Using gender quotas to guide the selection of candidates for elective office began as a voluntary procedure in postmaterialist northern European political parties in the mid-1980s. By the early 1990s, the practice diffused not only across the party spectrum in Europe, but also geographically to countries such as Argentina, which, in 1991, passed the world’s first electoral-law gender quota, legally requiring 30% of legislative candidates to be female. Today, more than 50 countries feature such electoral-law quotas, more than 30 states feature elections in which voluntary party quotas are employed, and nearly 20 more nations reserve legislative seats for women. In the wake of these developments, academic literature studying the design, implementation, and impact of quotas worldwide has proliferated (e.g., see Drude Dahlerup, ed., Women, Quotas and Politics, 2006; Mona Lena Krook, Quotas for Women in Politics: Gender and Candidate Selection Reform Worldwide, 2009; and Susan Franceschet, Mona Lena Krook, and Jennifer M. Piscopo, The Impact of Gender Quotas, 2012.) Much of this literature has focused on national-level quota politics.

Only recently have book-length studies examining the adoption, implementation, and impact of gender quotas at the subnational level begun to emerge. Two of these are reviewed here: Adriana Piatti-Crocker, Gregory D. Schmidt, and Clara Araujo’s Gender Quotas in South America’s Big Three and Meg Rincker’s Empowered by Design.

Studying gender and political representation at the local and what Rincker refers to as the “meso” (state, provincial, or regional) level is particularly important for several reasons. First, as Rincker convincingly demonstrates, since the 1980s international experts from the United Nations, World Bank, European Union, Asian Development Bank, and elsewhere have been arguing in favor of decentralizing political power, thus transferring resources and political authority to the subnational level. This policy is based on the assumption that governments closer to the people will be more diverse and better able to respond to a broader range of citizen concerns than a narrow set of elites in the national capital. However, if quotas are in place and/or more successfully implemented at the national level, while nonexistent or poorly implemented at the subnational level, or if women are otherwise better represented politically at the national than the subnational level, decentralization is unlikely to provide the hypothesized benefits to the female half of the population. The same international organizations that claim decentralization will benefit women present little empirical evidence as to whether or not this is the case.

Second, it may be that—due to regional variance in history, political culture, party systems, details of electoral laws, or other as-yet-unknown factors—gender quotas do not function the same way at the subnational level as they do nationally. Studying quotas at the meso-level also provides scholars with many more data points through which to investigate the causes, implementation, and impact of quotas than does a sole focus on the national level.

Finally, scholarship on gender and politics has increasingly documented the need for an intersectional approach to the topic, noting that “women” are an incredibly diverse group with vastly different needs and experiences. One axis with which gender intersects is region, and women within a given area of one country may be differentially empowered and/or have different needs and preferences than their countrywomen in other regions.

The two books at hand offer novel empirical insights into these subjects. Moreover, Empowered by Design offers concrete suggestions of meso-level institutional designs that, the author argues, will work to improve women’s descriptive and substantive representation.

Gender Quotas in South America’s Big Three paints a richly detailed portrait of gender quotas at the national and subnational levels in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, describing their adoption and implementation. The book’s most similar systems design features three large Latin American countries that adopted electoral-law gender quotas in the 1990s with various results. The authors judge quotas to have been most effective in Argentina and least transformative in Brazil, with Peru “somewhere in the middle” (p. 18).

Two of this book’s seven substantive chapters, written by Piatti-Crocker, focus on Argentina. They describe the rising numbers of women in Argentine national politics. Electoral-law quotas with high party magnitudes and placement mandates, combined with a closed-list form of proportional representation (PR), have increased the percentage of women in the National Congress to over a third. Once elected, women have been well represented in feminized committees and have achieved the passage of gendered legislation. Women have made fewer inroads into more masculinized committees, however. At the subnational level, Piatti-Crocker documents considerable variation in quotas and their implementation; provincial percentages of female legislators range from an average of 12.9% to 46.6%. At this level, too, women have been well represented in feminized committees and have proposed legislation relating to domestic violence and reproductive rights, but have not consistently moved into positions of broader legislative power. She also depicts women’s underrepresentation in selected provincial executives and in the judicial branch.

Clara Araujo’s two chapters on Brazil convincingly demonstrate how the country’s open-list form of proportional representation, featuring lists with up to 50% more candidates than seats available, and its highly costly form of campaigning, render gender quotas ineffective, both in the national Chamber of Deputies and at the subnational level. Although quotas have dramatically increased women’s candidacies, they have not translated into increased descriptive representation. Like Argentina, Brazil also features considerable subnational variance in women’s descriptive representation: Women fare the best in cities and states of the poorer Northeast, compared to the more developed regions of the South. Where quotas are not used, for example in the national Senate and local mayoral races, women’s descriptive representation is even lower.

Gregory Schmidt’s three chapters on Peru demonstrate how the country’s double-optional preferential vote electoral system (a variant of open-list PR) is conducive to the success of gender quotas at the national level. Over a quarter of congressional deputies are now female. Quotas have also led to an increase of women in Peru’s regional and municipal councils where a closed-list majoritarian electoral system is employed. Schmidt also takes an intersectional approach, describing the interaction of gender quotas with those for young and indigenous Peruvians. His third chapter makes use of cross-time variation in ballot structure to demonstrate the interaction between political culture and open- and closed-list PR. He confirms Melody Ellis Valdini’s finding that where political culture is unfavorable to women’s candidacies, a closed-list ballot structure is more conducive to women’s election than open lists are, but where more gender egalitarian attitudes are common, ballot structure is less relevant (see her “Electoral Institutions and the Manifestation of Bias: The Effect of the Personal Vote on the Representation of Women,” Politics & Gender, 9(3), 2013). Thus, women in Lima have been consistently more successful in winning elections than have their sisters outside the capital.

Overall, Gender Quotas provides a useful overview of the literature on quotas for readers unfamiliar with the topic; it offers a rich description of the electoral systems and gender quotas used in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru; and empirically documents the numbers of women in positions of political influence across these countries. The book clearly links the electoral system in place to the success or failure of quotas. Outside of the Peru case, however, it is less systematic in explaining the subnational variance in women’s representation that it observes. This reader would have welcomed additional theorizing about, and systematic tests of, the reasons why women’s meso-level descriptive representation varied within the three countries.

Piatti-Crocker, Schmidt, and Araujo’s findings that Latin American women’s subnational representation is often lower than at the national level gives credence to Rincker's concern that, ceteris paribus, political decentralization will not necessarily empower women. Empowered by Design begins with a cross-national analysis of the relationships between political, administrative, and fiscal decentralization and the United Nations’ Gender Inequality Index. The writing is clear and accessible to both academic and nonacademic audiences. Rincker finds the former two types of decentralization only weakly related to gender equality and the latter unrelated. Instead, she argues, a “gender policy trifecta” is required for the female half of the population to benefit from devolution. In addition to quotas for subnational elective offices, this trifecta involves meso-level women’s policy agencies (MWPAs) and gender mainstreaming, as well as gender-responsive meso-level budgeting.

Following this large-n analysis, the book features three in-depth case studies of countries recently decentralizing and adopting one (Poland), two (Pakistan), and three (the United Kingdom) nodes of the gender policy trifecta. This qualitative analysis convincingly demonstrates the mechanisms through which the three prongs interact to empower women and reveals what happens when one or more of the nodes are not present. While postcommunist Poland decentralized and adopted provincial-level women’s policy agencies, these agencies lacked not only political support, as the few women elected to provincial legislatures were marginalized, but also funding for their initiatives, as gender-sensitive budgeting was not in place. The 2011 adoption of subnational gender quotas improved the former situation but not the latter. Rincker describes the Pakistani case as a “shell game” (p. 104); the country has adopted decentralizing reforms that give the appearance of empowering women but, in practice, do not. Although 33% quotas for elective office were adopted at the municipal level, as was gender-responsive budgeting, localities do not actually possess the authority to set women's policies. Instead, MWPAs are the purview of provincial assemblies, where women are poorly represented and gender-responsive budgeting is lacking. As a result of these mismatched competencies, with only two nodes of the trifecta in place at the municipal level, decentralization has failed to empower Pakistani women. Rincker’s UK chapter details how, particularly in Scotland and Wales, feminists worked to engender devolution by ensuring that the process incorporated all three nodes of her “gender policy trifecta.” These reforms in turn empowered Scottish, Welsh, and, to a lesser degree, Northern Irish women.

In addition to Rincker’s important corrective to the conventional wisdom about the relationship between decentralization and gender equality, and her policy recommendations for engendering this process, her book also theoretically and empirically establishes region of residence as an important intersection with gender. The author conducted an extensive survey of meso-level women’s organizations across Poland, Pakistan, and the UK, asking about their members’ policy priorities. The results clearly establish regional variation in women’s political preferences. For example, in northern Poland, where shipyard employment steeply declined, women were very concerned about job training. In contrast, women’s organizations in Warsaw, home to many industries and Poland’s highest GDP per capita (p. 72), were most focused on gender pay equity. Women in rural Pakistan desired greater access to reproductive medicine, whereas urban women demanded improved access to political decision making. Empowered by Design also establishes that MWPAs were more responsive to women’s region-specific needs than were women’s policy agencies centrally located in the national capital. This sensitivity again underscores the importance to gender equality of both meso-level women’s policy agencies and gender-responsive budgeting to fund their proposals, in addition to effective subnational gender quotas for women in elective office. All three nodes are necessary to ensure that democratically elected meso-level governments are responsive to all citizens.

Both books are a welcome expansion of the literature on gender quotas, their implementation, and impact. They also raise important questions for future research, including explaining why quota implementation varies across different subunits of the same country and how feminists can ensure that Rincker’s gender policy trifecta accompanies future efforts to decentralize countries around the world.