Introduction: Gender Parity and Quotas in European Politics

Abstract

Since the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which clearly endorsed measures to ensure the equal participation of women in decision-making, many nations across the globe have adopted and implemented laws requiring political parties to nominate gender-balanced slates of candidates. This symposium brings together new research on the fairly recent gender quota and parity reforms in Portugal, France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain and the efforts of the European Union to promote them. In keeping with the single-case, comparative, and international gender quota literature, the articles stress the role of domestic and international actors/factors (political parties and elites, women's groups active inside and/or outside political parties, and international and European organizations) in the adoption of reforms as well as the reforms' specific provisions (placement rules and sanctions for non-compliance) and how well they fit in with the electoral system when assessing their impact. At the same time, the articles also offer intriguing insights related to the labelling of reforms as either ‘parity’ or ‘quota’ or both in different contexts, the involvement of different political parties in their adoption, and, finally, their qualitative upshots and, more specifically, their impact on citizens and elites' attitudes towards women in politics and measures to enhance it.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mona Lena Krook, Peter Mair and the anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and suggestions, and Karl A. Henriques for his constant support.

Notes

1. Although the constitutional and legislative reforms examined in this symposium are worded in gender-neutral language targeting both sexes, they are meant to benefit primarily women, the under-represented sex in most parts of the world.

2. As a result of the constitutional law of 23 July 2008, Article 3's statement about women and men's equal access to elected office was moved to Article 1 of the French Constitution, where the principles of the French Republic are stated, and expanded to include professional and social responsibilities (Praud and Dauphin 2010: 36). Italy changed its Constitution in 2001 (Article 117) so as to allow regions to take affirmative action measures to promote women in electoral politics (see Palici di Suni 2012).

3. On the adoption of the French reforms, see, among many others: Opello (2005), Wallach Scott (2005), Lépinard (2007), Krook (2007), and Sénac-Slawinski (2008b). In regard to the impact of these reforms on women's numerical presence in elected assemblies, see Dauphin (2002), Bird (2003), Murray (2004, 2007, 2008a, 2008b), and Praud and Dauphin (2010). For the other countries, see: Diaz (2002) and Meier (2004, 2005) for Belgium; Della Porta (2003) and Guadagnini (2005, 2007) for Italy; and Valiente (2005, 2008) and Threlfall (2005, 2007) for Spain. As Baum and Espírito-Santo (2012) note, to date nothing has been published on the Portuguese quota law.

4. Some of the sources comparing France to other cases include: Jenson and Valiente (2003), Diaz and Millns (2004), Lovenduski (2005), Krook et al. (2006), Praud and Henriques (2008), and Krook (2009).

5. Krook et al. (2009: 786–7) identify ‘soft quotas’ as a fourth type of quotas. In their view, the more informal measures that countries and parties have adopted to help bring more women into political office, such as targets and recommendations, can be considered as soft quotas even though they may not be explicitly labelled as quotas.

6. Dahlerup first developed these notions with Lenita Freidenvall (see Dahlerup and Freidenvall 2005).

7. This places Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy and France 9th, 15th, 31st, 51st, and 59th respectively in the Inter-Parliamentary Union's world ranking (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2011).

8. Apart from the more recent qualitative assessments of Ramsay (2008), Sénac-Slawinski (2008a), Praud and Dauphin (2010), and Murray (2012), the bulk of studies assessing the French reforms are based on statistics (see some of these sources in note 3).