Between party democracy and parity democracy: What the implementation of gender quotas teaches us about the tradeoff between intraparty democracy and parties’ role in democratic political systems

This paper builds on empirical findings from a comparative case study on the implementation of gender quotas across Europe. We investigate intra-party power dynamics when faced with implementing either party quotas or legislative quotas. Based on the GEPP approach (Engeli and Mazur 2018), we start by acknowledging that we know more about the adoption of gender equality policies than about their implementation. Implementation is conceived of as an ongoing process, starting with how policy design is operationalized and instituted and ending with how efficient and effective policy measures are in reaching a policy goal. The data showcase how parties negotiate, support, contest or even resist quotas, highlighting what is put in practice and who the main actors of implementation are. More specifically, we assess institutional, political and cultural factors that facilitate or hamper parties’ interest and ability to implement gender quotas. While these data also contribute to knowledge about the fate and outcome of gender quotas and the ‘secret garden’ of political recruitment and selection, our paper focuses on how institutional, political and cultural factors impact intra-party power dynamics. We investigate power dynamics within parties as a tension between intraparty democracy and parity democracy to reflect on their role in and contribution to democratic political systems. Our findings serve as the starting point for reflecting upon political parties as actors with particular roles in democratic political systems, taking us beyond their role as an important actor and link in the chain of political representation and decision-making. Historically across Europe, parties have been and many still are androcentric and masculinist institutions (in the broad sense of the term). At the same time, they are also meant to contribute to broad societal democratic goals (the eradication of gender inequality in our case, but the same goes for other norms such as the eradication of financial or other corruption). We find that intraparty democracy frequently pits overall party goals against parity goals. As parties reflect societal gender(ed) norms, they also reproduce them in various institutional, political, and cultural ways. The paper aims at disentangling these different dynamics, establishing whether and how or at what level party and parity democracy intersect and what this implies for the rethinking of parties as organizations and their role within (representative) democracy. Empirically, our argument draws from case studies in the European North (Denmark, Sweden), West (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom), South (Italy, Portugal, Spain), and from CEE countries (Croatia, Poland, Slovenia, Serbia), as well as Turkey. The dataset comprises parties with different historical legacies (liberalism, communism, authoritarian regimes), in differing electoral and party systems.