Introduction
With the large number of transitions away from authoritarian rule in the late
twentieth century and the seeming “triumph” of democratic government, a good deal of
recent scholarship has focused on the performance and quality of democracy in both
newly established and long-standing democratic systems. Recent works by Powell
(2000), Lijphart (1999), Anderson and Guillory (1997), and Birchfield and Crepaz (1988)
examine the impact of political institutions in producing variations in performance.
Specifically, these studies investigate how well different institutional designs provide
representation and outcomes consistent with the desires of the public.
One area of performance where both new and more established democracies
vary substantially is the number of women holding positions of power in both elective
and appointive governmental positions. The number of women serving in the
parliaments of advanced industrialized democracies, for example, averaged only 21% in
2001 and ranged from 7.3% to 42.7% (IPU 2002). The number of women in appointive
positions, the “elite of the elite,” shows an even broader variation, ranging from 0% to
50% in the late 1990’s (United Nations 2002, Siaroff 2000). And this impressive span of
variation has continued into the 21
st
Century, with 31 parliamentary or quasi-
parliamentary democracies producing a low of 0% women in cabinets and a high of
47% while averaging 22% women holding portfolios overall (Katz and Koole 2002).
This variation in the level of women’s service at the highest levels of democratic
governments is important for several reasons. First, although women comprise roughly
half the population they have held only a small minority of the power, raising questions
about the legitimacy of decision-making by these governments. Furthermore, past
research suggests that significant differences in both policy outcomes and in the
process of making policy result from the increased representation of women in decision-
2
Convention