These recent books aim to evaluate factors that impact women’s political representation. While their topic is the same, they study very different contexts, use very different methodologies, and ask very different questions. Magda Hinojosa builds on a rich data set of interviews to illuminate case studies of mayoral candidacy selection in eight Latin American municipalities (four in Mexico, four in Chile). Using these data, she builds a model of candidate selection and discusses the implications of different types of candidate selection procedures for women’s representation. Frank C. Thames and Margaret S. Williams have painstakingly collected time-series data from all democratic countries for 60 years, from 1946 to 2006. Taking these data and using a set of sophisticated statistical tools, they test whether there are contagion effects across political institutions and from institutions to gender-quota policies. In other words, does having a female president impact female proportions in legislatures and in judicial positions, does increasing representation in the legislatures increase the likelihood of having a female leader of a country (presidency/prime minister, or female representation among judicial positions), and does women’s representation in these positions increase the likelihood of adopting quotas?

Both books present interesting results and present strong cases for their arguments. Yet neither has an unassailable case, though not because their work is poorly done or incomplete. Quite the opposite: Both studies are thorough and careful. Rather, their limitations are inherent in the methodology used and show the need for a multiple-methods framework in studying the complex questions considered.

In Selecting Women, Electing Women, Hinojosa argues that the crucial step in the legislative recruitment process is the stage at which parties determine the candidates that they will nominate for office. In doing so, she rejects the argument that the lack of representation is a function of insufficient numbers of women to run, and she rejects the argument that the lack of representation is a function of voters’ unwillingness to vote for women. While both of these arguments may be relatively controversial in the Latin American context, they are entirely consistent with the literature in industrialized democracies. What determines women’s representation is the willingness of parties to nominate women to winnable seats.

On the basis of her studies of the major party nominations in the eight municipalities she covers, Hinojosa presents a theoretical model of nomination processes, concentrating on two factors: centralization versus decentralization and exclusive versus inclusive participation. Using these two factors, she creates a two-by-two table of nomination processes and describes how each of these processes works in practice across the municipalities and parties under study. She finds, surprisingly, that a centralized exclusive process using the traditional mechanisms of dedazos (a single individual at the top of the party pyramid choosing the candidate) provides the greatest advantages for women. She argues that this occurs because this process avoids two problems that crop up under the other conditions. First, there is a reluctance among women to self-nominate. Inclusive systems, which allow wide participation, invariably also require candidates to promote themselves as willing to serve. Hinojosa’s interviews reveal a systematic reluctance among women to push themselves forward, which, she believes, hurts women’s chances in inclusive nomination systems. Second, decentralized systems tend to be dominated by local power monopolies whose primary interest is maintaining control. Only rarely are women tied in to local power monopolies. These monopolies are unlikely to be concerned about gender equality and are far more likely to be concerned about maintaining patronage and power within the group, thereby effectively freezing women out. The most “democratic” system, that is, an inclusive decentralized decision process, is likely to be the worst for women because it has both power monopoly and self-nomination problems. Centralized exclusive systems, where decisions are made at a centralized level, are more likely to be concerned about maximizing the party vote totals and also ensuring some gender equity so that women have a chance to be selected. In effect, Hinojosa argues that women are often the most qualified candidates and that the centralized level is the one at which they are most likely to be given a fair chance.

The author’s case is clearly argued, and the interviews provide rich evidence for the suggestions made. My concern, however, is how truly generalizable these findings are. In particular, six of the eight cities studied were chosen precisely because they had elected female mayors. While the author is aware that this may be a problem and she insists she is not selecting on the dependent variable (because she studies the nomination process among those parties that did not win the mayoral seat), I still have a considerable degree of concern: While it may be true that in these specific cities the dedazos system worked to the advantage of women, we do not know the exact number of places where the system of having the central level choose the party candidate worked to the disadvantage of a woman because the party chose to ignore a highly qualified woman and instead chose a party loyalist. Again, Hinojosa does show awareness of this concern as she provides estimates of the female proportion of mayors elected across the six major parties under consideration, and these data show that women are more likely to win nominations when the centralized exclusive system is used (pp. 109–10). These results are largely driven, however, by one party, the Independent Democratic Union (UDI) in Chile. Importantly, the UDI is also the only party with the resources to effectively bankroll its candidates independent of the candidate’s own resources. Therefore, I remain somewhat skeptical.

The model Hinojosa presents is a theoretical one built upon a solid grounding of empirical evidence. The story she tells is compelling and convincing enough that it is clear the nomination processes are a crucial area that needs to be considered more thoroughly when evaluating women’s access to political positions in Latin America. Precisely because of the need to invest considerable resources in a very small number of places in order to acquire the rich data she mines, however, she cannot be said to have proven her thesis (that work remains for future scholars).

As noted, Thames and Williams take a different tack in Contagious Representation, collecting data for 159 countries over 60 years. They are specifically interested in testing for contagion across institutions. That is, if there is an increase in representation in one institution, does it lead to increases in representation in other institutions? Using time-series modeling and event-history analyses, they test for effects across democratic countries over the past 60 years. With respect to legislatures, they find that adopting quotas has an impact, but that there is only limited contagion from executive positions and the courts to legislative representation. In a chapter that provides an interesting and original take on questions of representation, they find that for executive positions, increases in women’s representation in the legislature and the adoption of quota laws raise the likelihood of having a female executive. They also take a look at women’s representation in the highest courts in democracies. They paint a nuanced picture, where increases in women’s representation in legislatures lead to greater representation on national courts, but only for countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Beyond industrialized democracies, there is no correlation between women’s representation and representation in the highest judicial position. In subsequent chapters, they define voluntary and compulsory party quotas as institutions that can be influenced by representation in the formal institutions. They find that as legislatures increase their proportion of women, the likelihood of parties adopting voluntary quotas goes up. Furthermore, as an increasing number of parties within a country adopt quotas, the likelihood of other parties adopting a quota increases.

The authors provide a useful touchstone for future work that looks at representation in legislatures, executive positions, and the courts. Nevertheless, there are some concerns that are inevitable for such an ambitious project. First, while time series are stronger on issues of causality than standard regression analysis, there is still an active concern that at least some of the relationships that are found are spurious. As Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris’ (2003) book title, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World, suggests, it may be that as broad changes in public opinion on issues of women’s status in society and women’s representation occur, we may see that these societal changes are the true driver of increases in institutional representation, rather than contagion effects. It may be that these changes in societal attitudes first appear in the legislatures as the institution closest to the people, and then over time appear in the executive and judicial branches. Such a process would produce precisely the econometric results found by Thames and Williams without contagion necessarily being the driver.

This possibility does not vacate the arguments made by Thames and Williams but, rather, provides an incentive for continued work and more research. First, moving beyond this work can be accomplished by strengthening the theoretical structure of the contagion concept. The finding that legislative representation matters for judicial representativeness in the OECD, but not in democracies beyond, suggests a need to more carefully analyze the level of influence that legislatures have on judicial appointments across countries. Such detailed analysis would be unrealistic in the context of the present book, but is prime ground for future digging. Second, those who do the careful and valuable ground-level research of the type that Hinojosa does can be urged to look into the concept of contagion and see if the representativeness of one institution bleeds into the others. Both of these books represent important contributions that can be built upon. I just hope that these authors take the chance to read each other’s work before their next projects!