Rosen Jennifer
Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Ave., Evanston, IL 60208, United States.
Soc Sci Res. 2017 Aug;66:82-101. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2017.01.008. Epub 2017 Feb 2.
Women's share of global lower or single house parliamentary seats has increased by over 70% over the course of the 21st century. Yet these increases have not been uniform across countries. Rather countries with low levels of socioeconomic development have outpaced developed democracies in terms of the gains made in the formal political representation of women. One reasonable explanation for this trend is the adoption in many poorer countries of national gender quota legislation, that is, affirmative action laws intended to compensate for sex discrimination in the electoral process. Yet, cross-national analyses examining quotas as an explanatory factor typically use a simple binary (yes/no) variable that either conflates the diverse intra-quota variations into a single variable or includes only one part of the many quota variations. By contrast, using an originally compiled dataset that includes 167 countries from 1992 to 2012, this paper employs measures of gender quota legislation that capture the complexity and considerable diversity of existing quota legislation. These measures allow us to identify the specific factors that have helped so many less developed countries rise to the top of international rankings in recent years. The findings indicate that the effect of each type of gender quota, as well as other explanatory variables, do not operate in the same way across all countries. Specifically, voluntary political party quotas are substantially more effective in developed countries, while reserved seat quotas are only significant in least developed countries. Electoral candidate quotas, on the other hand, can be significant across all countries, however only have a positive effect when they are accompanied by placement mandates that ensure women are placed in winnable positions, sanctions for non-compliance that are significant enough to force adherence, and a minimum mandated threshold of at least 30%.
在21世纪，女性在全球下议院或单一议院议会席位中所占的比例增长了70%以上。然而，各国的增长情况并不一致。相反，在妇女正式政治代表权方面取得的进展上，社会经济发展水平较低的国家超过了发达民主国家。对这一趋势的一个合理的解释是，许多较贫穷国家采用了国家性别配额立法，即旨在弥补选举过程中性别歧视的平权行动法律。然而，将配额作为一个解释因素的跨国分析通常使用一个简单的二元（是/否）变量，该变量要么将配额内的各种差异合并为一个单一变量，要么只包括众多配额差异中的一部分。相比之下，本文使用一个最初编制的数据集，该数据集涵盖了1992年至2012年的167个国家，采用了衡量性别配额立法的方法，这些方法能够体现现有配额立法的复杂性和相当大的多样性。这些方法使我们能够确定近年来帮助如此多的欠发达国家在国际排名中名列前茅的具体因素。研究结果表明，每种类型的性别配额以及其他解释变量的影响在所有国家并不以相同的方式发挥作用。具体而言，自愿性政党配额在发达国家的效果要大得多，而预留席位配额仅在最不发达国家具有显著意义。另一方面，选举候选人配额在所有国家都可能具有显著意义，然而，只有在它们伴有确保女性处于可获胜位置的安置指令、足以迫使遵守的不遵守行为制裁措施以及至少30%的最低法定门槛时，才会产生积极影响。
