Gender Quotas and Women’s Political Leadership

Diana C. O'Brien and Johanna Rickne
Additional contact information
Diana C. O'Brien: Indiana University

No 1043, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the impacts of these reforms on women’s political leadership remain largely unknown. We exploit a quasi-experiment – a zipper quota imposed by the Swedish Social Democratic national party on municipal party groups – to examine quotas’ effect on women’s selection and survival as leaders within their parties. We find that those municipalities where the quota had a larger impact became more likely to appoint female leaders, but not more likely to support the reelection of women to the post. Extending this analysis, we show that the quota increased the number of qualified female candidates without increasing the diversity among women within the group. These results lend support to the notion that quotas may have an acceleration effect on women’s representation in leadership posts and help dispel the myth that quotas trade short-term gains in women’s descriptive representation for long-term exclusion from political power.

Keywords: Gender quotas; Political leadership; Party leaders; Political careers; Electoral reforms; Women and politics; Subnational politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G34 G38 J20 J48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2014-10-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp1043.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Gender Quotas and Women's Political Leadership (2016)
Working Paper: Gender Quotas and Women’s Political Leadership (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1043

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().