Are gender quotas a good idea? Yes, for two reasons: Quotas are an effective mechanism for improving women's numerical representation, and they encourage new attitudes towards women in politics. I argue that the numerical and ideational gains brought by gender quotas outweigh the potential pitfalls they might introduce. From a pragmatic standpoint, quotas constitute an imperfect means to a positive end: women's political empowerment. What is more, formal rules may become norms, reinforcing changing attitudes.

The implementation of candidate gender quotas is often followed by a dramatic increase in women's parliamentary participation. This process is supported by cross-national, cross-temporal and nation-specific evidence (Kittilson forthcoming). As an exemplar of the process, in 1988 the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) adopted candidate gender quotas, and the proportion of women from the SPD rose from 18% in 1987 to 27% in the first postquota election of 1990. Gender quotas are effective because they set benchmarks and allow advocates for change to hold the key players accountable for these goals. In most political systems, parties are the gatekeepers to elected office, and they can facilitate or hinder women's efforts to gain nomination in winnable positions. Because parties are not unitary actors, but rather made up of competing factions, the process of agreeing on quotas establishes shared goals and a formal commitment, making it unlikely that women's claims will slip off the agenda when a new issue emerges.

Gender quotas are a mechanism for enriching democratic inclusion. They represent a shared agreement that women have often received short shrift in the nomination process, and an admission that a concerted effort should be made to get more women elected. With a formal commitment, women can insist that their party measure up to defined standards. Without clear, stated objectives, most goals are forgotten. Promises to increase women's candidacies can be mere lip service if not institutionalized as formal rules. The process of setting benchmarks commits political leaders and party faithful alike, and participation in the process may alter perceptions of the importance of gender balance, and as a result, women's presence becomes a “party position” in itself.

Because effectiveness is one of the justifications upon which I base a case for quotas, one might question why a national-level quota law was largely ineffective in France. The simple answer is this: All quotas are not created equal. Quota policies may prove ineffective if they contain loopholes. Further, without the support of those charged with implementation, quotas may not be enforced, as occurred in the French case.

The French policy is a national-level requirement that all parties nominate equal proportions of men and women as candidates in their election lists in municipal elections, and as overall equal proportions of candidates in National Assembly elections. However, the first postquota national elections of 2002 brought few gains: Women still held only 12% of the seats in the French National Assembly, up only one and a half percentage points from the previous election. Most of the major parties violated either the spirit or the letter of the new law, nominating women to unwinnable seats, or simply ignoring the new law and accepting the financial penalty (Russell and O'Cinneide 2003). For example, the French Socialist Party (PS) nominated women in only 36% of the districts it contested and the Union for a Presidential Majority (UMP) nominated only 20%, while the smaller National Front (FN) nominated women in 49% of its races.

The major parties, such as the PS and UMP, could afford the fines in their state subsidies, while smaller parties could not, and thus complied fully. French parties receive public subsidy based upon two separate equations. The first is calculated on the basis of the votes a party receives (equal to about 1.55 euros per vote), and the second on its share of seats (equal to about 45,125.00 euros per seat). Parties deviating from a 50/50 split by more than 2% are fined in the first “votes” equation, not the “seats.” The larger the difference between male and female candidates offered by a party, the larger the party's fine. On the basis of these calculations, Bird (2002) estimates that the UMP had its subsidies reduced by roughly four million euros—a significant sum, but some party leaders may have speculated that they could make up for this loss on the “seats” end of the subsidy equation. In fact, Bird (2002, 696) quotes a member of the UMP's nominations committee as stating, “It is more profitable to have men elected than to have female candidates defeated.”

The quota policy was difficult to implement for National Assembly elections due to the single-member districts from which legislators are elected. As opposed to multimember districts, which are more easily “balanced” by adding women to the party lists, single-member districts require seats to be designated specifically for women, to the exclusion of all men. Faced with challenges to entrenched power holders, many French party leaders skirted the quota policy because they remained unconvinced of the electoral payoff for their party. In fact, it appears that some nomination committees may have calculated that women candidates might cost the party votes. Without the backing of the party leaders, these rule changes were ignored. In short, the more effective strategy for women activists is to couple demands for inclusion at the national level with party-level efforts to win the cooperation of party leaders (Kittilson forthcoming). Party-level campaigns for quotas may drum up support based upon democratic ideals, such as inclusion or justice, or based on the promise that women candidates may yield a decisive “women's vote.”

Further, gender quotas fall short if they lack the sort of sanctions that make the policy costly to ignore. For example, if a party were to risk disqualification or losing the bulk of its total state subsidies by ignoring gender requirements, it would have a distinct incentive to follow the law. Moreover, a more specific policy that mandates equal proportions of women in winnable seats would bring greater gains.

If gender quotas are so important to women's gains in parliament, one might also ask, how did Finnish women, for example, make such remarkable strides in getting elected to the national parliament without any formal gender quota policies? By 1970, Finnish women already held nearly 20% of the seats in the Eduskunta. Early in the 1960s, Finnish women activists had concentrated the full force of their efforts on party politics and gaining equality, rather than aiming part of their efforts outside party channels through an autonomous women's movement. Importantly, Finland's electoral rules are uniquely conducive to women's parliamentary participation. In general, party-list proportional representation systems create incentives for parties to include women on the list. By adding women candidates to the list, the party broadens its appeal among women voters. In Finland, women have long been an especially important constituency, for they have turned out to vote at higher rates than their male counterparts since the 1970s (Sundberg 1995).

In most party-list proportional systems, voters are bound to cast a ballot for “closed” lists, which are comprised of a predetermined set of candidates ranked by party leaders. In most Western European nations in the 1970s, women were most often relegated to the bottom of these lists, rendering them the last to fill party seats in parliament. Therefore, without a sweeping victory for the party, women's chances to win a seat were grim. However, what is unique to Finland is that the ballot rules allow voters to indicate their preference for particular candidates on the list. Finnish women candidates avoided the trap of predetermined ranking, and voters were able to support women candidates. In essence, the configuration of electoral rules in Finland did not present the same barriers as in other party-list systems. As a result, Finnish women made great strides in parliamentary presence early on, and saw little need to press for candidate gender quotas.

However, few political systems offer this specific set of favorable electoral rules. And a reworking of national electoral rules is usually not a practical goal. In the design of a new constitution, an electoral configuration based on Finland's system might be ideal. Not only do Finnish women face fewer obstacles to elected office, but the same “logic of inclusion” and ability to cast preference votes favors the election of candidates from minority groups in general. In short, this open-list configuration enhances the opportunity for diversity in parliament—at least in countries where voters are likely to support women.

Debates over quotas often focus on candidate quotas at the national or even party levels. Yet gender quotas are not exclusive to parliamentary bodies. Where single-member districts make implementing candidate quotas difficult in practice, gender quotas within the party ranks may be a more effective policy. Cross-national research shows that more women in the top echelons of the party leadership leads to more women in parliament (Kittilson forthcoming). The most common way for women to gain positions among top party leaders is by gaining midlevel positions. In a sequence of positive forces for change, gender quotas for positions at all levels, including decision-making bodies, is an effective way of raising the number of women nominated and elected.

Importantly, often the more contentious candidate quotas may be less imperative where intraparty quotas are adopted. In fact, gender quotas within political parties can provide a foundation upon which women can launch efforts to gain nomination for parliamentary seats, change the party culture, and press for policy goals. With women's presence at the local or intraparty level, the infrastructure behind female candidates is set, even if women suffer setbacks in a particular election.

In the United States, gender quotas at the candidate level may not be a good idea. Such rules mean that a certain number of open seats would be designated as “women only.” This is likely to be far too contentious to be a practical strategy. Instead, it would be more effective for women to push for internal gender quotas of 50% within the Democratic and Republican Parties. Although the Democratic Party currently requires that half of its delegates to caucuses be women, these quotas would be more effective if they were to apply at all levels within the national, state, and local parties. For example, in the resource-intensive candidate-centered campaigns of U.S. politics, women among the top leadership ranks of the parties may push for greater resources in contested races with women candidates.

Gender quotas do reify differences between men and women. However, traditionally “gender blind” approaches to women's underrepresentation have not created the equal opportunities they promise. In political systems where prescriptions for women's numerical underrepresentation merely call for incremental change based on women's educational and professional gains, such as in the United States, women's numbers in the national legislatures lag far behind those where direct steps are taken. At the current rate, it will take decades to see anything approaching equal presence for women.

Will quotas lead to fundamental transformations in party or parliamentary culture? Not necessarily. Will quotas deliver policy changes that enhance women's opportunities and lives? More than likely. Women's faces in the halls of parliament may not spontaneously generate a “women-friendly” environment, nor comprehensive substantive changes. However, bringing in the perspectives of women to the decision-making process enhances the chances for real change. More women means greater odds that the issues that affect women's lives disproportionate to men's will be debated among political decision makers.

Several cross-national and country-specific studies support this proposition. In the United States, Carroll's (2002) in-depth interviews with women in Congress reveal that these women most often share a group identity and carry a responsibility to represent women's interests. Similarly, research on the U.S. Congress finds that female legislators raise new issues that are important to women as a group (Dodson et al. 1995), and that they demonstrate greater commitment to these issues in the legislative process, even after controlling for their partisan affiliations (Swers 2002). When and where women's presence is stronger, this group consciousness may have a substantive impact. In the United States, Sue Thomas (1994) shows that when women constitute 20% of the state legislature, the legislature is more likely to pass bills concerning women. In a survey of party politicians in five Scandinavian countries, Lena Wangnerud (2000) finds that the majority of respondents indicate that their party altered its issue position at least once in direct response to the presence of female legislators among them. In another example, in Norway, which is a world leader in women's representation, Kathleen Bratton and Leonard Ray (2002) find that at the municipal level, the proportion of women elected is positively related to the percentage of children in state-funded child-care facilities.

Admittedly, gender quotas can be used by political parties as mere rhetorical symbols designed to attract more votes. The finding that quotas often spread among parties within a country and to the national level in a process of “contagion” (Baldez 2004; Matland and Studlar 1996) suggests that quotas may be more of an election strategy than a real reflection of a party's support for women's parliamentary presence. However, quotas may be adopted for one reason but have broader, unintended consequences. Once women have gained power, it is difficult to take it away, and women will become entrenched power holders. Achieved gains mark a new standard, or norm, upon which parties can be held accountable in the future. Heightening women's presence in parliament—even when they are labeled “quota women” by some—shapes our collective perceptions of what political leaders should look like, where women's place is, and by changing expectations, encourages a greater number of young women to enter party politics and run for elected office.

In short, then, in addition to their practical efficiency, gender quotas and the increase in women's parliamentary presence that quotas achieve also have ideational, or normative, effects. In their study of the “rising tide” of women's equality around the world, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2003) argue that cultural change is necessary for institutional change. Attitudes surrounding women's roles shape the kinds of policies that are adopted. Indeed, changes in attitudes and values underpin women's advances toward greater equality—formal rules are not sufficient. However, formal rules and informal cultural norms mutually reinforce each other. In this way, gender quota policies can act as mechanisms for bringing women immediate gains in parliamentary seats, and can also reshape attitudes, values, and ideas towards women's roles in politics long after the quotas have expired. So even where general attitudes toward quotas might be overtly hostile, the adoption of this policy may in itself alter attitudes toward women's representation over the long term.

In addition to creating new standards regarding what is appropriate for women's parliamentary presence within countries, gender quotas can be a powerful symbol for democracy and justice beyond national borders. Gender quotas represent practical means for achieving the democratic ideal of inclusion. Where democracies adopt gender quotas for candidates or within the political parties, those quotas and women's presence can serve as a peg upon which women in newly emerging democracies hang their claims for equitable representation. As such, gender quotas may enhance the opportunities for women's political empowerment globally.