Electoral Autocrats and Women's Political Inclusion

After the end of the Cold War the international community changed its democracy-developing efforts in at least two ways: First, it increased its efforts to liberalize autocracies by pushing these regimes to hold multiparty elections. Authoritarian states with ties to democracies, through trade arrangements, aid, etc., responded to these pushes by opening up for electoral competition while managing to maintain an uneven electoral playing field (Levitsky & Way 2002; Miller 2020). As a consequence, the nature of authoritarian regimes changed, with the number of autocracies holding multiparty elections – also referred to as electoral autocracies – increasing substantially and becoming the most common type of autocracy (Miller 2020). Second, international organizations were increasingly preoccupied with gender inequalities in political representation. A global push to increase women’s political inclusion spurred the most far-reaching electoral reform of our times: the introduction of different forms of electoral gender quotas. Women now occupy 24 percent of the world’s parliamentary seats, compared to just 10 percent in 1995. While a large body of work on political regimes have conceptualized authoritarian regime types and analyzed the changing nature of these regimes (e.g. Schedler 2006), and a significant literature has examined trends in gendered parliamentary representation (e.g. Fallon et al. 2012), these two developments have largely been analyzed separately. The former literature has rarely included gender aspects in research on the calculus of autocrats (Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009), and the latter body of work has mostly treated autocracies as a homogenous group of countries. This paper bridges these literatures and studies the relationship between regime type and women’s political inclusion in representative bodies in light of these developments. More specifically, having an agenda-setting ambition, we first theorize and illustrate how specific types of autocracy relate to women’s political representation. We suggest that the usage of democratic institutions such as multiparty elections makes a specific type of autocracy – electoral autocracies – more sensitive and responsive to Western pushes for increased political gender equality than more full-fledged autocracies. Second, we propose a research agenda that analyzes the extent to which – and how – electoral autocrats also strategically use the pushes for gender equality as a strategy to serve their own ends: regime stability. By studying how the changing nature of authoritarianism interact with the process of increasing women’s political inclusion, we make various contributions. First, we contribute to the literature on gender and political representation by showing that those countries that used to perform the worst with respect to women’s political representation – electoral autocracies – are the countries that have been most responsive to pushes for increased political gender equality. Second, the paper contributes to the growing literature on authoritarianism and women’s rights by distinguishing between two types of autocracies and by suggesting that the relationship with women’s political inclusion varies across types. Third and finally, we contribute to the literature on political regimes and comparative democratization by proposing that gender is used strategically as a tool to avoid receiving pressures for democratization.