Women Legislators Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The process of granting for mal political rights to women, including the right to vote and stand for election, began in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first self-governing country to introduce unrestricted women’s suffrage was New Zealand in 1893. At this time women did not, however, have the right to stand for election—it was not until 1919 that this right was granted to women in New Zealand. In 1906 Finland was the first European country to give women both the right to vote and stand for election.

The introduction of formal political rights for women does not automatically mean the start of a process leading to a high number of women elected into office. The situation in western Europe serves as an example. Most countries in western Europe had introduced formal political rights for women—both the right to vote and stand for election— before the end of the Second World War in 1945. Yet as of late 2009, women made up an average of only 21 percent of legislators in the national parliaments of that region. However, notable variations exist between countries. Recent research points out that conscious acts—from quotas to informal goals for achievements—implemented by actors such as political parties with the specific aim of getting more women elected are important for high numbers. The literature in the field also reveals important interplay between political parties and interest groups such as women’s organizations and between these kinds of actors and structures of society. The type of electoral system matters for the number of women elected as does the type of welfare state; proportional representation (PR) systems are, for example, more favorable for women than majoritarian electoral systems.

There is a current global trend to introduce formalized quotas to speed up processes concerning the number of women elected. A common distinction in research is to separate between legal quotas and party quotas. Legal quotas refer to prescriptions written into the constitution of a country or into that country’s electoral laws, whereas party quotas refer to prescriptions voluntarily introduced by parties themselves in their own statutes. Quotas also can differ in that prescriptions can refer to a fixed number of seats for women in a legislative body or the occurrence of a certain number of women on election ballots. Investigations show that legal quotas are currently used in forty countries; major political parties in another fifty countries have instituted party quotas.

Finland was mentioned before. Together with Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, Finland represents a group of countries where changes in the number of women elected can be described as incremental; they have come about stepwise over a long time. Already in the 1970s, the average number of women in Nordic parliaments passed 20 percent, and in the early twenty-first century, the average number in that region is 43.2 percent. A contrasting example is then to be found in Rwanda, which represents a “fast-track” model. In 1994 women made up 17.1 percent of the national parliament in Rwanda. As of late 2009, 56.3 percent of Rwanda’s legislators were women. Thus, developments in the Nordic countries have been taking place over many decades, whereas the number of women elected in Rwanda more than tripled in only fifteen years.

The contemporary global trend to introduce quotas for the election of women can to a large extent be characterized as a fast-track trend and is most commonly found in Latin America and Africa. The distinction between different models is interesting because in some parts of the world there is, as of the early twenty-first century, a strong divergence between changes in the number of women elected and changes in the status of women in society more generally, and this situation is rather new.

Empirical results demonstrate that an increased proportion of women legislators contribute to strengthening the positions of women’s interests in the legislative process. Societies that elect large numbers of women tend to be more gender-equal also in other respects than societies that elect few women. However, so far this research has mostly been based on comparisons between Western democracies. A pending question in comparative research on women legislators is therefore to what extent the impact of women legislators on society and political life at large is conditioned by factors like stability and level of democracy in a country.

Bibliography:

All figures are from www.ipu.org, the Web site of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), September 2009. IPU publishes figures for the number of women elected to national parliaments around the world. The database also includes world and regional averages.
Dahlerup Drude, ed. Women, Quotas and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Kittilson, Miki Caul. Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments: Women and Elected Office in Contemporary Western Europe. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.
Rosenbluth, Frances, Robert Salmond, and Michael F.Thies. “Welfare Works: Explaining Female Legislative Representation.” Politics and Gender 2 (2006): 169–92.
Wängnerud, Lena. “Women in Parliaments: Descriptive and Substantive Representation.” Annual Review of Political Science 12 (2009): 51–69.

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