Female Candidate Performance and Gender Quotas: The Case of Ecuador

ABSTRACT

Ecuador has one of the strongest electoral designs in terms of gender quotas in Latin America. However, there remains a significant gap between the number of women candidates and the number elected. To explain why a quota does not lead to an elected representation proportional to the quota we examine voter bias and elite bias in the legislative elections of 2013 and 2017. Results show gender bias toward female candidates, and not against, which is a surprising result in a country maintaining a culture of traditional gender roles on average. A breakdown of the voting patterns by gender, however, reveals that the overall voter preference for female candidates is driven entirely by stronger female same-gender voting than male same-gender voting. The lack of representation of women as frontrunners in a political party is likely to explain the gap between female candidates and elected members to the National Assembly. Elite bias against women, not voter bias, explains women’s electoral fortunes in Ecuador.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender quotas
• gender penalty
• voter bias
• elite bias
• Ecuador

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The Quota Strength Index (IFC) takes into consideration five dimensions: 1) quota size, 2) position mandate, 3) enforcement, 4) scope, and 5) exhaust valve (the existence of legal norms that allow for the quota to be avoided, as, for example, cases where, paying a fine allows a party to avoid meeting gender quotas). It also takes into account three dimensions of the electoral system: 1) the electoral formula (proportional representation vs. relative majority), 2) the magnitude of districts (small, medium, and large), and 3) the type of voting structure (closed and blocked list, preferential vote or open list) (Caminotti and Freidenberg 2016).

2. However, more recent research in Denmark by Kjaer and Krook (2019) shows that once incumbency is controlled for, often this gender bias can become insignificant.

3. Such actors are often referred to as Crumb Maidens in Australia, referring to those that uphold the power structures, so they continue to benefit from the crumbs of those power structures (The Urban Dictionary 2021).

4. Diplomas awarded by public and private universities in Ecuador are automatically recognized. Degrees earned abroad need to go through a national procedure to be recognized in the country.

5. This measure was calculated for each candidate using information of three groups of voters (1) all voters, (2) female voters and, (3) male voters.

6. We ran separate regressions for each of the two time periods. This analysis confirmed that the results did not vary from the 2013 to 2017 election.

7. Following Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) analysis, a test was performed to assess whether the two regression coefficients differ significantly from each other. We found that the coefficients are, indeed, statistically different.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vanessa Carrión-Yaguana

Vanessa Carrión-Yaguana is an Assistant Professor at Universidad de Las Américas in Quito, Ecuador. She is head of the Research Group Lugar, Medio y Sociedad (Place, Context, and Society). She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on political behavior, labor economics, and impact evaluation of development programs, all these topics addressed from a gender perspective.

Sarah J. Carrington

Sarah J. Carrington is an Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Las Américas in Quito, Ecuador within the research group, Lugar, Medio y Sociedad (Place, Context, and Society). Having received her Ph.D. from Monash University in Australia in 2011 specializing in economics, she has since worked in economic development in Asia and worked in several universities in Australia and Ecuador. Her research interests include macroeconomics, economic development, informal labor markets and gender economics. Recently, her work is focused on investigating how the gender divide manifests itself in Latin American markets and other institutions.

Gabriel Velástegui Moya

Gabriel Velástegui Moya is an Information Management Officer at UNDP in Quito, Ecuador. He has a master’s degree in Economics from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany. Throughout his work experience, he has mainly focused on economic research and data analysis, but also has been involved in supporting the process of public policy designing related to foreign policy and democracy promotion in civil society. Currently he is working on risk analysis as part of a regional UNDP project in Latin America.