Expanding democracy: debating legislative and corporate board quotas In five European states

ABSTRACT

This project examines the puzzle posed by different types of quotas, which both seem to be part of similar gender equality policies and yet differ; legislative and corporate board quotas regulate sectors with different patterns of state intervention and play different roles in the democratic process, have different practical and political dynamics and tend not to occur in the same places. We use parliamentary debates in five European nation-states to analyze how policy-makers use conceptualizations of equality and democracy in these different policies and how these differ across quota types and cases. We determine that the two policies reflect similar conceptualizations of equality and democracy that are shared across the cases, although the understanding in the later CBQ debates is more expansive than in the earlier LQ ones, especially among MPs on the right. It takes women’s equal qualifications to participate in decision-making bodies as a given and expands the agenda for dismantling unequal power structures. These new norms derive their legitimacy from the experience of other comparator nation-states with quotas and concern for the state’s international reputation. Thus, CBQs are extensions of LQs but the mechanism of their relationship arises as much through international diffusion as domestic policy expansion.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender quotas
• democracy
• equality
• citizenship
• gender and politics
• women and politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some CBQs regulate public corporation boards or limit their scope to those that are publicly held.

2 Most of Norway’s political parties have used voluntary quotas and public commissions have been regulated since the early 1980s (see Teigen 2018a & 2018b).

3 As indicated in Table 1, Germany and Portugal hardened their CBQ laws since 2016 and Austria adopted hard CBQs. Our study excludes the first two as these are modifications of the existing laws and the last as it occurred outside the study’s parameters.

4 We were unable to use the Italian LQ debates from 1993 because they pre-date electronic record keeping in Italy and neither the legislature nor any academic or institution we contacted could produce them.

5 For all cases, we selected only the initial quota legislation and did not consider subsequent bills that adjusted penalties or thresholds as these debates were not typically focused on the principles quotas engaged but their mechanics.

6 Our coding focuses on “arguments,” which we classified as referring to particular concepts. We did not code interjections or technical discussions about procedures.

7 Teigen (2018b) refers to this concept as “industrial democracy” in her discussion of Norwegian CBQs.

8 Lépinard and Meier both contextualize these concerns in their chapters in Lépinard and Rubio-Marín (2018). See also Scott (2005).

9 French MPs used the comparative position of France as “second to last in Europe,” (Marie-Thérèse Boisseau, 1-25-2000) to justify LQs and congratulated themselves for “suddenly” becoming “the engine of equality between men and women” (Nicole Péry, 1-25-2000), and setting “an example … for all European women” (Marie-Thérèse Boisseau).

10 Piscopo (2016) similarly highlights the shift in understandings around democracy in quota/ parity debates in Latin America.