Electoral gender quotas systems and their implementation in Europe

• Quotas for women will be followed by demands for quotas for other groups, which will resultin what has been termed an increased ‘balkanisation’ of politics and a politics of sheer groupinterestrepresentation (Phillips 1995: 22).• Quotas are irrelevant. Women and men have equal status in society.• Quotas are symbols of ‘Soviet-style’ forced emancipation.Arguments for quotas• Political assemblies should reflect the major social groups in society. Since women constitutehalf of the population, they should have half of the positions in public decision-making bodies.• Political representation is not only about merit and competence. It is about representing thepeople.• Political representation is about rights and justice. Women have the right as citizens to equalrepresentation. How can the fact that men occupy more than 80 per cent of the parliamentaryseats in the world be justified?• Quotas for women do not discriminate. Rather, they compensate for existing barriers thathinder women from receiving their fair share of political seats, and they prevent further barriersand mechanisms of exclusion.• Quotas for women do not discriminate against individual men. Rather, quota rules limit thetendency of political parties to nominate mostly men and compel them to seek out active andcompetent female candidates. For the voters, the opportunities are expanded, since it nowbecomes possible to vote for parties with women candidates.• Women are just as qualified as men, but their qualifications are downgraded and minimised ina male-dominated political system.• Women’s experience is needed in political life. Political assemblies should take advantage of allthe resources and of all the pools of competence in society.• Women are best represented by women, since they have an understanding of what equalitymeans for them, an understanding that men do not have.• Quotas are a quick method for increasing the number of women elected. Introducing quotasthus accelerates the process and leads to major leaps in the number of women elected.• Quotas are already in use in other countries, and targets for women’s political representationare acknowledged in several internationally recognised conventions, including CEDAW, as wellas the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action.• Quotas, formal or informal, are already in use for other categories in nomination processes –such as geographical territories, trade union interests, occupation, age and so on.• Including women may contribute to the process of democratisation and increase the legitimacyof established democracies.As these lists show, the arguments for and against quotas are based on various assumptions relatedto key concepts, such as ‘equality’, ‘representation’ and ‘rights’. For instance, while opponents ofquotas argue that quotas are in conflict with principles of equal treatment and non-discriminationand become a form of discrimination of men, proponents of quotas argue that they are not a formof discrimination against men but a response to the discrimination against women and an effort toprevent present and future mechanisms of exclusion. Quotas are an attempt to achieve justice.Thus, while the opponents of quotas base their arguments on the classical liberal notion of equalityas equal opportunity and the removal of formal barriers, their proponents base their arguments onthe notion of equality as real equal opportunity or even equality of result (Dahlerup 2007). Theremoval of formal barriers, such as extending voting rights to women, is not enough to achieve anequal share of political influence. Rather, active measures must be introduced to achieve substantiveequality.Furthermore, the discursive controversy over quotas is connected to a debate concerning therelation between descriptive and substantive representation of women and the likely consequences19