Conservative parties are typically not considered to be champions of gender equality. The European discussion about corporate board quotas for women is a case in point: among the most vocal opponents of an EU-wide corporate board quota were Germany and the United Kingdom – both led by conservative governments at that time. Yet while the Conservative Party in the UK remains firmly against board quotas, Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) switched its policy position and included the adoption of board quotas in its 2013 coalition agreement. This paper will investigate why the CDU changed its policy stance. Drawing on the critical actor perspective (see Chaney 2012; Celis and Childs 2008; Childs and Krook 2006, 2013) and veto player literature (see Immergut 1990; Huber et al. 2003; Tsebelis 2012), I argue that electoral competition from the left as well as strategically placed critical actors within the conservative government account for the turnaround in the CDU. More specifically, I will argue that critical actors within conservative parties often lie dormant until persistent electoral competition from the left opens a policy window in intraparty dynamics that make party leaders open to new policies and ideas. This paper will also build on the feminization of political parties literature (see Childs and Webb 2011) by arguing that the advancement and substantive influence of critical actors in the conservative parties cause conservative parties to become increasingly feminized. By analyzing the adoption of gender equality policies under the CDU in Germany, this paper contributes to a better understanding of critical actors within conservative parties as well as the role of conservative parties in advancing gender equality policies overall, a subject matter that is still relatively undeveloped in the overall gender literature.
