Are consociations bad for women? Assessing the effectiveness of gender quotas in Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia

ABSTRACT

To overcome ethno-national segregation, conflict resolution practitioners have promoted consociational power-sharing. After power-sharing arrangements were instituted, to address women’s under-representation in parliaments legislated gender quotas were also introduced. Gender quotas have been adopted in many post-conflict settings, but their effects remain understudied. In this article, by combining consociationalism and gender quotas theory, and applying a feminist institutionalist analytical approach, we examine the disparate effectiveness of gender quotas in two consociations: Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia. We pair the two countries to evaluate why gender quotas have produced different outcomes and demonstrate that formal and informal institutions matter for quota effectiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender quotas
• consociationalism
• post-conflict political systems
• Feminist institutionalism
• descriptive representation of women

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to express their appreciation to the following scholars for their support and advice in preparation for this paper: Adnan Kadribašić.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The constitutional name of the country is Bosnia and Herzegovina, but for easy reading we also will use the internationally accepted shorter version – Bosnia, and the abbreviation – BiH, still meaning the entire country. As part of the 2019 Prespa Agreement, (the former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia has become North Macedonia. The constitutional name of the country from 1990 until 2019 has been Macedonia. When speaking about this period, we will use only the shorter version Macedonia. We will also use the abbreviation MKD.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Saša Gavrić

Saša Gavrić is PhD Researcher at the Leipzig University, studying the impact of consociational power-sharing on descriptive and substantive representation of women.

Anja Vojvodić

Anja Vojvodić is a Lecturer at CUNY LaGuardia Community College, where she teaches courses on global politics.