Has Democracy Failed Women? by Drude Dahlerup

Author:Drude Dahlerup
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

Gender, ethnicity and class

According to a well-worn argument by quota opponents (see No. 6 in Table 3.2), gender quotas will lead to endless demands for quotas on the part of various other groups. It should be noted, however, that many formal and even informal quotas are already at work when parties nominate their candidates. Reservations for national minorities, such as the two seats reserved for the German minority in the Polish parliament, have been in place for a long time and are usually attached to particular geographic areas. Class quotas have, since the days of the old estates, become rare, though Egypt, ever since Nasser’s regime, has a radical 50 percent reservation for “workers and farmers,” enshrined also in the newest electoral law and much less discussed than quotas for women. Quotas for ethnic minorities are a more recent occurrence, often adopted as a post-conflict instrument. Immigrants are grossly under-represented everywhere, but it is, as British political scientist Anne Phillips argues, extremely difficult to formally define the relevant constituencies.10 An interesting conclusion from a series of interviews made within the frame of the large FEMCIT project on “Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe,” with women’s minority organizations in Warsaw, Skopje, Stockholm, London and Madrid, about their preferred representation and the issue of quotas, was that they all – with the exception of Muslim women’s organizations in London – wanted a general gender quota, but not ethnic quotas.11

In the second part of this chapter, we will follow the development of gender quotas. What have been the driving forces behind the global spread of electoral gender quotas?12

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