What country currently boasts the highest percentage of women in parliamentary office? If you ask most people, they will guess one of the Nordic countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland, or Denmark. These guesses are close in one sense but very far off in another. The answer is Rwanda. As of this writing, women make up nearly half of the members of the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies—48.8% according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2005b). Most people find this answer surprising. Sadly, we tend to associate Rwanda with the genocide of 1994 rather than with gender equality. What has put Rwanda in the number one spot on the list of women in elective office, an important indicator of women's equality?

The answer is gender quotas. The Rwandan constitution stipulates that women must hold at least 30% of political positions (International IDEA 2005). Rwanda is not unusual in having a gender quota; most of the countries in the top 20 spots on the Inter-Parliamentary Union's (IPU) list of women in national parliaments have some kind of gender quota in place.¹

Rwanda is the only one on the list of countries in the top 20 spots that has reserved seats set aside for women. Five of the countries in the top 20 (Argentina, Belgium, Costa Rica, Guyana, and Iraq) have candidate quota laws that require a certain percentage of all legislative candidates to be women.² Eleven of the countries on the IPU list have voluntary quotas at the party level (Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Mozambique, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden).³ Gender quota laws are a fairly recent phenomenon. In most cases, countries with gender quota laws have adopted them within the last 15 years (since 1991). Quota scholar Drude Dahlerup (1998) and others have suggested that a kind of “quota fever” is spreading around the world.

I find the global cachet of gender quotas intriguing. How did quotas get to be such a popular idea in the international community, when they have been so vilified in the United States? Quota is a bad word in the United States. Even if the term were semantically disguised, by calling it “positive discrimination” or something similar, the notion of setting aside a determined percentage of anything for anybody is politically untenable here. Conflicts over quotas have grown even more divisive in recent years with efforts to roll back affirmative action policies.

In this essay, I apply a little of this American skepticism about quotas to the global gender quota phenomenon. I examine the pros and cons of candidate quota laws at the national level, based primarily on the research I have done on gender quotas in Mexico. I argue that whether or not gender quota laws are a good idea depends in part on what impact you expect them to have. If you want to increase the number of women elected to office, then gender quota laws are a good idea. As the existing literature has demonstrated, the “right” kind of quota law adopted in the “right” conditions can generate fast and significant increases in the election of female candidates. If you want to democratize the process of candidate selection as much as possible, by making it more transparent, then I am not so sure that gender quota laws are a good idea. The effect that they have on the political system and on the electoral process overall is not yet well understood. I offer various hypotheses, and some suggestive evidence, to respond to this question, and I conclude by offering some thoughts about the prospects for gender quotas in the United States.

What has made gender quotas so appealing? I believe it is important to understand what makes gender quota laws attractive in the first place, in addition to identifying the conditions under which they will and will not be adopted, a question I have addressed elsewhere (Baldez 2004). Their appeal derives in part from the failure of more gradual efforts to change the masculine culture of politics. Politics in Latin America, as in other regions of the world, has been centrally defined by a dichotomous understanding of gender. Women's exclusion from politics reflects deeply entrenched patterns of behavior. As Mala Htun (2005, n.p.) puts it:

Given the pervasively gendered nature of politics in many countries, only the equivalent of an exogenous shock could loosen the hold of longtime norms associating politics with men.

Gender quotas provide this kind of exogenous shock. They come from outside any given political system. They come with the approval of the international community, the imprimatur of other modern democracies, such as Sweden, France, and (within Latin America) Argentina, and with the expertise of a vast network of advocates and practitioners around the world. Moreover, quotas work and they work quickly—under the right conditions. What are the right conditions? Pippa Norris (2004, 187) provides a concise summary of some of the main factors:

These conditions exist in many Latin American countries. Thus, it makes sense that gender quota laws have generated a 10-point increase in the percentage of women elected to legislative office in Latin America, on average (Htun 2004b).

The literature has established quite solidly that gender quotas can, under the right conditions, effectively break up the male monopoly on elective office. But what impact do gender quotas have on politics more generally? To what extent does the adoption and, more significantly, the implementation of a gender quota law affect the party system overall? The election of more women to office through gender quota laws can revitalize public faith in the political system. The climate of reform and democratic consolidation that has swept through Latin America in the past few decades has been a second critical factor in the widespread adoption of gender quotas (Baldez 2004). In Latin American countries, support for gender quotas (as well as quotas for youth and sometimes for indigenous peoples) is closely linked to high levels of distrust in the political system. People see politics as a hopelessly corrupt “Land of the Lost,” overrun with (male) dinosaurs.⁴

They want the old politicians out, a sentiment concisely expressed by the phrase que se vayan todos (kick them all out), the slogan chanted by protesters during the Argentine Crisis of 2001 and in Ecuador earlier this year. The todos whom people want to kick out are mostly men, precisely because deeply entrenched patterns of sexism have long excluded women from political power. The historical exclusion of women from politics dovetails with conventional gender norms that portray women as naturally altruistic and dedicated to serving others. As a result, women are perceived as politically pure, untainted by partisan infighting and immune to corruption. Electing more women to office then becomes a logical way to enhance the legitimacy of ethically moribund parties. Gender quotas offer a way to bust open the doors of the smoky back rooms where male party leaders cut political deals. A corollary to the phrase que se vayan todos might be que se entran ellas (let the women in).⁵

Although gender quotas can be revolutionary in their power to destroy men's monopoly over candidate positions, they can also reinforce the status quo. In Latin America, gender quotas are compatible with existing rules about how parties select candidates. In most Latin American parties, candidate nomination is a highly centralized process in which a small group of party leaders select candidates for office. In the context of democratic transition, however, political parties throughout Latin America have sought to democratize the way they make decisions. Party leaders have tried to make politics more transparent by adopting measures that will hold politicians accountable to their promises. The rules that govern the selection of legislative candidates is one area targeted for reform. In this context of demands for internal reform, gender quotas and primary elections both constitute viable ways for parties to democratize the process by which they choose candidates. Both of these reforms are democratic, but in different ways. Gender quotas are democratic to the extent that they increase the inclusiveness of candidate nominations by requiring the participation of more women (and quota advocates tend to frame their arguments in these terms). Primaries are democratic to the extent that they take power out of the hands of party leaders and disperse it more widely, among party members or among voters more generally. From the perspective of party leaders, gender quotas should be far more preferable because quotas do not interfere with their ability to handpick candidates. Quite the contrary: Gender quotas circumscribe the power that party leaders exert over the candidate nomination process, but they do not dissolve it altogether, as moving to primary elections would. Moreover, by incorporating women, gender quotas provide a fresh mantle of legitimacy to the same old process. I caution that their effectiveness in achieving that goal comes at the expense of maintaining a problematic political status quo. Gender quota laws strengthen highly centralized, undemocratic processes of candidate nomination. They introduce new players to the political arena but make them play according to old rules. Gender quotas may also make it more difficult to implement deeper reforms to the internal structure of political parties. The problem is that gender quotas come at the expense of deeper reforms of the way in which candidates are nominated. Gender quotas may bring more women into the political arena—but the dynamics of the process remain the same. In this respect, gender quotas reinforce the status quo, at least theoretically.

Empirically, things do not always work out that way. The adoption of gender quotas may have unintended consequences for additional political reform. In Mexico, the quota law actually led the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) to adopt primaries. The PRI, one of the three leading parties in Mexico, monopolized political power until the election of Vicente Fox in 2000. The party was particularly notorious for the lack of transparency in selecting candidates; incumbent presidents chose their own successors in a process coined the dedazo (finger-pointing). In 2002, the Mexican Congress amended the electoral law to require that lists of candidates for Congress “in no case will include more than 70% of the same sex” (Instituto Federal Electoral, n.d.). Parties that fail to comply are prohibited from running any candidates in that particular district. There is an escape clause from this rather strict enforcement mechanism: Parties that chose their candidates via “direct election,” what we in the United States would call primaries, are exempt from the gender quota. In the 2003 legislative elections, the first in which the new quota law was applied, the PRI chose to select nearly all of its candidates by primary election, rather than comply with the quota law. So ironically, the PRI—the party of the dedazo—decided to hold primary elections in order to avoid putting women in 30% of its electoral spots. Although one of the aforementioned hypotheses predicts that gender quota laws would consolidate the power of party leaders to impose their preferences on the rest of the party, it was not borne out in Mexico. In fact, the adoption of a gender quota law had exactly the opposite result in the case of the PRI. Whether or not primaries will be a lasting feature for the PRI remains to be seen; it is telling that the party did not amend its internal statutes to make primaries permanent.

If the adoption of quotas prompts parties to adopt primaries, then how do primaries affect the election of women? It is not yet clear what the gendered consequences of primaries are, in comparison to other forms of candidate nomination. My own research has generated contradictory findings. It may be more difficult for women to get elected in primary systems than it was in the days before gender quotas. In an article about the adoption of gender quotas in Mexico, I hypothesized that primaries would favor candidates who have large war chests and strong name recognition; in other words, successful primary candidates would tend to be men (Baldez 2004). In a more recent study of the implementation of the Mexican quota law, the data I collected refuted this hypothesis. I found that women did better in primaries than men did (Baldez 2005). It would appear that the gendered impact of primaries is a topic that warrants future research.

My concerns about gender quotas derive from the way in which they interact with centralized candidate nomination processes. What happens when gender quotas are adopted in countries with decentralized rules for selecting candidates? What about gender quotas in the United States? I maintain that the decentralized nature of candidate selection in the United States makes it difficult to imagine how gender quotas would be implemented. Our single-member districts constitute a significant obstacle, though not the main one: Both Mexico and France adopted gender quotas in single-member district systems (very effectively in Mexico and less so in France). What would make gender quotas hard to implement is our reliance on primary elections held at the district level. It is possible to envision a gender quota that would require political parties to achieve gender balance among their primary candidates, but that would prove untenable in the case of uncontested primaries. Effective quotas also require some kind of enforcement mechanism (Baldez 2005) in order to hold someone accountable for their implementation, but it is not clear who would be in charge of balancing ballots in the U.S. case, given the decentralized nature of candidate nominations here.

The benefits of gender quotas must be analyzed in terms of the broader political context, not solely in terms of their impact on women but also in terms of how they interact with other aspects of the electoral process. We commend certain countries for their achievements in getting more women elected to office—and rightly so. In Rwanda, quotas led to gender parity in the legislature, at a critical time in that country's history.⁶

While we applaud increases in the election of women, however, we need to keep the larger picture in mind as well. The significance of gender quotas must be interpreted in terms of the overall political context. Nearly half of the legislators in Rwanda are women—but the elections that brought them to office were marked by “‘serious’ irregularities and ‘fraud,’ ” and “the main opposition parties and candidates had been banned or disqualified before voting began” (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2005a). Depending on how democratic a legislature is, a small percentage of women in office may be more powerful and effective than a large one.

The current political context in the United States does not strike me as a propitious one for forwarding measures to promote women's rights—at least not for promoting the rights of American women. The current administration has done much to promote the rights of women in Afghanistan and Iraq, but as Michaele Ferguson (2005) argues, the Bush administration appears to consider the establishment of gender equality in the United States a fait accompli (pardon my French). The GOP would never support gender quotas for the United States now—even though the party was a “political trendsetter” in terms of quotas in the 1920s. The Republican Party adopted an “equal division rule” that established gender parity for party delegates to national conventions in 1924, prompting the Democratic Party to follow suit (Schnall 2005).

I began this essay by considering the global quota phenomenon from the perspective of American skepticism about quotas. I end it by turning my gaze back to the United States, to consider what we might learn from the experiences of countries that have adopted them. Simply learning that gender quotas exist may help us to think about the problem of political gender equality in a different light. People in the United States tend to assume that our country is doing pretty well in terms of the election of women to office, but we could do much better. Go to the list of women in national parliaments on the Inter-Parliamentary Union Website (http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm) and scroll down until you come to the United States. It is shocking how many countries you pass before you come to the United States, at number 61 on the list with 15.2% women in Congress, a position we share with Angola. While I am skeptical about the level of reform that gender quotas permit, they constitute a clever response to the “intractability of male dominance” that characterizes so many political systems. Gender quotas thus can fuel our political imagination. The advances that other countries have made in women's legislative representation can inspire us to come up with new solutions to the problem of women's political equality.