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Abstract
This article analyses the Belgian gender parity debate of the 1990s. It first sketches the history of this debate and how it led to the adoption of statutory gender quotas (1994 and 2002) and finally also to the insertion of a clause on parity democracy into the Constitution. The article then discusses the factors explaining the adoption of these measures. After focussing first on the electoral system and citizenship model in place, it looks at the attempts of the women's movement, political women's groups and a number of femocrats to relate their requests to existing models of citizenship and representation, with special attention to the windows of opportunity facilitating these attempts. The article concludes with a reflection on how the Belgian case contributes to a broader understanding of the processes through which gender quotas and, more broadly speaking, gender parity get initiated and consolidated.
Notes
1. As of 1919, widows, women active in the Resistance and single mothers of soldiers who died during World War I were awarded the right to vote, but only until they (re)married. In 1921 women got the right to vote in local elections.
2. The Council of State's most important competence is its power to suspend and annul administrative acts that are contrary to the legal rules in force. But it also has an advisory function in legislative and statutory matters, advising parliament and government on the extent to which bills fit into the Belgian legal order.
3. A neutralisation of the list order equals an open list whereby the number of preferential votes cast for an individual candidate determines his or her chances of getting elected rather than the position the candidate occupies on the list.
4. While the 1994 act applied to all elections, the 2002 acts do not apply to communal and provincial polls, since their organisation has become the responsibility of the regions. All regions (Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels) have adopted measures copying the national legislation, with the exception that in Flanders only one of the top three candidates has to be a woman, due to some of the parties' reluctance to have more women in top list positions. In sum, therefore, the gender quota legislation is very homogeneous across all levels of elections, from the communal to the European ones.
5. The facts presented in this section have been gathered in Celis and Meier (Citation2008).
6. The presence of women in the executive first appeared on the political agenda in March 1991, as an amendment to the revision of Article 86 (later 104) of the Constitution. Trees Merckx, who had already introduced the 1991 gender quota bill, proposed that at least one Minister and one Secretary of State of the federal government be of the under-represented sex. The underlying idea was a perceived need for measures to increase the participation of women in decision-making because their actual number remained low over the course of years (House of Representatives, Parliamentary Documents 961/3, 1989–1990). The idea was retained in a resolution adopted by the House of Representatives in May 1991. While a resolution can be interpreted as advice to the federal government, Trees Merckx's initial idea was to impose a minimal presence of each sex in the federal government through the Constitution.
7. This also explains why in Belgium the political debate on parity democracy followed the debate and implementation on gender quotas, while this was the other way around in France (with the exception of the attempts in the early 1980s to institute a gender quota for municipal elections).
8. Interestingly, these debates neither spilled over into nor had been preceded by broader public debates on the issue of gender quotas and/or parity democracy, as has been the case in France, for instance.
9. The percentages for the Senate include the appointed Senators. Data source: ‘Women in Politics’ database, available at: http://www.ipu.org
10. The current Belgian gender quota act can still serve as a model as there is no way around it. Political parties cannot ignore it when composing their lists of candidates. The parity democracy clause is less of a model from the point of view of what parity democracy initially stands for, especially with respect to the requirements on the composition of the executive branch of power.
