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percentage of women nominated in the districts to which the quota applied, to the
percentage of women nominated across all districts, broken down by party.
It is questionable how direct most of the candidate elections really were. The law
does not define what constitutes “direct” and the IFE offered no guidelines as to what did
and did not count as legitimately direct elections. One of the IFE Councilors
acknowledged this explicitly in a general assembly on April 18, 2003, the day the parties
submitted their lists of single-member district candidates: “the Federal Electoral Institute
accepts the claims of the political parties [regarding whether the elections they held were
direct or not] as truthful and valid, inasmuch as they are institutions of good faith, whose
affirmations must be taken as legitimate, unless proven otherwise.”
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Despite these exemptions, women won 23% of the seats in the Chamber of
Deputies, up from 16% in the previous legislature. These results catapulted Mexico from
#55 in the world ranking of women in legislative office to #23, a spot it now shares with
Switzerland (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2003). The 7% increase that occurred in Mexico
is just one point below the average increase that quota laws generate (Htun and Jones
2002).
Conclusion
Gender quota laws are increasingly prominent landmarks on the electoral map,
particularly in places one might not expect to find them. This examination of the Mexican
case highlights three factors that contributed to the adoption of a gender quota law in
2002: first, a political context of electoral uncertainty that opened up the possibilities for
reform of the rules by which parties selected their candidates; second, a shifting balance
Convention