The Impact of Party Quotas on Women's Political Ambition

Do women's motives for joining a political party depend on the implementation of a gender quota for party offices and electoral lists? There are several reasons why a quota might reduce the gender gap when it comes to political party membership. Political parties, for example, have an incentive to recruit female party members to have a wider selection for offices restricted with quotas, and, most obviously, the increased probability to gain a political office might motivate women to join. Contrasting these arguments, Ponce et al. (2020) recently showed that party quotas do not increase the proportion of female party members. This seems to imply, that women do not consider quotas at all when deciding whether or not to join a political party. Due to data limitations, however, no prior study directly examined the effects on female party members' motives for joining yet. Based on multiple waves of the German Membership Studies, we address this issue using survey data for about 5,000 female party members. We find that women's probability of joining a party because of their political ambition, i.e. attaining a public or party office, indeed only slightly improves with the quota size. But more importantly, there is a robust, statistically significant interaction between the quota targets and the percentage of female party members. In particular, women are most likely to report instrumental reasons for joining when there is a large gender gap for the party members and a quota requiring a high percentage of female office holders. These results strongly imply that women, at least roughly, calculate the intensity of the intra-party competition for political offices when deciding to join a party.