Beyond Strategy: Values Orientation and Individual Legislator Support for Gender Equality in Latin America

Why do members of parliament support gender equality? Explanations in the gender and politics literature have pointed to electoral and institutional factors, such as competition from left parties and governing party ideology. Such factors may explain the adoption of standalone gender equality policies, but say little about legislators’ underlying value orientations and their overall disposition towards building a more equal society. Gender equality is high on the agenda of the world’s parliaments, but legislators’ attitudes towards women, gender roles, and the state’s obligation to transform these roles vary significantly, both within and across countries. Parliamentarians may support gender equality for political reasons (because of their party membership and electoral strategies), individual reasons (because their underlying values truly favor equality), or both. This paper explores support for gender equality among legislators of 18 Latin American countries, drawing from the Latin American Elites Database at the University of Salamanca. For the first time ever, the 2015-2018 wave of the Latin American Elites survey included ten questions designed to measure legislators’ opinion on women, gender roles, and public policies aimed at women and girls. The Salamanca surveys also contain a wide battery of questions about legislators’ professional background, personal background, and private life, as well as measures about their party ideology, allowing us to assess and compare the influence of political versus individual reasons for support. We find that legislators’ attitudes about gender equality group along three distinct dimensions: gender equality values (e.g., their responses to questions such as, “do men make better political leaders than women?”); recognizing inequality (e.g., their responses to questions such as, “inequalities between men and women are problem in the country”); and supporting positive action (e.g., their responses to questions such as “the state must implement public policies to reduce inequality between men and women”). Individual factors, such as parents’ educational background (a proxy for class) and religiosity, are more strongly associated with predicting gender equality values: legislators with upper-class backgrounds and legislators who are more religious espouse more traditional views about gender roles. By contrast, individual factors and party ideology combine to shape whether legislators recognize gender inequality and endorse positive action. Importantly, these patterns persist even in the Latin American countries that have made the greatest strides on gender parity in elected office, such as Mexico and Bolivia. Taken together, our results indicate that the success of gender equality reforms depends not just on legislators’ rational choice calculations, but on the underlying values cultivated in their families and through their life experiences.