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Mexico held mid-term legislative elections on July 6, 2003. According to the
media, the big story of this election was the defeat suffered by the National Action Party
(PAN). The PAN, the party of President Vicente Fox, took a beating arguably far worse
than is typical for the fate of ruling parties in mid-term elections. It lost 54 seats in the
Mexican congress, many from its traditional base of support in the northern states. In the
important industrial state of Nuevo León, the PAN lost control of the governorship, the
state assembly and most of the mayoralties. The PAN also lost all of its representatives
to the Mexico City legislature. Meanwhile, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
and the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) made impressive gains (Grayson
2003; Lawson 2004; Starr 2003).
Another story emerged from these elections that has gone virtually unnoticed by
the media and completely unnoticed in scholarly accounts: the success of female
candidates. Women won 23% of the seats in this election, up 7 percentage points from
the 2000 election. These results catapulted Mexico up in the world ranking of women in
legislative office: from #55 to #29 (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2003). The most plausible
explanation for this increase points to the effect of Mexico’s new gender quota law. An
electoral reform passed in 2002 requires women to be at least 30% of all the candidates
for all political parties. This law was applied for the first time in the 2003 mid-term
elections. Perhaps the most interesting finding with regard to the gender quotas is that all
of the political parties competing in this election fully complied with the law. To that
extent, Mexican politicians both obeyed the law and complied with it, in contrast to the
dictum obedezco pero no cumplo (I obey, but I do not comply). Mexico’s experience with
Convention