Gender Quotas in the Arab World: Political and Social Implications
Panel 148, 2011 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, December 3 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
The institutionalization of gender quotas is relatively simple, but their implications are quite complex. Gender quotas affect not only the distribution of seats to women, perceptions regarding female political participation/ leadership, and gender-related policies, but also broader distribution of resources and power. The papers in this panel examine factors affecting the implementation of gender quotas and the social and political effects of those instituted in the Arab World. Papers are based on extensive fieldwork, including interviews, original surveys, and the analysis of election result.
The papers first examine the institutional choices of gender quotas. “De Jure vs. De Facto” uses a risk model and cases studies of Jordan and Morocco to consider how development assistance and foreign direct investment create incentives for different types of laws. In contrast, "Women, Tribes, and Ruling Parties in Nondemocratic Elections " focuses on how different domestic power configurations created incentives for different rules in Jordan and Egypt.
The panel will also explore how the implementation of gender quotas affects attitudes and outcomes. Through an analysis of survey data and process-tracing in Algeria and Morocco, "Why Quotas Matter: Gender Quotas and Attitudes toward Gender Equality" argues that public debate through which quotas are introduced helps to support for women's involvement in public life. "The Consequences of International Support for Women's Political Participation in Jordan" also uses a survey experiment to determine the extent to which the effects of gender quotas depend on whether the quotas are viewed as supported by external or domestic actors. Do internationally-supported gender quotas have the intended effect, particularly when citizens know that the reforms are supported from outsides?
Implications of gender quotas are similarly complex. "Electoral Quotas and Constituent Services" focuses on how quotas influence which candidates campaign and then subsequently provide services. Focusing on Jordan, it takes advantage the presence of both ethnic and gender quotas to compare their implications. "The Consequences of Political Support for Women's Political Participation" examines not only attitudes toward women in politics, but also the relationship with attitudes toward the West. "Women, Tribes and Ruling Parties" explores how the different configurations of gender quotas affect what types of women are elected (e.g., levels of education, attitudes, experience, etc), and consequently, the impact they are likely to have on gender relations.
Taken together, these papers move forward our understanding of gender quotas, not only in the Arab world, but elsewhere as well.
This paper investigates the role of gender quotas in developing democracies. Drawing empirical material from Egypt (which had gender quotas in 1979 and 1984 and re-instituted them in 2010) and Jordan (which has had them since 2003), it explains variation in the design of gender quota mechanisms, as well as the ways in which these formal institutions interact with underlying social structures to produce outcomes that can either empower or disempower women. In both cases, it finds that the particular quota system the country adopted was designed to advantage the most powerful political actors. However, though in Jordan the system elects female parliamentarians who do not pursue women's liberation, in Egypt quotas have been somewhat successful in this regard. This variation is less a function of institutions than of the different beliefs of the ruling establishment over the proper role of women in society.
Do electoral quotas affect the way in which politicians campaign and serve their constituents? A large and growing literature on public goods provision suggests that institutions, even in semi-democracies, can affect politicians’ incentives on what kinds of services to provide and to whom. This paper examines the question in the context of Jordan, where competitive legislative elections have been held since 1989, where gender and minority (Chechen, Circassian) quotas have been introduced, and where the prevailing view is that a politicians’ main job is to provide access to patronage and services. Using detailed quantitative data and extensive interviews, the paper argues that quotas do affect politicians’ campaign and service strategies through their effect on the size and nature of the constituency. Politicians running on a quota are much more likely to be engaged in private charitable and income-generating organizations for campaigning and distributing goods and services to constituents, and to serve a smaller group of voters than the non-quota candidates. I also compare the different effects of the gender and minority quotas.
More than one hundred countries have now adopted some form of quota to promote women’s representation in politics, often due to international encouragement or pressure. But do quotas impact politics in positive ways--by improving public perceptions of female political leaders or by better representing women’s interests--when they are adopted in countries where women have an otherwise low status? Furthermore, does the international support for quotas condition their impact? The second question is all the more salient in countries where there exist strong sovereign-nationalist or anti-American sentiments.
This paper offers answers to those questions using evidence from a novel survey experiment in Jordan, where six seats in parliament were reserved for women in 2003 and increased to twelve seats in 2010. Jordan’s quota offers an interesting case study since it was adopted in a context that is highly unfavorable towards women’s participation in politics when judging from public attitudes as well as other measures. Furthermore, the quota was strongly supported by international actors; advancing women’s political participation has been a key element of democracy assistance programs supported by the United States, European Union, and United Nations in Jordan.
Our survey exposes randomly selected participants to a treatment of information about the parliamentary gender quota and a set of actors that have supported it--either American leaders, Jordanian secular public opinion leaders, or Jordanian religious leaders. Respondents’ answers to questions about their support for the quota, willingness to consult with a male vs. female MP, and intention to vote for a woman in the upcoming parliamentary election are then compared across the control and various treatment groups. Results are also analyzed to show how treatment effects vary by factors such as respondents’ gender, religiosity, and education levels. The study contributes to our understanding of the impact of gender quotas (and internationally-supported human rights measures more broadly), how international actors can support women’s political participation and democracy, and the sources that impede women’s access to political power in the Arab world.
Culminating with the Millennium Development Goals, gender empowerment has become increasingly tied to economic development in the eyes of the broader donor community, but even more so amongst aid recipient countries since this new economic association has attracted a significant increase in available funds. This is especially the case in the Middle East and North Africa with many Arab countries implementing gender reforms as a presumably low-cost way to placate foreign donors, but also in the interest of improving their global image and attracting or sustaining foreign direct investment. One of the most controversial yet ubiquitous tools to promote women into the public sphere has been the gender quota--a policy trend eagerly embraced by many Arab countries at the beginning of the new millennium. Importantly, not all quotas are created equal. There are three types of legislative gender quotas present in the region (political party quotas, legal candidate quotas, and reserved seats) and they differ relative to the level of formalized commitment to insuring women's presence in political institutions. This paper explores the mix of incentives behind the choice of a particular type of quota as a gender empowerment strategy across the 22 Arab League member states using a competing-risks model. The preliminary analysis finds development assistance has the most significant impact on the adoption of more formally binding quotas such as legal candidate quotas and reserved seats, while foreign direct investment increases the likelihood of adopting political party quotas. The mechanism underlying these findings is elaborated on through a structured-focused comparison of gender quotas in Morocco and Jordan.
Why are ordinary Moroccans much more likely than Algerians to express supportive attitudes toward gender equality and gender quotas in political institutions? Why do ordinary people throughout the Muslim world vary in their support for women as political leaders? This paper assesses levels of public support for gender quotas among Moroccan and Algerian constituents using data collected by the author in nationally-representative surveys conducted in 2006 and 2007 and over 50,000 public opinion surveys collected in 28 Muslim-majority nations by the World Values Survey since 1981. Morocco and Algeria are highly comparable cases in terms of both culture and religion, as well as aspects of their contemporary parliamentary and electoral institutions. Yet gender quotas were raised to the level of national political discourse by women’s groups in Morocco, resulting in the implementation of an agreement reserving 30 seats for women in 2002 and requiring voters to select two party lists, one for their local constituency and one for the national constituency represented by women. In Algeria, no quota was in place at the time of the study and some prominent female politicians opposed quotas. The data reveal that fully 86 percent of Moroccan constituents reported that they were in favor of gender quotas, compared to 49 percent of Algerian citizens. Moroccans are also much more likely than Algerians to report that they believe women are equally or more able than men to represent their interests in parliament (83 and 55 percent of Moroccans and Algerians, respectively). Employing process tracing in two case studies, Morocco and Algeria, and multivariate analysis of data from over 50,000 public opinion surveys from 28 Muslim-majority nations, this paper tests the effect of gender quotas on political attitudes toward women in parliament. It hypothesizes that implementation of a gender quota explains higher levels of popular support for women in political life because debate about and implementation of quota brings about a process of norm change and learning in society more generally. These findings suggest that, even in authoritarian settings where other effects of quotas, such as the impact of parliamentarians on gender-related legislation or democracy promotion, may be limited, gender quotas positively affect popular beliefs about women as political leaders and are, therefore, highly worthwhile.
