Who supports gender quotas in Ireland?

ABSTRACT

Candidate gender quotas were passed into law in the Republic of Ireland in 2012. This paper examines support for this quota amongst three different groups: local election candidates, a sample of professionals and the general public. Using responses from three different datasets, we identify the key ideological, partisan and demographic predictors of support for the quota. We find that the best predictors of support for the quota are, not surprisingly, the gender of the respondent and being a feminist. There is a weak effect for left-wing ideology and partisanship and for beliefs regarding the causes of women’s absence from political life. Overall, the results suggest that resistance to the quota is still relatively strong amongst both potential candidates for Dáil Éireann and the Irish electorate.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender quotas
• candidate selection
• party politics
• Irish elections

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Gail McElroy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3154-7282

Notes

1. Gender quotas may be a particularly powerful tool for the election of women in Ireland, given the nature of the electoral system which gives voters an unusual degree of freedom in deciding which candidates from the ballot are elected. This can be contrasted with the experiences of gender quotas even under open list systems such as those that operate in Poland (Górecki & Kukołowicz, 2014) or Brazil (Miguel, 2008).

2. Two thousand and twenty-two candidates were on the ballot paper at the 2014 local election. Two were withdrawn before the election but after each ward had completed its notice of poll and 13 of the candidates’ addresses could not be retrieved.

3. Unusually by comparative standards, a full 19 per cent of sitting TDs (2011–2016) are teachers.

4. Employing the full scale of this variable did not alter the regression results.

5. Dubrow’s (2010) paper highlighted the importance of religious ideology in predicting party support for gender quotas. Initial models (not presented here) included a variable capturing religiosity, measured as the frequency of attendance at religious services. Religiosity of individual respondents did not prove to be significant and has therefore been omitted in the final models.

6. Due to the low number of respondents from several of the smaller parties, these parties were grouped together for the purposes of the regression analysis.

7. Odds ratios for all significant coefficients in the six models in the paper are provided in Tables A1–A3 in the appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Irish Research Council.