Electoral gender quotas systems and their implementation in Europe

In order to correct the discriminatory effect of the single-member constituency system, the partiescould have taken voluntary measures. The Communist Party has long been the only party to reservea certain informal quota of seats for women at elections, but it has become politically marginal. TheSocialist Party, born in 1971, waited until 1996 to vote in a quota of 30 per cent women in generalelections, lagging behind its fellow parties elsewhere (Dahlerup and Freidenvall 2005). (In 1979, forelections to the European Parliament, which took place with one round proportional party list vote,it had set a quota of 30 per cent women.) For 20 years, for the legislative elections from 1973 to1993, the percentage of women fielded by the Socialists (which was less than that of theCommunist Party) only once exceeded 10 per cent (in 1986); and the percentage of female deputiesin the socialist group has always been below this threshold. On the right, neither the Union for aPopular Movement (UMP) nor the Union for French Democracy (UDF) has applied a quota. Onlythe Greens, since their founding in 1984, have incorporated the parity principle in their selection ofcandidates for election (and in the decision-making body of the party).Finally, the politics of legislated quotas came up against a decision from the Constitutional Council:on 18 November 1982, it invalidated an article of the law of 1982, setting a maximum of 75 percent representation of each sex on the candidate lists at municipal elections. This decision, made inthe name of the equality of citizens under the law, set a precedent for future case law. Thelegitimisation of reform has been made possible by international law: by making the principle ofaffirmative action in order to balance out power between the sexes lawful, the United NationsOrganisation, the Council of Europe and the European Union have helped the French legal cultureto transform. In addition, the crisis of political representation, which is acute in France, has madethe male monopoly on the res publica unpopular. Since then, the marginalisation of women has beenviewed as a symptom of a ‘flawed’ democracy, and parity has been perceived as a necessary remedy.The political actors are taking action on this. Since the presidential election of 1995, politicalprogrammes have incorporated the theme of sharing power between the sexes. The politicalalternation which brought the left into power in 1997 has pushed the calendar of reforms to theforefront: the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, placed parity at the centre of politicalmodernisation.2.2. Ideological controversy: universalism revisitedThe question of parity has transcended the boundaries between left and right and has divided thefeminists. The theoretical and political debate that preceded the reform fuelled intense controversyover the meaning of universalism (Gaspard et al. 1992; Lépinard 2007; Sénac-Slawinski 2008). The‘fundamentalist’ republicans criticised the reform in the name of universalism. According to them,the French nation, which belongs to all the citizens, is an indivisible body that transcends groups(social classes, gender ...). By targeting the unity of representation, parity places the Republic injeopardy. To delegitimise the parity reform, some have pointed out the dangers of the Americanintransigent belief in a quota system. Others have objected that parity would ‘naturalise’ politics,that it would send women back to their nature; this is rejected by the ‘egalitarian’ feminists. The‘universalists’ admit that the Republic has not kept its promises to women, but find the remedy ofequal representation for both sexes even worse.On the other side the advocates of the reform justify parity and criticise the liberal individualismthat underlies the Republican order. Real equality should replace formal equality, which carries theseeds of exclusion along with it. Parity is presented as being different from quotas, promoting notrepresentation of minorities but equality of status between the sexes. Is it not the only way ofensuring that women have real equality of candidacy? This notion has been scoffed at by theFrench parties, which, as in other democracies, hold the monopoly of candidate nominations.Those who are in favour of parity reject all accusations of ‘particularism’: women are not a category;rather they represent half of humanity. The universality of the difference between the sexes mustserve to prompt a rethink of Republican universalism.52