Implementation as Process: Evidence from Institutionalizing Gender Quota Policies Across Europe

Gender quota policy scholars have focused their attention primarily on the passing of regulations and laws. Across Europe and globally, quota adoption has been hailed as the most successful institutional gender policy to reach parity in politics. With the ‘implementation turn’ of recent years, however, the field acknowledges the fact that regulatory and legal frameworks, while essential for advancing women in politics, are in and of themselves only the starting point towards better outcomes for women. Quota implementation is a long, complicated, and diffuse process and the question of what makes quotas stick and be effective has not been conclusively answered. In this paper, the authors draw on 17 country cases to assess the different factors that shape successful quota implementation. This comparative perspective allows for a systematic assessment of endogenous and exogenous factors that advance or impede the implementation of laws or public policies in a broader sense. We identify central actors, dynamics, and resistance mechanisms to show that implementation does not start after adoption, but is intertwined with it. Using quota implementation as a case study also allows us to highlight how a feminist institutionalist perspective contributes to the implementation turn in public policy research. We show how the match between quotas and formal electoral architectures, stringent sanctions, curbing informal institutional arrangements, as well as left-alternative party ideology inform successful implementation over time. What has been underexplored as of yet, however, is how different actors navigate institutional settings and shape implementation. Thus, our central question in this paper is how the interplay of actors responsible for operationalizing gender quotas and putting them into practice affects their institutional salience, and what lessons we can draw for democratic accountabilities in regards to gender equality.