With two decades of scholarship demonstrating the importance of norms in international politics, it is no longer controversial to make the claim that norms matter. The work on norms and policy diffusion has turned into major research programs in international relations (IR), and the scholarship on norms now spans the entire field, ranging from international security to international political economy and global governance. Even realist and rationalist liberal approaches give some credence to the role of behavior standards in the spread of new policy measures. This seems to be a good time to step back and revisit some of the fundamental questions regarding norms: What are norms and how do they function? One aim of this article is to address these questions and to propose conceptual revisions of what norms are and what norms do.Footnote 1
Most scholars approach norms as standards of behavior for actors of a given identity. A shared assumption among all those interested in norms is that, when effective, norms homogenize state behavior and state organizational forms. Norms even out divergences among states by providing instructions about what are appropriate, normal, or effective policy measures in order to reach specified goals. However, by focusing exclusively on the homogenizing aspect of norms, existing scholarship has overlooked their ranking dynamic. The main theoretical claim of this article is that in setting out standards of behavior, norms also draw on and generate social hierarchies. In defining what is normal and desirable, norms set the terms for what is abnormal and undesirable behavior and provide the means for ranking those states that do not meet a norm as deficient and inferior. This ranking dimension is a crucial component of what norms are and it provides a better understanding of norms' dynamism. A conceptual rethinking of norms to include social ranking also provides two new theoretical insights to the role of norms in international policy diffusion. First, we gain a better understanding of where—among which states—new candidates for diffusion may first emerge: new policies may develop at the margins of international society and not solely among core states. Second, we get a better grasp of how policy advocates frame the appropriateness or benefits of a new state practice: they must frame policy demands in terms of the international standing and rank of the targeted state.
The diffusion of legal sex quotas serves well as an empirical case to illustrate and develop these theoretical points.Footnote 2 Legal sex quotas are laws that aim to change the sexual makeup of national legislatures. They are constitutional or electoral laws that either reserve a certain number of legislative seats for women or that regulate the sexual makeup of the party lists or candidate pools of the political parties wanting to participate in the national electoral process. Legal quotas generally demand that women make up between 20 and 50 percent of the lists. What distinguishes these measures from the voluntary quotas that individual parties may choose to adopt is that they are mandated at the national level. Any political party that wants to participate in the national electoral process is required by law to include women on their lists or as candidates. Legal sex quotas are a national policy, centering on the national electoral system as such. In many places, legal sex quotas thus involve political power at the highest national level.
Around fifty states have adopted legal quotas to increase the level of women in their national legislatures, including countries on every continent and in virtually every region of the world (see Table 1). The worldwide emergence of this new national policy has been remarkably rapid, taking place during the past fifteen years only. Diffusion scholars expect new policies such as legal quotas to be adopted first among the states that form the liberal, Western core of international society and then spread to the rest of the world. There are various theories for why this is the case. Some contend that these states are economically and militarily dominant, and as such they can pressure or socialize weaker states to adopt policy approaches similar to their own.Footnote 3 Others point to the importance of these countries' policy success as a source of learning and mimicry among others.Footnote 4 In other words, “the poor and weak and peripheral copy the rich and strong and central.”Footnote 5 Yet others highlight the liberal ideational nature of international society and the new policy ideas that develop among its actors, arguing that such liberal policies are most easily and readily adopted by liberal states.Footnote 6
Adoption of sex quota measures for national assemblies (single/lower house), 1989–2010
Notes: The table is assembled from data provided by IDEA 2010, unless noted by *. Provisions may have changed since initial adoption, generally demanding a larger percentage.
* Tripp Reference Tripp2003.
The international diffusion path of legal sex quotas is not one that IR scholarship would expect, however. The present surge of legal quotas instead developed primarily out of Latin America in the 1990s, where national and transnational women's advocates had demanded that quotas be used to increase the numbers of women in politics. The Latin America trend is quite remarkable—ten countries on that continent passed legal quotas between 1996 and 1998. Starting in the mid-1990s, quotas were then championed by global and regional organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), as well as by women's organizations and political parties outside of Latin America. Another thirty-some countries have subsequently adopted legal quotas since 2000, primarily in Africa and Asia, including several Islamic states such as Djibouti, Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, and Jordan (see Table 1).Footnote 7 The use of legal quotas is still rare in Western Europe and North America, and there is virtually no discussion of legal quotas as a measure to increase the very low number of female members of the U.S. Congress. The only core Western states that have adopted such quotas are Belgium, France, Portugal, and Spain—countries where there has been some domestic quota advocacy.
The diffusion of sex quotas is not a case of hegemonic socialization, of the poor and peripheral copying the rich and central, nor of core liberal states adopting and promoting a new liberal standard. Although these claims are not without general merit, one possibility has been overlooked: new policy measures may emerge “from below” as peripheral states attempt to improve their standing. Because new state policies may start off among states identified as lesser and inferior in international society, one must address and carefully examine the link between norms and rank in the diffusion process when looking at a state's attempts to rise in rank. This takes us to the second theoretical point about norms, social hierarchy, and policy diffusion: how advocates frame their demands. A new policy has to be legitimated by relevant actors in terms of a state's rank, so that it is clear to policymakers why a state of a certain standing rather than another should adopt a policy. Any actor—whether a state, international organization, or transnational social movement—invoking norms in advocating for a new policy must refer to and grapple with international social hierarchies. In the case of legal sex quotas, a state's standing in the hierarchy between “modern” market democracies and “traditional” society provides meaning to and importance for increasing the level of female legislators. Exhibiting a larger share of female legislators is seen as one indication of a state being “advanced” and “modern,” a sign of being a developed democracy with political institutions that are conducive to investments and market-based growth. Importantly, these modern states are distinguished from more “traditional” ones that presumably have not yet overcome age-old and backward political practices that serve as a barrier to democratic justice and an impediment to growth. A state's placement in the social hierarchy between the “modern” and “traditional” provides the framework and much of the urgency for passing quota legislation.
In sum, my main contention is that international norms necessarily both generate and draw on social rank (the ordering of states as superior and inferior). This link between norms and social hierarchies manifests in how new policies are legitimated and framed by advocates, and it also helps account for the international diffusion trajectory of a new policy.
Studying norms and rank in the international diffusion process is a massive undertaking. I have generated evidence through a three-step analysis that (1) began with tracing the origin and international adoption path of legal sex quotas based on data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). The analysis (2) then turned to secondary sources on quotas, and (3) ended with an analysis of the shared meaning of higher levels of women in politics to quota advocates. Such a three-step analysis enables the cross-check of different sorts of evidence:Footnote 8 a diffusion pattern “from below,” secondary sources that mention international comparisons and rank, and arguments by quota advocates that refer to or rest on the international rank of states would all support the claim that the link between norms and social hierarchy is central in the diffusion process. The possibility of contradictory results helps assess the viability of focusing on social hierarchy when studying international norms. The third form of evidence—intersubjective meaning—is nonetheless the most important of the three. As Kratochwil has argued, “communicative structure among actors ought to constitute the referential framework for attempts to understand why actors do the things they do.”Footnote 9 The communicative part of the analysis centers on the arguments of quota advocates in Latin America (with a focus on debates in Argentina, Peru, and Mexico), since legal quotas first emerged in that region, and also on the arguments for quotas advanced in all the documents on women's political representations by the influential international organizations promoting quotas (UN, World Bank, Inter-Parliamentary Union [IPU], IDEA, and others). The analysis ends with a brief examination of the adoption (France) and nonadoption (United States and United Kingdom) of legal quotas in core states. In all, I have analyzed a massive amount of material, relying on my command of English, Spanish, French, and the Scandinavian languages for this study.
Approaching Norms and Policy Diffusion
There is an enormous literature puzzling over the swift emergence of similar state policies among a large number of countries across the world, asking how and why we have come to live in a world of such similarity. Virtually all scholars addressing this puzzle agree that the rapid and worldwide emergence of similar new policies cannot be explained with reference to domestic factors in isolation, as if state policies emerged independently of the international context. Instead, there is recognition of the complex interdependence of international and domestic factors in national change.
With IR scholars focusing primarily on international dimensions, one issue in particular has been of central interest: the process or mechanism of international policy diffusion. Although their theoretical approaches vary, a large number of scholars have asked how the character of the international interaction by which policies spread is best conceptualized and described.Footnote 10 The diffusion scholarship has produced useful taxonomies to characterize the process, pivoting on four main concepts. Processes of coercion (the imposition of policy change) and persuasion (inducing policy change through argumentation and tactics other than overt material coercion) place heavy emphasis on the role of intentional efforts by external actors to produce change in state policy.Footnote 11 The remaining two processes are more decentralized. The process of learning (gaining new beliefs about proper ends and about causal relationships) emphasizes the fact that policymakers may actively reflect on and draw lessons from changes in other countries. The process of mimicry (automatic emulation) finally draws our attention to how cues from the external environment may prompt changes in state policy without much reflection or debate. At the risk of glossing over important theoretical differences among diffusion scholars, the literature on the whole has demonstrated effectively that there are multiple kinds of international interactions by which policies can emerge worldwide—there is no one master process that can account for all cases of policy diffusion. Regarding the spread of sex quotas, KrookFootnote 12 and BushFootnote 13 have provided excellent analyses of the processes at play, demonstrating effectively that several of these kinds of interactions can be part of a single case of policy diffusion.Footnote 14
In many accounts of the diffusion process, norms—as standards of behavior for statesFootnote 15—serve a key function in explaining the international spread of a new policy. The concept of norms is of course primarily associated with the broad set of constructivist approaches to IR because a number of constructivist scholars have made norms central to their explorations of the social nature of international politics. Norms are used to account for behavior governed by social rules and they are primarily held to entail a mode of interaction based on a “logic of appropriateness.”Footnote 16 Within this logic, state actors behave as they are instructed to as being of a certain identity and as the ideational context calls for. Constructivist policy diffusion explanations thus hold that states come to adopt similar policies across the world because of the spread of new standards of behavior and new expectations about what states are supposed to do.Footnote 17 There is a great deal of disagreement among constructivists about how and why new norms emerge, change, and spread, however. Some trace the initial change back to the intentional manipulation by actors,Footnote 18 whereas others assume change to be inherent to and continual in normative systems and thus trace normative change to largely unintentional discursive changes and historical contingencies over time.Footnote 19 Explanatory disagreements aside, constructivists who have looked at policy diffusion all place norms at the center of analysis.
However, in the diffusion literature, the concern with norms as standards of behavior is important to not only constructivists. Realist diffusion scholars also rely on the concept to advance claims about hegemonic socialization as an explanation for similar state policies.Footnote 20 This view focuses on attempts by hegemons to change the policies of others through the creation and manipulation of international rules and standards of behavior. In a slightly different vein, Drezner and others have looked at the competitive “standard-setting games” of economic powers in efforts to establish and enforce the rules of the game for economic interaction, standards that then help shape the policies of other states.Footnote 21 There is some recognition that major powers contend with the social and meaning-laden dimensions of world politics in their manipulation of standards that guide state behavior. Norms are thus seen as an important intervening variable—they help major powers diffuse policies internationally.
Liberal rationalist diffusion approaches also often rely on the concept of norms, if implicitly. Diffusion scholars who foreground the importance of learning (as a rational process of assessing new information about means to an end) generally assume bounded rationality—that is, policymakers are means-ends oriented but their calculations are bounded by the information available and by cognitive factors.Footnote 22 In other words, there is no presumption that policy choices necessarily converge on “the truth”—policymakers can learn a faulty theory or take mistaken lessons from another state.Footnote 23 Policymakers develop ideas about a policy's efficacy and learn about behaviors presumed to lead to a certain outcome, which then serve as the basis for policy change. Norms can thus be a crucial component in this learning process because their rationales communicate shared understandings of why a policy is appropriate.
There is general recognition in the diffusion literature as a whole, then, that norms matter in the international spread of new policies. It is indeed difficult to account for the worldwide diffusion of policies ranging from women's suffrage to central bank independence to nonuse of chemical weapons without some recognition of the importance of social standards of behavior. An adequate conceptual understanding of what norms are and how they operate is thus crucial. However, there are certain general shortcomings in the study of norms that hamper the understanding of policy diffusion. First, the belief that norms simply standardize behavior and thus bring about similarity among states is mistaken for conceptual and empirical reasons. This shortcoming is related to a second major problem, namely how norms are studied.
Diffusion scholars generally provide a succinct definition of a norm and then proceed to explore which actors are responsible for promoting a policy and the processes and mechanisms by which the policy has spread internationally. Diffusion scholarship thus rarely examines norms in terms of the behavior standards' actual meanings to the actors involved. This is unfortunate. The meanings and interpretations of norms are interesting and important to study in their own right. But the meanings of norms also have consequences for where and how new policies emerge and spread, as we will see. If we take the role of norms seriously in world politics, we must then take the meaning of norms seriously and pay better attention to intersubjective knowledge and ideas.Footnote 24 When advocates invoke norms, they draw on broader sets of ideas to make sense of the norm and to be persuasive in their arguments for new policies. In studying the spread of legal sex quotas, norms scholars should ask: What rationales and motivations for quotas are presented by quota advocates? Why is it reasonable for states to adopt such policies, according to quota supporters? What pre-understandings (about ends, causal relationships, etc.) must be in place so that it makes sense to ration women into national legislatures? In short, what is this standard that helps bring about wide-spread policy change?
What is more, we can only assess whether norms in fact create a world of more similar states if we examine the actual meanings of norms to actors involved. If norms help homogenize states, then the understandings across the world of new policies should point in that direction. However, the rationales and arguments for sex quotas have consistently also rested on identifying certain kinds of states as inferior to others. This indicates a crucial but overlooked dynamic of norms, namely that of social ranking.
The Conceptual Link Between Norms and Social Ranking
Most studies of norms adapt Katzenstein's widely used definition and approach to international norms as social standards for the proper behavior of states of a stipulated identity.Footnote 25 A norm is thus not a mere generalization of regular practices but rather refers to recognition of relations between specified behaviors and a stated identity. In other words, norms help set the terms for what can be said and done as a certain kind of actor. They also set out what has to be said and done in order to be regarded as a certain kind of actor. Norms are essentially about value—they validate certain kinds of behavior for specific sorts of actors and devalue other sorts of behavior. The assigned value is key to understanding the operation and effectiveness of norms—indeed, assigning value gives norms much of their force.
Whereas prior studies of international norms recognize their value-laden nature, the implications of this fact have not been drawn out. The society of states as presented by diffusion scholars thus seems at odds with any other known human society because it is portrayed as devoid of patterned relations of social hierarchy and the norms productive of such relations. To be sure, various IR traditions place social hierarchies at the center of analysis and take the relation of hierarchy to the production of meaning very seriously. The traditions of Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and critical theory all grapple with the meaning-laden dimensions of international hierarchy in distinctive ways. In examining such diverse social hierarchies as class relations, gender, and the self-other constructions of colonialism and Orientalism, these traditions have looked at the normative foundations of specific international hierarchies. My contribution is partly more abstract, since I try to highlight the role of norms as such in generating and drawing on social hierarchies. The contribution is also of the empirical theory variety, in trying to demonstrate the role of social hierarchy in policy diffusion. While none of these IR traditions have advanced these two claims, some sociologists have discussed the general role of norms in generating and drawing on social hierarchies.Footnote 26
Social hierarchy, which I use synonymously with social rank, concerns the ordering of actors as superior or inferior to one another in socially important respects.Footnote 27 A wide array of scholars presume an original state of equality and ascribe to property, mode of production, or division of labor the crucial role in destroying this equality.Footnote 28 Positing a period of equality, whether a state of nature or primitive communism, it is possible for thinkers as different as Rousseau and Marx to approach inequality as a historical phenomenon that can, conceivably, be eliminated.
German social theorist Dahrendorf, in contrast, traces the origin of inequality to the very nature of societies as value-laden communities. Although it is possible to eliminate particular kinds of inequality, such as class, the eradication of social inequality as such is unachievable unless there is a full state of indifference and absence of assessment. In short, his argument runs as follows: He begins with Durkheim's famous premise that every society is a moral community, constituted and regulated by established and inescapable evaluative expectations—norms—which are “always related to concrete social positions.”Footnote 29 Societal norms, in turn, necessarily entail some sort of tacit or overt sanctioning of behavior according to the level of conformity to the norms for that identity. Norms assess better and worse practices, desirable and undesirable behavior, what is normal and abnormal, for a particular kind of actor. Given that norms always entail sanctioning evaluative criteria, Dahrendorf concludes that in any given historical society,
whatever symbols they may declare to be outward signs of inequality, and whatever may be the precise content of their social norms, the hard core of social inequality can always be found in the fact that men as the incumbents of social roles are subject, according to how their roles relate to the dominant expectational principles of society, to sanctions designed to enforce these principles.Footnote 30
In other words, whereas norms change contextually and over time, all societies are characterized by some form of social hierarchy. Inequalities are built into the very fabric of society and are an inescapable effect of norms' existence. Contrary to what existing studies of international norms assume, norms do not simply generate a more homogeneous society of like units—they simultaneously help differentiate and hierarchically order actors. Homogenizing and stratifying tendencies are mutually implicated in norms.
The link between norms and social hierarchies has implications for the policy diffusion process in at least two ways. First, social hierarchies shape how new policies are understood and legitimated. For example, new state practices such as sex quotas are framed in terms of the unequal standing of states generated by existing norms. Advocates of change must make clear how and why it makes sense for a state of a certain rank to change its behavior toward women. Second, social hierarchy can help us understand from where new state policies emerge and spread. States that are low in rank may become the first to develop and adopt a policy, attempting to rise in rank within a given order or as a challenge to or rejection of that order. Crucially, then, linking norms with international social hierarchies helps us understand why new state behaviors may first emerge among states considered less advanced. There may indeed be particular pressure on states that are considered lacking or inferior to change, so much so that it should come as no surprise that being at the margins may serve as a catalyst for change.
Norms, Social Hierarchy, and the Diffusion of Sex Quotas
The Adoption and Advocacy Trajectory, 1989–2010
The current trend of adopting legal quotas began in 1989 and really took off in the second half of the 1990s (see Table 1).Footnote 31 It is difficult to locate the origins of this adoption trend in a definitive manner, but one can roughly summarize the trend like this: legal quotas were first demanded by women's movements in Latin America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and were then picked up and advocated by regional and global governance organizations (particularly development institutions) as well as other national and transnational women's movements in the mid-1990s and onward.Footnote 32 However, the initial demand in Latin America did not emerge in a vacuum. During the UN Decade on Women (1976–85), there had been a great deal of discussion of women's political participation in various parts of the world, but the actual UN recommendations on women in political decision making remained vague and general.Footnote 33 Efforts to increase the numbers of women in political parties and legislatures developed in a number of states across the world during this period, initially with most success in the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, where internal party quotas were used. In this context, and as a number of Latin American countries were transitioning to democracy, Latin American women's movements and democratic actors were looking abroad for models to embrace. The debates about adoption of an internal party quota in the Partido Socialista Obrero Español—the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party—in 1987 and 1990 were particularly closely followed by the parties of the left in Latin America.Footnote 34 The Socialist International itself had endorsed affirmative action as a principle for gender equality in 1989, an endorsement that was crucial for the initiation of the national quota debate in Argentina that same year.Footnote 35 Stimulated by Social Democratic debates on internal party quotas in Europe, Latin Americans picked up on the idea of party quotas and turned it into a demand for national legal quotas.Footnote 36 In 1989, bills demanding that a certain percentage of all party candidacies be reserved for women were also proposed in Costa Rica and Paraguay.
In 1990, the year Argentina adopted a legal quota, global governance organizations also began advocating quotas. That year, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women named equality in political participation and decision making a priority theme, and recommended that quotas be used as an interim measure to increase the levels of women in elected office.Footnote 37 In the next few years, various international organizations began urging political parties to put forth female candidates, demonstrating a heightened concern with women in political decision making but falling short of advocating legal quotas.Footnote 38 The work intensified in 1995 following the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.Footnote 39 Crucially, the Human Development Report 1995, prepared by the UNDP for Beijing, argued for targeted measures such as quotas to attain a short-term threshold of 30 percent women in national assemblies, a goal the UNDP subsequently increased by calling for 50 percent women by 2005.Footnote 40 The Beijing Platform for Action, while not binding, saw 189 governments commit to taking measures to increase the levels of women in political decision making, if necessary through positive action.Footnote 41 By the second half of the 1990s, international organs came to argue more forcefully that affirmative action was the preferable manner of achieving “gender balance” in decision making.Footnote 42
Today, the landscape of organizations, networks, states, and campaigns involved in increasing the number of women in decision making is enormous to the point of dizzying, spanning the globe from Latin America to Asia. The campaign is neither unified nor coordinated. However, certain organs stand out as crucial nodal points in this web of activities and they seem to primarily (though not exclusively) involve development organizations: the UNDP, the UN women's agencies, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the International Institute on Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), and the World Bank; the foreign ministries of the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden; and the transnational nongovernmental organization (NGO)—the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). Connected to all of these organs are regional initiatives and networks of domestic and transnational NGOs, development banks, international governmental organizations (IGOs), and other actors. These actors have convened a series of large international and regional conferences and initiated a multitude of development initiatives focused on increasing the levels of women in politics, some of which I will discuss at greater length.
This explosion of activity leads to my primary analytical concern: What do these main advocates understand quotas to be about? In what ways did the Latin American advocates frame quota adoption as reasonable and appropriate for their states? Similarly, how are legal quotas advocated within the main global governance organizations, such as the UNDP and the World Bank? In short, what is this norm?
Quota Rationales: The Challenges of “Modern” Market Democracy
Quotas are unmistakably being championed in a global context of capitalist restructuring of states. However, there are many ways that higher numbers of women in decision making could be interpreted and promoted even within our contemporary environment of free market orthodoxy: as a matter of human rights, as a step in eradicating men's domination of women, as democratic representation, or as a matter of market-led growth. There are multiple interpretive possibilities, in other words. Among quota advocates, more female legislators have nonetheless overwhelmingly become understood as related to two particular ends: as a question of promoting democratic institutions, which in turn is presumed to be central for a functioning market economy.
Latin American advocates discussed quotas primarily as a matter of democratic representation, and increasing the levels of female legislators was presented as a question of justice that constitutes a cornerstone of “modern democracy.” As Mexican Senator Carvajal Moreno Gustavo explained at a 1997 IPU conference: “What is at stake is not just the inclusion of women in Parliaments but democracy as such: our countries want to grow, our countries want more justice. Women are key actors for the renewal of democracy.”Footnote 43 As a matter of democratic justice, the very essence of the meaning of “modern” forms of representation is contemplated in quota discussions, centering on whether allegedly disembodied interests or embodied identities are the proper object of representation and then on the implications for national legislatures' composition. Modern democracies, all sides in the debates publicly agree, do not mistreat women. Modern democracies, quota advocates argue, in fact take affirmative measure if need be to provide just representation for women. In the words of Argentine Senator Margarita Malharro de Torres, those who oppose higher levels of women legislators “hold women back in the name of old, traditional prejudices more worthy of a feudal era than of modern times, than of an aggiornado and firm democracy that is founded on the representation of all.” In passing the quota bill, on the other hand, “the Senate [is] taking the advanced, modern, aggiornado step of transitory quotas to incorporate women into the legislative powers as they deserve.”Footnote 44
Among regional and global governance organizations, a second understanding of women legislators' importance for “modern” states has come to predominate over democratic representation, namely that gender-balanced institutions are conducive to market economies and particularly to market-led development. When quotas were embraced by the major global governance organs in the mid- to late 1990s, the democratic justice arguments receded into the background in favor of arguments that emphasize the advantages of women legislators for the market economy, allegedly benefiting women as well as general humanity. In a global market economy, global governance organizations hold, states simply cannot afford not to bring more women into national assemblies:
Today, all our countries face global, political and economic challenges that are partly beyond our control, and many are undergoing radical institutional and structural changes whose long-term social, political and economic effects are extremely hard to manage in view of an unsatisfactory international order and insufficient economic co-operation. In such a context, no country can any longer afford to overlook any portion of its human resources. This means redirecting our perspectives and policies. Our domestic policies must henceforth, at all levels, be shaped and applied not just by men but with the full and equal participation of women.Footnote 45
A larger percentage of women legislators is thus a “critical dimension of the UNDP's efforts to help meet the overarching goal of halving world poverty by 2015,” as the very first introductory sentence of the landmark Women's Political Participation and Good Governance: 21st Century Challenges reads. The significant UN Secretary General report Road Map Towards the Implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration tellingly lists “supporting the inclusion of women in government and other decision-making bodies at a high level” as a strategy for the goal of Development and Poverty Eradication rather than as an end in itself or as a strategy for the goal of Human Rights and Democracy.Footnote 46 “Disparities between males and females in power” a subsequent World Bank report claims, “act to undermine economic growth.”Footnote 47 In a surprisingly sharp tone, the World Bank similarly emphasizes that “gender equality is an issue of development effectiveness, not just a matter of political correctness or kindness to women” in the introduction to “The Business Case for Mainstreaming Gender.”Footnote 48 Senior World Bank economist Andrew Mason (co-author of the groundbreaking 2001 World Bank report Engendering Development Through Gender Equality) states that “societies that discriminate on the basis of gender pay a significant price in greater poverty, slower economic growth, weaker governance, and a lower quality of life.”Footnote 49
Democracy, to the extent that it is mentioned in the UNDP and World Bank elaborations, takes on a particular meaning, namely the creation of public institutions that are conducive to so-called good governance. A “gender-balanced representation,” one is told time and again, is a matter of “good governance.”Footnote 50 For those unfamiliar with the concept, the UNDP defines governance as “the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country's affairs at all levels,”Footnote 51 and it centrally involves “providing an enabling environment for private sector activity.”Footnote 52 After a period of skepticism about the importance of state institutions for the market economy, democratic political institutions have come to take center stage in the production of such an enabling environment.
Summing up the significance of good governance, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan declared that “a new consensus is emerging on the nature, role and function of official institutions,” concluding that “we are moving from old ideologies to a new pragmatism.”Footnote 53 With alternatives to the market economy apparently not only defeated but also relegated to the world of old ideologies, a higher number of women legislators is becoming part and parcel of the new, “modern” pragmatism of good governance. I will analyze precisely what women as office-holders are made out to be to bring about democracy and economic growth but first I examine the hierarchy between the modern world and traditional society in the discussions of quotas. It is this hierarchy, I contend, that provides leverage and dynamism to the global governance organs and activists in their efforts to promote quotas.
Social Rank and Quota Norms: Overcoming “Tradition” in the Development of “Modern” Market Democracies
I briefly introduced the notion that quotas are promoted as a component in the construction of “modern” capitalist democratic statehood. In contrast with the diffusion literature that considers such developments as a simple case of homogenization, I argue that the ranking dimension inherent in norms has helped give dynamism to the quota debates. Having become embedded in the production of “modern” capitalist democracy, much of the quota debates' drive across the world derives from efforts to move away from “tradition” and its associated practices. “Modern” statehood is thus articulated together with “less advanced” or “traditional” polities or groups of humans on a single scale of development and success. The quota struggles thus draw on and constitute two broad categories of states and the hierarchical relations between them: those that have already attained the “modern” status (generally so-called developed states) and those that are understood to still be “developing” away from “tradition” in the direction of meeting the demands of the global economy. Understood this way, there is clearly greater urgency for and pressure on developing states to adopt modernizing measures such as sex quotas, a fact that helps account for the adoption trajectory “from below.”
Among quota advocates ranging from the SADC, the Inter-American Commission of Women, and the UNDP to IDEA and individual parliamentarians favoring quota laws, “cultural tradition” is identified as the primary causal force behind low levels of female representation. According to the major global governance organizations and quota advocates such as IDEA, poor and wealthy states alike have managed to increase the numbers of women legislators, demonstrating that the wealthy part of the world does not have a monopoly on the political empowerment of women. The UNDP Human Development Report 1995 showed that women's political empowerment does not depend on “national income or wealth,” a claim that has since been widely reproduced and presumably accepted.Footnote 54
Quota advocates instead generally hold that the primary cause of the problem resides in culture, a concept carefully separated out from the economy and politics. As states “modernize,” we are expected to see a “weakening of traditional values” and therefore “changes in perceptions regarding the appropriate role for women—all factors that increase women's political resources and decrease existing barriers to political activity”Footnote 55 according to IDEA's quota website. “Traditional understandings of space as private and public, women generally being relegated to the former” we are told by the UNDP, “lie at the very heart of most of the difficulties women face entering politics.”Footnote 56 SADC and others agree that “at the heart of the under representation of women in politics are age old attitudes and stereotypes that assign women to the private, and men to the public domain.”Footnote 57 Contrasted against modernity, culture is thus understood as a set of national beliefs, values, and customs that have been passed down from premodern eras and that hinder economic and democratic advancement. It is through cultural development, the move away from “traditional” society toward “modern” state institutions, that women are empowered in decision making.
It is important to note that these understandings represent a total reversal from those of the early twentieth century, when much of the non-European world was chastised as primitive for not maintaining separate spheres and for not keeping women out of political power.Footnote 58 Indeed, in the early twentieth century, the ban on women's political participation was seen as indicating the advancement of Western Europe (in contrast with “less advanced” societies where women had political authority). Now, organizations such as the Inter-American Commission on Women argue that it is “sociocultural patterns” that inhibit women from taking part in “modern society.” “Prejudices and customs”—as low numbers of women legislators are now interpreted—“limit [women's] participation in public life.”Footnote 59 These alleged customs have been institutionalized as “traditional practice in many political parties and government structures.”Footnote 60
Operating in this framework, the Latin American quota debates centered on cultural deficiencies as the source of women's underrepresentation. “[The low level of female deputies] demonstrates clearly that a patriarchal and machista political culture is responsible for the fact that of a total of 2031 parliamentarians, only 84 have been women,” Peruvian deputy quota legislation author Luz Salgado argued in 1997 like many of her colleagues.Footnote 61 “The nature of the discrimination that we are debating is cultural and it permeates Argentine society profoundly,” the Argentine Minister of the Interior likewise claimed during the 1991 quota debates.Footnote 62 His fellow legislators agreed:
the law that we are debating today arises from the problematic of a society which has suffered a strong cultural retrocession, because if this had been a democratic people which had long ago overcome authoritarianism and discrimination, we would not need to discuss the 30 percent female representation for electoral lists. The fact that we are debating how to protect women through affirmative action shows that we in some way accept that there is a problem in Argentine society.Footnote 63
Such an understanding of the problem leads to certain preferred solutions: quotas are understood as transitory electoral reforms that serve as one step in “achieving a transformation in the political culture of society,”Footnote 64 in “overcoming the sociocultural obstacles that impede or limit [women's] participation.”Footnote 65 Once such cultural change has taken place, quotas will no longer be needed. States that are truly “modern,” that have progressed toward a modern national culture, would have no need for such measures because half of the legislature would automatically be female. Swedish politicians often point out with pride that the Swedish legislature and cabinet attained their high levels of women without “coercive” quotas.Footnote 66 Furthermore, whereas the transfer of economic resources from rich to poor states is not seen as a solution within this schema, the transfer of modern values and the eradication of traditional culture is. Women, as we are about to see, are simultaneously an important component in and beneficiary of this cultural transformation.
How Women Legislators Advance the State from a Traditional to a Modern Polity
In the 1991 quota debates, Argentine delegate Cecilia Lipszyc cited nineteenth-century French utopian socialist Charles Fourier's famous thesis: “Social progress and historic changes occur by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and decadence of the social order occurs as the result of a decrease in the liberty of women.”Footnote 67 Even though general progress from traditional to modern statehood is understood to be the fundamental force behind the political empowerment of women, an increase in women legislators, as Fourier's claim suggests, is concurrently thought to bring about general progress. State officials and quota debaters are thus faced with an apparent tautology: general modernization is understood to be beneficial for women, while at the same time the changing status of women allegedly brings about general progress.
How, then, do women legislators supposedly advance and modernize the state? First, by enhancing general economic development, a feature central for modernity and the quest away from tradition. The landmark 1997 UNDP conference on Governance for Sustainable Growth and Equity—the first global UN conference on governance that officials from more than 153 member states attended—highlighted a close relationship between the low number of women parliamentarians and the high number of women in poverty. A close relationship between low numbers of women parliamentarians and high level of general poverty has since been established and underscored time and again by major global governance organizations.Footnote 68 Empowered as a distinct category with unique experiences and interests, the UNDP, IPU, and others hail women legislators for contributing toward poverty eradication by bringing their difference and interests into the policy process. Women's interests, such as equal opportunity for education and employment, reproductive health, nutrition, and child care are understood to benefit the economy as a whole. The “failure to include women in the political running of societies is regarded by the IPU as a major impediment to development,” the secretary general of the IPU proclaims in unison with other quota proponents.Footnote 69 Interestingly, then, if the level of a state's economic development is not an important determinant of women in decision making, the reverse is certainly said to hold true: the number of women in decision making is positively related to a state's level of economic development.
If the pursuit of women's interests by means of quotas is said to be an important strategy for general economic development, women are also celebrated in a second manner—as the honest sex. A series of studies show strong positive correlations between women and good governance, arguing as a rule that “the greater the representation of women in parliament, the lower the level of corruption.”Footnote 70 The World Bank explains that “good governance is critical for sustainable development. A growing body of evidence suggests that gender equality in rights and resources is associated with less corruption and better governance.”Footnote 71 In a widely cited study commissioned by the World Bank, we learn that “numerous behavioral studies have found women to be more trust-worthy and public-spirited than men. These results suggest that women should be particularly effective in promoting honest government.”Footnote 72 The authors of the study elaborate:
Men are more individually oriented (selfish) than women … women will be less likely to sacrifice the common good for personal (material) gain. This may be particularly relevant for the role of women in government since, almost by definition, one of the most significant difficulties faced by public bureaucracies is designing institutions that discourage their agents from acting opportunistically, at the expense of the public.Footnote 73
Such representations of selfless women are echoed time and again across the world. “Women have stabilized politics in a way because they tend not to be so opportunistic. They tend to go after the interests of stability. They're not so reckless as men,” Uganda's president Museveni stated in 2000.Footnote 74 “Women generally refuse corrupt behavior and are less inclined to adopt corrupt behavior than men,” the Swiss protestant aid organization Bread for All declared in 2003.Footnote 75 Peruvian delegate Luz Salgado, co-author of the quota bill that won approval in 1997, explained in the parliamentary debates that
being a woman gives us a special condition that doesn't simply consist of a having a different color, stature or texture. We women have different life experiences from men. The quota system will put things in order, like they should have been from the beginning … politics will be clean when there are clean characters, when there are transparent characters, when there is a decision to work, when there is solidarity.Footnote 76
Some quota debaters are still unsure whether such honesty is inherent to women's sex or a malleable matter of gender: “the reasons are unclear, various hypothesis [sic] could be established, such as socialization, less access to the networks of corruption, less access to the ‘corruption currencies,’ less know-how of corrupt practices.” Whatever the verdict, women are presently understood at a minimum as important for the fight against corruption in the short run: “efforts to promote the involvement of women in public life could at least in a short term represent an effective strategy to fight corruption.”Footnote 77 Allegedly less corrupt and less selfish, women have thus become ideal agents in the construction of transparent states.
If women quite literally help advance the state and general welfare by using their different characteristics, they also do so symbolically by serving as a crucial marker of modernity. Since neither the economy nor politics are approached as important in generating higher numbers of women in national legislatures, only “traditional” states governed by “culture” are expected to exhibit low levels of female representation. As I stated earlier, the causal relation between the political status of women and cultural advancement is circular—general progress away from tradition allegedly benefits women, and the advancement of women via quotas brings general progress away from tradition. Quotas, as a quick fix for bringing more women into national assemblies, help mark states as “modern,” a point that has clearly not been lost on state officials. So when Ugandan parliamentarian Beatrice Kiraso claims of the quota legislation that “women are now the main instruments of modernization in Uganda. We're also leading the way for women in Africa—It's hard to believe we've come so far,”Footnote 78 she suggests that Uganda has inched closer to modernity simply by passing the quota law, before the women legislators have had time to have their expected effects. Senior World Bank economist Mason explains that a higher level of female political representation “signifies a country that is more open in general, with more transparent government and a more democratic approach.”Footnote 79 In other words, having produced more women legislators, the country must be more modern—transparent and democratic. In a world where being ranked as corrupt has serious effects for a country's total capital inflows, such symbolic representations could be consequential.
Normative Hierarchies, Nonadoption, and Outliers in the Core
The quota adoption trend has not reached all parts of the world with equal force. As quota guru Drude Dahlerup recently said, “resistance to electoral gender quotas is strongest in the Western world.”Footnote 80 Why is this so? Some of these countries—for example, the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands—have reached high levels of female representation with the help of voluntary internal party quotas. Parliamentarians feel no need to implement legal quotas since these countries are the norm. As former head of the Swedish Left Party's Parliamentary Council on Women's Politics has pointed out, only states with a problem (those viewed as inferior because they do not meet the standard) presumably need to turn to quotas as a solution.Footnote 81 But most Western states, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, to name two noteworthy examples, show dismal levels of female representation in national politics. With 22 percent (UK) and 16.8 percent (U.S.) female representatives in the lower house in April 2011, the United Kingdom and the United States rank fiftieth and sixty-ninth respectively.Footnote 82 They thus fall below most of Latin America, much of Africa, and even Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates in terms of levels of women in national legislatures. And yet in neither country have legal quotas been considered. Why has the quota fad not been picked up by these obvious candidates?
A complete answer to this question is obviously beyond the aim and scope of this article.Footnote 83 In short, there is neither active demand for nor active supply of legal quotas among these nonadopting countries. Using the United Kingdom and the United States as illustration, there is no legal quota movement in either country and no such bills have been introduced. In fact, there appear to be few legal quota advocates at all in the United States and United Kingdom. On the external “supply” side, international organizations clearly do not have the same influence in these wealthy states as they do in developing and postconflict countries. There has thus been little if any advocacy targeting these states from within or without, and their poor international ranking has not been politicized. Many liberal, Western states can therefore still reconcile having low levels of female elected representatives with being modern market democracies. As one U.S. commentator has noted, “Americans seem content with a government where women are just 16 percent of their political leaders.”Footnote 84
This may not be the end of the quota story for these states, however. Although rare, there are voices raised in favor of quotas in U.S./UK academia and media.Footnote 85 These supporters consistently make reference to international rank in their arguments for quotas, making international comparisons and contending that “in terms of women's political representation, the United States is laggard.”Footnote 86 An opinion piece in the British newspaper, the Guardian, that similarly raised the laggard status of the United Kingdom pointedly asked, “do people seriously believe British women less capable of running their country than their European sisters?”Footnote 87 If the number of advocates grow, as they very well may as the rates of women in national politics continue to increase around the world, they may be able to more effectively politicize the low rank and laggard status of these old and established democracies. Things may then change, even in the core states of international society.
A few core states have in fact already adopted legal quotas (Belgium 1994, France 2000, Portugal 2006, and Spain 2007). In each of these cases, much like in Latin America and in contrast with the nonadopting states discussed here, some combination of domestic women's movement advocacy and leftist/green political party support of legal quotas were at play prior to adoption.Footnote 88 The ideas influencing these domestic advocates were circulating transnationally: some of the parties were members of the Socialist International, which endorsed affirmative action as a principle for gender equality in 1989, whereas others mirrored European Green parties in advocating for gender parity in politics.Footnote 89 And although there has been no formal international pressure, international organizations began advocating for equality between men and women in decision making in the 1990s. The Council of Europe began taking various actions to support equality in politics in the early 1990s. The UNDP Human Development Report 1995 provided an influential ranking of states in terms of gender empowerment. The European Commission began fostering the exchange of “best practices” on political representation of women in 1996. These cross-national movements of ideas and ranking data and the exchange of best practices enabled European quota advocates to draw comparisons with other countries. In invoking the norm of fair representation for women, advocates in Spain, Portugal, and France could and did argue that their states fell short of the norm and performed much worse than other European states. They pointed to the fact that Spain, Portugal, and France ranked twenty-sixth, thirtieth, and thirty-first respectively in the gender empowerment measure of the UNDP Human Development Report 1995 and thus fell far below all other Western European countries.
The French debates on the so-called Parity Law of 2000 serve well as an illustrative case. The French Parity Law obliges political parties to allot 50 percent of candidacies to women or else lose public campaign funding. The law was initiated by the Socialist Party as a result of a strong parity movement that had emerged in the early 1990s and gathered significant force after the European organizations and the UN began publishing comparative data.Footnote 90 Advocates within the parity movement framed the low level of women's representation in terms of France being “backward” in the context of Western Europe, with great success. Indeed, virtually every scholar and commentator on the French Parity Law observes that “the comparison between France and other countries was essential.”Footnote 91 Kramer argues that the Socialist Party strategists behind the bill were “embarrassed in Europe” and that one crucial function of the Parity Law was to help France “look modern and ‘not like Greece’—the only country in Western Europe with a lower percentage of women in its parliament.”Footnote 92 Yvette Roudy, a central feminist in the parity movement and also a former socialist minister of women's rights (1981–86), similarly explains that
In the EU, France was a unique case because, in terms of women's representation in assemblies, it was almost in last place, just ahead of Greece. Feminists such as myself never missed an opportunity to underline how embarrassing it was for our politicians to talk about anything related to women's rights on the international stage when we were next to last. It was not very flattering for a country that had been a pioneer in the area of human rights.Footnote 93
French Constitutional Court member Noëlle Lenoir likewise notes that “in terms of women's representation in politics, France still shared with Greece the bottom place in the European Union.”Footnote 94 She goes on to explain the implications:
the involvement of the European authorities, both in the European Union and in the Council of Europe, in the promotion of women's rights, and the correlative publication of comparative statistics on their representation in the various national political authorities, probably encouraged the awareness of France's backwardness in this field. The parity [laws] aim, as is clear from the parliamentary debates, to rectify the situation.Footnote 95
When asked why parity has resonated so strongly in France, center-right minister Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin's short answer was that “France was so far behind other countries in terms of women's representation in politics. For the country of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, this delay was indeed quite incredible, shameful, and intolerable.”Footnote 96 The social hierarchy that the norm of fair representation for women produces was clearly at work in France, and advocates made effective use of France's poor ranking in this hierarchy in framing their demands.
It is noteworthy that the horizon of comparison among Western states does not seem to extend beyond the Western core—there is no indication that European debates have pointed to the experiences of Latin America, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East as valuable sources of policy innovation. The social hierarchy between the developed West and “the rest” appears to be so well entrenched that it becomes difficult for Europeans to draw lessons from other parts of the world. This suggests that the diffusion path from periphery to core may be complicated, since core states do not automatically take lessons from those considered less developed and politically inferior. The international diffusion path of women's suffrage laws had similar obstacles when politicians in states identified as of “old, European civilization” (for example, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France) contended that the experiments with suffrage in new and “less civilized” states (for example, New Zealand, Australia, Norway) had little bearing on the old core of civilized society.Footnote 97 It would take effective mobilization and creative reinterpretation of the suffrage norm before women in the old core of “civilized society” would attain voting rights. Something similar would be needed for states such as the United Kingdom and United States to adopt legal quotas.
Conclusion
In a brief sentence, the new sex quota norm could be summed up as “modern market democracies should have a significant share of female legislators.” Female representatives are believed to help bring a state in this direction in a number of ways. First, gender-balanced legislatures are held to stimulate economic growth and to serve a function in poverty eradication. Female legislators are believed to better represent so-called women's interests (in reproductive health, nutrition, and child care, as well as equal opportunities for employment and education), and various global governance and development actors have shown the importance of attending to these interests in the fight against poverty and in the quest for economic growth. Gender-balanced legislatures are now also seen as a matter of good governance because women are believed to be less corrupt and less selfish and thus ideal in the construction of transparent state institutions (which in turn are believed to bring better-functioning markets). Finally, a larger share of female legislators serves an important symbolic function for states, demonstrating the existence of a modern, just form of democratic representation and the leaving behind of cultural traditions. There are thus multiple strong reasons at play for including more women in national legislatures.
These understandings of the norm, of what quotas are and what quotas do, rest on and help reproduce a social order that validates the “modern” over the “traditional.” As I have shown in this article, this hierarchy is the taken-for-granted foundation from which the arguments for quotas derive much of their force. One can question whether the modern/traditional hierarchy is indeed the most appropriate and fair way to understand quotas and higher levels of female legislators.Footnote 98 However, the association of quotas with hierarchy as such should not be taken as a critique of the quota norm, since social ranking is a requisite component built into the logic of all norms. Norms inevitably generate comparative judgments of some sort. As states take on meaning by being ranked and assessed in relation to others, norms help order actors hierarchically. Almost forty years ago, Dahrendorf therefore concluded that “the origin of inequality is thus to be found in the existence in all human societies of norms of behavior.”Footnote 99 In short, norms need to be understood and studied in conjunction with social ranking and not simply as productive of homogenization.
Connecting norms with social hierarchy helps better account for the role of norms in policy diffusion. First, social stratification helps account for the origin in international society of new worldwide state behavior. New policies may originate with states that abide by norms and are high in rank, in order to maintain that standing. Whether admired or envied, their rank—being seen as superior to other states in some regard—then helps prompt other states to follow suit. In a context of modern/traditional hierarchy, linking norms with social rank helps explain why new policies may spread from states considered the most modern to those considered less developed and thus traditional.
But change does not emerge exclusively out of the so-called core of international society. States that are low in rank may also become the first to change their behavior, attempting to rise in rank within a given order or as a rejection of that order. Crucially, new state policies may develop “from below,” as in the case of legal sex quotas. Given how higher levels of female legislators are interpreted, there is clearly more pressure on developing states to take action and so it is not surprising that quotas are adopted more extensively everywhere but Western Europe and North America. However, it seems feasible that a new policy that has developed from below could generate a competitive dynamic among states higher in rank, who may feel a need to follow suit in order not to be outperformed. In any case, since policy change can emerge from states that are high or low in rank, the claim about social hierarchies and the origin of change obviously does not help us predict where new policies will develop and from where they will spread in a law-like manner. The analysis nonetheless helps us explain the origin of change in the sense of better understanding the causal dynamics at work. Ranking is an important and overlooked force for initiating change on a worldwide scale.
My second claim about diffusion concerns the process of change: social hierarchies shape how new policies are understood, advocated for, and legitimated—in short how they are framed. When activists or political party officials try to make a state engage in a new behavior, they need to make clear why that state as a being of a certain kind and rank should do so. In other words, they have to invoke the normative ranking orders in which a state is positioned. Arguments must be developed to explain why, for instance, a “traditional” state should engage in “modern” behavior. Getting a state to behave in ways considered typical of states seen as inferior is particularly difficult. In contemporary Western Europe, for instance, it would be ludicrous to advocate for a new gender policy by suggesting that the policy is emblematic of “traditional” or “developing” states. Arguments about change have to consider the rank of the state in question in a particular interpretation of hierarchy. Proponents of change must make clear how and why it makes sense for a state of a certain rank to change its behavior towards women. Crucially, social hierarchies are part of the norms story, all the way, of how new policies develop to become worldwide in scope.
