Electoral gender quotas have spread rapidly around the globe over the last two decades. Yet there is also wide variation in their numerical impact. Prevailing explanations highlight policy design and institutional factors, but political will also plays a crucial role. Implementing quotas can require substantial intervention on the part of central party leaders or state actors tasked with overseeing compliance. Conversely, party elites may engage in creative readings of quota requirements, take advantage of escape clauses, or simply privilege men in their candidate nominations. These stories recur frequently across case studies, but have not yet been the focus of systematic analysis. This paper seeks to situate these dynamics in the context of quota diffusion, exploring the extent to which quotas can initiate or enact transformations in the gendered patterns of political life.
The first section reviews existing explanations of quota adoption, as well as arguments and evidence regarding their transformative potential, focusing on clues provided in various studies regarding efforts to subvert their intended effects. The second section theorizes the microfoundations of this resistance, focusing on how quotas challenge, at a very fundamental level, gendered ideas about public and private spheres. The third section presents a typology of resistance, organized according to different stages of the electoral process, with the aim of unifying a range of different practices under a common heading. This exercise highlights ongoing contestation surrounding gender quotas even in the face of public acceptance, limiting the ability of quota reforms to truly level the political playing field. Systematizing this resistance exposes the roots and forms of behaviors undermining the goals of gender quotas, revealing what individual reforms mean for women’s empowerment and democracy – and, in turn, offering a way forward for devising additional, complementary strategies to facilitate political inclusion.
