Gender Quota Laws and Executive Power

Do political gender quota laws increase women’s presence in positions of executive power worldwide? Women have traditionally been underrepresented in politics, especially leadership roles in government. As a remedy, political gender quota laws have now been adopted by over 60 countries, requiring all political parties in a country to nominate a certain percentage of women among their candidate slates. Can such gender quota laws increase not only women in national parliaments but the share of women in governments worldwide? We argue that gender quotas increase numbers of women in the pipeline to executive power, but that male-dominated governments are more likely to allocate women to portfolios of low rather than high prestige after a quota law. To test this argument, we combine comprehensive data on cabinet compositions with an updated dataset on quota law implementation in a global sample of democracies from 1990 to 2022. New data collection on political party support for quota laws within countries enables us to study the causal effects of quota law adoption among those parties which did not vote for the law, and for which the law can thus be seen as exogenously imposed on the party. Our findings shed new light on the potential role of gender quotas as institutions that can indirectly shape parity in not only parliaments but cabinets worldwide.