The Roots of Resistance: How Party Logics Shape Resistance to Gender Quotas

While resistance has become a buzzword in gender and politics research, resistance aimed at protecting the status quo is still an undertheorized factor as we seek to understand why gender equitable policies fail. This paper explores the roots of resistance aimed at protecting the institutional status quo and what implications different motives underlying resistance have for the prospects of gendered institutional change. In particular, I theorize how party characteristics (such as whether a political party is primarily programmatic as opposed to clientelist) shape the motives underlying resistance against gender quota policies. On the basis of a comparison of gender quota resistance in two political parties in Uruguay over a thirty-year long period, I outline three different roots of gender quota resistance – what I label idea-based, patronal, and patriarchal resistance. Drawing on a large number of interviews with key actors and quota debate transcripts, I show how resistance to quotas primarily have been idea-based in programmatic MPP, while it has been targeted to protect party structures (patronal resistance) and a male logic of doing politics (patriarchal resistance) in clientelist Partido Nacional. Taken together, I suggest that the different logics through which political parties operate have implications for the underlying motivations of quota resistance, but also for the leadership’s ability to resist the policy, and how this resistance can be challenged and ultimately defeated.