Democracy’s Paradox of Inclusion: Why sub-Saharan African Democracies Fail to Reserve Seats for Women

The formal inclusion of women through reserved seats in Sub-Saharan African national parliaments has followed a paradoxical path, despite widespread multi-party democratic transitions across the region since the 1990s. While semi-authoritarian regimes such as Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania institutionalized women-only seats early on, more democratic countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, The Gambia, and Zambia have repeatedly failed to adopt them. This paper poses the question: why do more democratic sub-Saharan African regimes fail to reserve parliamentary seats for women, while less democratic or hybrid regimes succeed? To answer this question, the study bridges feminist-institutionalist and comparative political approaches by disaggregating democracy into its institutional and elite-behavioural dimensions. It theorizes that four mechanisms shape the likelihood of adopting reserved seats for women: (1) freedom of association, which multiplies veto players and fragments reform coalitions; (2) constraints on the executive, which limit top-down reform authority; (3) clientelism and elite gender norms, which entrench male patronage networks resistant to gender redistributive reforms; and (4) parliamentary size, which heightens the perceived costs of expansion and institutional change. Empirically, the paper bridges large-N and small-N methodologies, combining cross-national statistical analysis with within-case process tracing. A new dataset covering all Sub-Saharan African countries from 1990 to 2025 maps the adoption, attempt, or rejection of reserved-seat provisions. The quantitative component uses logistic regression to test the relationship between disaggregated democracy indicators (drawn from V-Dem) and the probability of adoption, controlling for GDP per capita, population, post-conflict status, and donor aid. The qualitative component traces legislative reform trajectories in Ghana, Nigeria, and The Gambia to identify how elite dynamics, veto structures, and associational pluralism concretely obstruct adoption. Findings suggest that reserved seats are most likely to emerge in semi-competitive regimes with moderate associational freedom and concentrated executive authority, and least likely under highly pluralistic democracies where institutional checks, party fragmentation, and clientelism jointly sustain male dominance.