3
“I’d give up my seat for you if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m sitting in it myself.”
—Groucho Marx
1
“[Many Latin American countries] have ‘homosexual’ political systems, that is the power
of the political parties and the state is in the hands of only one of the sexes . . .”
—Line Bareiro, Paraguayan feminist
2
The participation of women in politics has become an increasingly salient issue in
recent years. Countries throughout the world have pursued a variety of ways to increase
the number of women active in political life. One of the most popular measures to boost
the presence of women in politics is the adoption of gender quotas. There are several
different kinds of gender quotas. The most common are party-level quotas, which
individual political parties adopt and implement on a purely voluntary basis. As of
August 2003, 122 parties in 58 countries had some kind of quota provision in their
internal statutes. Many people associate the high levels of female legislators in the
Scandinavian countries with the quotas that leftist parties adopted there in the 1970s.
Next are gender quota laws for legislative candidates at the national level.
Twenty-two countries have laws that require all political parties to nominate a minimum
percentage of women as candidates for national legislative office. The level of the quota
ranges from 20% to 50%. Argentina was the first country to adopt a gender quota law, in
1991. The Argentine law requires women to be at least 30% of candidates, and stipulates
that at least one woman be placed in every third spot on the electoral lists. Argentina is
the most dramatically successful case; after the law took effect, women’s share of seats in
the Chamber of Deputies rose from an average of 4% to an average of 27% (Jones 1998).
Worldwide, national gender quota laws generate an 8 percentage point increase in the
number of women elected to parliament (Htun and Jones 2002).
Convention