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Abstract
This article accounts for the particular steps Spain took to institutionalise gender equality in political representation. While some West European countries, where the ‘incremental track’ was considered too slow or too ineffective, recently shifted to the ‘fast track’ (notably, Belgium, France, Italy and Portugal), Spain adopted a legislative quota in 2007, when women's representation had already reached very high levels. Indeed, 10 years earlier, the quotas adopted by left-wing Spanish parties in the late 1980s had already reached parity and triggered a contagion effect within the party system. Comparatively speaking, Spain has followed the incremental track in a narrow time frame since democracy was restored in 1978. Finally, although the legal quota reform encountered political and juridical opposition, Spain managed to introduce it without the need for constitutional reform.
Notes
1. Spain's predominant religion is Catholicism; women's educational attainment was deterred by the Francoist authoritarian regime (1939–1976); the percentage of women in the workforce has been traditionally low by Western European standards (though the gap has been closed in the past decade); and, finally, although women's suffrage was first introduced in 1931, Spanish women were unable to exercise it in the four decades following the 1936 military coup. In their recent cross-national analysis, Tripp and Kang (Citation2008) do not find a strong significance for the socioeconomic and cultural variables.
2. Women's political representation was one of the highest priorities of the Women's Institute since its inception in 1983, which is reflected in the three Gender Equality Plans passed during the PSOE government (1982–1996).
3. On various occasions, the PSOE and the PSC women have occupied executive positions within the Socialist Women International.
4. That is also the proportion defined as ‘parity democracy’ by the European Commission (Citation1998).
5. Training included courses on political management, communication, and equality policies. Regarding the PSOE, at the beginning of the 1990s, women already accounted for 30 per cent of all participants in training courses. By the end of the decade, with a view to increase women's presence in the lower house and in local councils, women's participation rose to 52 per cent. As for the PSC, 70 per cent of the candidates who attended training sessions for the most recent regional elections were women.
6. See El País (27 December 1998; 1 July 1999; 31 September 1999). Party feminists also participated in the debate (Jenson and Valiente 2003: 91).
7. The full text of the law can be accessed at the Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE) website: http://www.boe.es/aeboe/consultas/bases_datos/doc.php?coleccion=iberlex&id=2007/06115. As regions can only pass acts affecting regional elections and cannot contradict the national law, the Constitutional Court specified that the maximum threshold for either sex shall be, in any case, 60 per cent, thus excluding all-women lists allowed initially by the Basque law.
8. The full text of the 29 January 2008 judgment can be accessed at: http://www.tribunalconstitucional.es/es/jurisprudencia/Paginas/Sentencia.aspx?cod=9438
9. The average for all lower house elections held since 1979 is 86 per cent.
