Democracy, Representation, and Women
Participation, Vol. 30, n° 2, p. 9-14
Participation shares excerpts from the conference given by Manon Tremblay at the IPSA World Congress in Fukuoka. While she presented the complete version of the results of her work in three parts at the Congress, we have chosen to publish only the first segment in which she reviews the literature on determinants of the proportion of women in national parliament. The entire version of her comparative analysis may be viewed on the Internet at www.ipsa.ca.
The Committee on Awards of the IPSA presented the Wilma Rule Award to Manon Tremblay on the occasion of the Association's 20th World Congress in Fukuoka.
Introduction
Democracy, representation and women: three notions that everything opposes! Historically, the very design of democracy and representation excluded women. In Ancient Greece, cradle of the democratic experiment, democracy was rigorously exclusive: the citizen was male and born of Athenian parents. Theorists examining social contract and the sovereignty of the people at best ignored women, and at worst foresaw their confinement to the private and family spheres. The great revolutions that paved the way for representative democracy — the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution (1775-1783) and French Revolution (1789) — did little to promote the access of women to the governance of the nation. In fact, in France, the abstract individual — the notion underpinning Republican Universalism — padlocked the political citizenship of women until, I would say, the beginning of the 21st century, an era when a highly stimulating debate began on the subject of parity.
Today, representative democracy, presented as an ideal includes women or, at least, those who do not think so keep quiet! Unfortunately, practice does no honour to this ideal: as of May 2006, the average percentage of women in lower or single houses of some 180 parliaments is 16.8%1. This proportion varies greatly from one country to another. For example, the most recent election for the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies held in September 2003 resulted in a new record for women in national parliament — 48.8% were female MPs, that is to say the quasi parity. This contrasts with data in other countries: 20.8% in the Canadian House of Commons (following the 2006 elections), 17.1% in the Italian Camera dei deputati (2006), 12.2% in the French Assemblée nationale (2002), 8.3% in the Indian Lok Sabha (2004), and 2% in the Egyptian Majlis Al-Chaab (2005). Approximately ten countries have no woman member in the lower or single House (such as Micronesia, Nauru, Tuvalu, or the United Arab Emirates). Moreover, at first glace, there seems to be no connection between the proportion of women who hold seats in a legislative assembly and what I would call “quality of democratic life” in the country in question. Countries such as Cuba, Mozambique, Rwanda or Tanzania, hardly recognized for their democratic virtues, show a percentage of women parliamentarians that vary between 30% and 48.8%, while in Canada, the United States, France, Japan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom women parliamentarians do not even reach the 25% mark. However, the case of northern countries requires that I nuance my position: these countries marry high-quality democratic governance and enviably high proportions of women in their parliaments.
The value of political equality is central to normative theories of democracy: it is argued that women are equal citizens and therefore should share public decision-making positions equally with men otherwise a democratic deficit ensues. By contrast, empirical theories define democracy by the presence of institutions such as freedom to form and join organizations, freedom of expression, the right to vote in elections and to stand for public office, the right of political leaders to compete for support and votes, freedom of information and alternative source of information, and free and fair elections. Institutions that formulate government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference. In fact, empirical democracy is a much more complex concept that speaks to a number of practical realities, including cultural, socioeconomic, and political contexts. For instance, how can democracy work if the population lacks the resources to satisfy its basic health and education needs? How can democracy work when the majority of the people live in poverty? How can democracy work without freedom of the press and the right of association? How can democracy work where the dominant religion prescribes that a wife must obey her husband? In sum, how can democracy deliver its virtues when the cultural, socioeconomic and political contexts are hostile to the very basic principle of gender equality? It is this multifaceted understanding of empirical democracy that will be used in order to better understand the descriptive representation of women in national parliament.
Determinants of the Proportion of Women in Parliament
Studies have shown that a multitude of factors influence women’s access to legislative arenas. These factors may be grouped into three broad categories: cultural, socioeconomic and political. Though presented as distinct entities, in fact, these factors mix and overlap to pave women’s way to power. Therein, they pose a real problem in terms of causality: do cultural factors precede socioeconomic and political factors, or the opposite? For example, must there first be a notion of gender equality before women can access legal careers and economic independence, which are major advantages in stepping into the political arena? This is why it is probably more instructive to think of these factors in their interactional dynamic as a more global incubator for the election of women to legislative arenas.
Culture refers to the values, standards, beliefs and attitudes that control a society and its institutions and that are inspiration for the population’s ways of being, talking and doing. Religion, education and views on gender-based social roles are the primary cultural factors that studies argue when examining determinants of the proportion of women in parliament. Generally, the dominant protestant religion (as opposed to other religions), women’s access to university education, and gender equality in social roles are variables associated with women’s access to parliament. Other studies have shown that culture, especially a model of equality between women and men, is a more determining variable in the proportion of women in parliament than voting systems (especially proportional representation). The importance of the ideological variable can be explained by the fact that culture is superimposed, in some ways, on socioeconomic and political factors.
And yet, a simple look at the classification established by the Inter-Parliamentary Union on the proportion of women in Lower or Single Houses of parliament invites us to be cautious in measuring the impact of culture — and particularly of traditional or egalitarian concepts of the gender roles — on feminization of parliament: traditional agricultural societies such as Afghanistan, Burundi and Rwanda, where Catholicism and Islam dominate, are ahead of post-industrial societies such as Australia, Canada, France and Great Britain, where the idea of equality of women and men enjoys support from the general public. We must say, however, that Afghanistan and Rwanda have constitutional quotas to favour women’s access to parliament, and Burundi uses a system of proportional representation lists while Australia, Canada, France and Great Britain all use plurality/majority representation, a formula known for being less favourable to the election of women. A statement by Rule (1994a: 16) affirming that "…favorable societal conditions will not substitute for unfavourable electoral systems relative to women reaching their optimum representation in parliament" takes on its full meaning. Moreover, the cases of Afghanistan, Rwanda and even Iraq brilliantly demonstrate that institutional strategies (i.e. quotas) can be justified by basic justice, but also serve to overcome the hostility of the population toward the political participation of women.
Socioeconomic factors have to do with conditions that lead women to envision careers in the field of politics. We are talking here of the supply of candidates. One idea suggests that if there few women in politics, it is because women are under-represented in the milieus where parties identify and from which they draw their potential candidates. An improvement of women’s socioeconomic conditions should favour their increased presence in parliament. Variables considered in this category are, among others, the type of society (agricultural, industrial or post-industrial), the Human Development Index, the birth rate, the proportion of women on the labour market, the female-male income ratio, the per capita income based on the GNP, public expenses in education and healthcare, and the urbanization rate. Studies show that the proportion of women in parliament is positively influenced by factors such as participation in the labour market (particularly in specialized employment), a high Human Development Index, a post-industrial society, and a developed welfare state.
Again, a look at classification by the Inter-Parliamentary Union requires us to moderate the contribution of socioeconomic factors as regards parliamentary representation of women. For instance, countries that enjoy few socioeconomic advantages such as Mozambique (34.8%), South Africa (32.8%), Guyana (30.8%), the Seychelles Islands (29.4%) or even Namibia (26.9%), outshine G8 member countries such as Canada (20.8%), the United States (15.2%), France (12.2%), Japan (9%) or the United Kingdom (19.7%) when it comes to the feminization of their respective parliaments. Again, we need to look at quotas (both legislative and party-based) intended to favour feminization of parliament to find measures to which Western counterparts seem allergic to2 — or perhaps an answer to this difference. This said, the influence of socioeconomic factors proves to be very instable, so much so in fact that often, this influence is crushed under the weight of other variables in models of multivariate analysis.
Political factors influence the demand for candidates and, more specifically, it determines which citizens from the "eligible pool" are deemed qualified for a political position and worthy to be put forth as candidates and the election of candidates. These factors fall into two dimensions: the political rights of women and the profile of the political regime. The first dimension refers to the political citizenship of women; it is primarily measured by the year women received the right to vote in national legislative elections. A large number of studies have indicated a connection between this given point and the proportion of women in parliament. Few variables have been developed to grasp the impact that the political rights of women have on the proportion of women in parliament. However, many aspects of women’s political rights can influence the presence of women in parliament. These include the year women won the right to run for office in a national election, the year the first woman was elected to parliament, and the year the first time a woman gained entry into government, and finally, if a woman has already held the position of President or Premier, etc.
Unlike the political rights of women, the other dimension of political factors — the profile of the political regime — has enjoyed a great deal of attention on the part of researchers. We draw here on a wide range of variables to explore the impact of a political regime on the proportion of women parliamentarians. These are, for example, the state structure (unitary or federal), the structure of parliament (uni- or bicameral), the number of seats, the maximal length of a legislature, the nature of the legislative career (such as the turnover rate of parliamentarians), the party system (the number of elective parties, the number of effective parliamentary parties, the ideology of the parties that form the government, how candidates are selected, etc.), and it goes without saying, the electoral system itself (the type of voting system, the magnitude of the district, the nature of the lists: closed, open or flexible, etc.). Some studies support the idea that the number of seats plays a role in the proportion of women in parliament. A low turnover rate of parliamentarians has long been identified as an obstacle to women’s accession to legislative assemblies. On the other hand, others believe that parliaments that enjoy multiple party representation offer women candidates more potential for election than bi-partisan parliaments. Political formations that tend toward the Left and Centre on the ideological spectrum offer the best possibilities for women who wish to gain a seat in parliament than in right-tending political formations, particularly if these formations form the government. If, at first, we suspect that quotas have a direct and immediate impact on the feminization of parliament, many criteria must be present for quotas to reach their objectives. For example, they must anticipate and foresee a gender-sensitive order that enables the classification of candidates on lists, and penalties that apply in cases of violation of the law.
The electoral system is the component of the political regime that has generated the richest literature on its role in the proportion of women legislators. Parliaments elected by proportional representation show a higher percentage of women than parliaments constituted by a plurality/majority system. Nevertheless, many speak out to nuance the association too often made between proportional representation and a substantial presence of women in parliament. Indeed, voting systems do not consistently act independently of the framework in which they exist; how else can we explain that parliaments formed through the similar voting systems show varying proportions of women parliamentarians, or that the percentage of women in any given parliament differs across time even if the voting system remains constant?
The performance of voting systems depends on their characteristics and the actors that use them to their advantage. Thus, for example, high vote/seat proportionality fosters a turnover rate of parliamentarians which, in turn, improves women’s chances of being listed for eligible positions. In the same vein as the threshold of representation that comprises the most powerful instrument of the proportionality within the voting system, a threshold set at a relatively high level reduces the number of parties between which parliamentary seats are distributed. Each party thus receives more seats and therefore attribute seats to women, be it voluntarily (i.e. to balance out its representation), or mechanically (because it runs to the bottom of the list where women candidates are registered). However, it is also possible to support the notion that a high-level threshold of representation represents an obstacle to parliamentary representation of small parties for hich women are often candidates. Many studies have shown that the size of electoral districts (the other mechanism responsible for the degree of proportionality of a voting system) bears an influence on women’s ability to be elected: the greater the number of seats per electoral district — mainly the more seats a party can hope to win — the stronger the women's chances are of holding parliamentary seats.
And then there are the parties, the true maîtres d’oeuvre of women's parliamentary representation. According to Matland and Montgomery (2003: 31-32): "The electoral system directly effects female legislative representation, because it shapes the recruitment strategies of party gatekeepers at the nomination phase." Indeed, the voting system is more of an intermediary variable between political parties (that inspires strategies for selecting candidates) and the legislative representation of women — a perspective that Farrell endorses (2001: 167): "…it is not the electoral system which is at fault [for the underrepresentation of women in parliaments] so much as the party selection committees”.
Of course, in almost all electoral systems, the parties and not the electorate, control the selection process of candidates, and therefore the composition of parliaments. However, the control they exercise over the selection of candidacies varies greatly based on the voting procedure and its particular characteristics. In terms of proportional representation, closed lists and lists without preferential voting give political parties absolute control over the composition of parliament as opposed to open lists with vote splitting (panachage) in which voters play a role in designating those who will represent them. There is no consensus, however, as to which lists — closed or open — most foster election of women in politics. In single transferable vote systems, parties have indirect (in other words, preliminary) control over the composition of parliament: if female and male candidates must obtain endorsement from the party for which they are campaigning, these are preferential votes entrusted by the electorate to each candidate that will determine who holds a seat in parliament, not merely the ranking established by the parties. Nevertheless, the few countries that use a single transferable vote system show low proportions of women in their parliaments. As for plurality/majority representation, the American system of primaries does not confer any power to the parties to select people who hope to be elected to Congress, while the British and Canadian parties firmly hold the reins of the selection process of candidates for legislative elections. However, in order to designate members of the Canadian House of Commons, the selection process of candidates for legislative elections is more decentralized than in Great Britain. Yet, women might benefit from having a standardized and centralized selection process of candidates, mainly because it would allow national elites to more easily adopt positive affirmative measures and quotas. This may explain why from 1992 to 1997, the British Labour Party was able to adopt and apply a policy for short lists of women candidates only in the most competitive ridings (in other words, where the Party stood a good chance of winning), — a measure that will surely contribute to opening the doors of the House of Commons to women.
What is indisputable is that the candidate selection process is not neutral: it is an exclusion/inclusion process, meaning that some would-be legislative candidates are systematically excluded from the path to parliament while others are steadily ruled into it. Norris and Lovenduski (1989) suggest that party selectors (that is, party leaders, officers, activists, members, and voters) will choose their candidates according to an ideal type of member of parliament that they call the homo politicus. For them, "[t]he system has been designed to select a standard model candidate who is [among other things], well educated and typically employed in a professional career, in business as an executive or manager, in education as a school teacher or university lecturer or in the law as a practising barrister or lawyer […] By defining the appropriate qualifications for a career in politics in such a way, then certain types of candidates will tend to be successful. As a result, working-class women candidates and those from the ethnic minorities will tend to be consistently disadvantaged.
The strategy of gender quotas is a method used to counteract this type of informal (or systemic) discrimination that electorates may eventually use against potential female candidates. Since the beginning of the 1990s, roughly roughly 90 countries have adopted some form of positive action, be it reserved seats, legal constitutional or legislative quotas, or even party quotas, to advance the presence of women within lower or single chambers of their countries' parliaments. Gender quotas insure that the number of women constitute a set minimal percentage of candidates on the list (or of MPs, in the case of reserved seats). Quotas adopt different forms. According to Krook (forthcoming), there are "three types of measures: reserved seats, which set aside a certain number of positions for women among elected representatives through constitutional reforms; party quotas, which aim to increase the proportion of women among a particular party’s candidates through party reforms; and legislative quotas, which require parties to nominate a certain proportion of women among their candidates through constitutional or legal reforms."
Quotas may be considered also according to additional traits; for instance, if they require a certain percentage of women or a balanced proportion of both genders, if they regulate the rank order of women and men on the list of candidates, if they provide for penalties in case of non-compliance with the law, and so on. In fact, the efficiency of quotas lies in these details, and notably in the good faith of political parties to comply with them. Today, most quota systems aim at ensuring that women constitute at least a "critical minority" of 20-30 per cent3.
Feminist mobilizations on the electoral scene, both in parties and in civil society, is another strategy to counteract discrimination that party selectors may display against women would-be candidates. Rule (1987) goes as far as to state that such mobilization can act as counterweight to more substantial resistance that certain voting procedures present to the election of women: "…[n]egative electoral system features have been overcome by women’s political mobilization" (p. 495). It stands to reason that feminist mobilization and quotas are not opposing strategies since mobilization of women is one of the causal accounts that explains the adoption of gender quotas.
In addition to voting systems, many other factors stemming from elections may influence the ability of women to accede to legislative assemblies. For example, many studies reveal that the electorate does not exercise negative discrimination towards candidates — nor does it display positive discrimination. More recent research challenges the hypothesis that when women are candidates in ridings considered to be "already lost", at least they are not more so than men. If the cost of electoral campaigns has long been considered a primary obstacle to the election of women, many recent works have questioned its relevance in explaining the small proportion of women in parliaments.
In summing up, there is a wide choice of factors (cultural, socioeconomic and political) that influence women’s access to parliament around the world.
I will now address to the more specific issue: what factors help or hinder women from entering parliament in countries defined as democratic?
As mentioned above, democracy does not necessary constitute a springboard for the feminization of parliament, as we see from the modest proportion of women in many well-stablished democracies, such as Japan. However, the opposite reasoning cannot be supported: the proportion of women in parliament is more and more an indication of the state’s quality of democratic life. This shift in paradigm was made possible by a host of political events, including the Third Wave of Democratization, the end of the Cold War, and political restructuring of former Warsaw Pact member countries, and especially, by the mobilization of the women’s movement in both national and international political and electoral arenas. Many international instruments, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979) and the Universal Declaration on Democracy4 (1997), are henceforth fundamentally marked by this new paradigm. Using this reasoning as a foundation — that democracy can no longer be imagined without women — I decided to limit my analysis to 89 countries classified as democratic in 2005 by the Gastil Index5 . It was then crucial for me to target, within this particular type of states (which, by the way, do not offer equal quality of democratic life) the factors that help women to enter parliament or those that hinder their possibility to do so.
Notes
1. www.ipu.org/wmn-f/classif.htm; accessed June 4, 2006.
2. Except in France, where can-do legislation encourages parties to present an equal number of female and male candidates in legislative elections, and in Great Britain where, in 2002, a law was enacted to allow political parties looking to adopt such measures to avoid being accused of discriminatory practices.
3. There are exceptions, such as in Nepal where “[a]ccording to clause 114 of the 1990 Constitution, at least 5% of the total number of candidates contesting for the lower house election from any political party or organization must be women candidates.” (www.quotaproject.org/displayCountry.cfm?CountryCode=NP; accessed June 5, 2006).
4. Section 4 states that: "The achievement of democracy presupposes a genuine partnership between men and women in the conduct of the affairs of society in which they work in equality and complementarity, drawing mutual enrichment from their differences." (www.ipu.org/cnl-e/161-dem.htm; accessed June 6, 2006).
5. It is worth mentioning that "respect for the rights of women" is a component of how Freedom House defines democratic political systems: "Freedom is possible only in democratic political systems in which the governments are accountable to their own people; the rule of law prevails; and freedoms of expression, association, belief and respect for the rights of minorities and women are guaranteed.” (www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=2; accessed June 5, 2006).
References
Farrell, David M. (2001), Electoral Systems. A Comparative Introduction, Houndmills: Palgrave.
Krook, Mona Lena (forthcoming), "Candidate Gender Quotas: A Framework for Analysis", European Journal of Political Research.
Matland, Richard E., and Kathleen A. Montgomery (2003), "Recruiting Women to National Legislatures: A General Framework with Applications to Post-Communist Democracies", in Richard E. Matland and Kathleen A. Montgomery (eds), Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19-42.
Norris, Pippa, and Joni Lovenduski (1989), "Pathways to Parliament", Talking Politics, 1, 3: 90-94.
Rule, Wilma (1994a), "Parliaments of, by, and for the People: Except for Women?", in Wilma Rule and Joseph F. Zimmerman (eds), Electoral Systems in Comparative Perspective. Their Impact on Women and Minorities, Westport: Greenwood Press, pp. 15-30.
Rule, Wilma (1987), "Electoral Systems, Contextual Factors and Women’s Opportunity for Election to Parliament in Twenty-Three Democracies", Western Political Quarterly, 40, 3: 477-498.
Related page : Democracy, Representation, and Women: A Comparative Analysis, Democratization, 14, 4, 2007.
