{"id":432792,"date":"2020-05-12T13:27:55","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T17:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=432792"},"modified":"2024-04-16T10:21:12","modified_gmt":"2024-04-16T14:21:12","slug":"gender-electoral-quotas-unintended-consequences-432792","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/gender-electoral-quotas-unintended-consequences-432792\/","title":{"rendered":"Women quotas in politics lead to unintended consequences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Designed to increase the representation of women in politics, female electoral quotas may curtail representation in other respects, Rochester political scientists find.<\/h2>\n

Aside from Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, and more recently Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern, women continue to be scarce in the halls of power.<\/p>\n

To rectify this inequality, a majority of countries<\/a> (or at least one political party in most) have imposed female electoral quota systems, or rules designed to increase the representation of women. The catch? Boosting gender may well curtail representation in other respects.<\/p>\n

An unintended consequence of such quotas is the reduction of other underrepresented minorities, finds a recent University of Rochester study in the American Journal of Political Science<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Rochester study looked at India\u2019s caste system and female representation in local government, where female-reserved seats have been enshrined in the 73rd and 74th Amendments of the Indian Constitution since the early 1990s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe effect of electoral quotas for women in India was to reduce the representation of lower caste groups,\u201d says lead author Alexander Lee<\/a>, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science<\/a> at the University of Rochester<\/a>, who looked specifically at what happened in Delhi in local elections once gender quotas were introduced. \u201cIn many poorer or developing countries electoral quotas can reduce the representation of marginalized groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

For their study, Lee and his coauthor, Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra<\/a>, a PhD graduate student in the same department, examined the consequences of women quotas on the electoral representation of caste groups in local government bodies in Delhi. They found that constituencies reserved for women were less likely\u2014compared to unreserved constituencies\u2014to elect members of groups where the status of women was low.<\/p>\n

In practice, this meant that those reserved constituencies were less likely to elect members of several traditionally underprivileged groups\u2014especially of the so called \u201cOther Backward Class\u201d or OBC castes\u2014a collective term used by the Indian Government to classify castes, which are educationally or socially disadvantaged. Instead, the scientists discovered, voters in women-reserved constituencies tended to elect candidates from the Hindu upper castes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn India if you have a policy that lets you choose only women, a disproportionate number of these women will be upper caste,\u201d says Lee.<\/p>\n

The author of From Hierarchy to Ethnicity: The Politics of Caste in Twentieth-Century India<\/em> (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Lee is interested in the factors governing the success or failure of political institutions in South Asia and other areas of the developing world. In particular, his work<\/a> focuses on the historical evolution of state capacity, the causes and consequences of identity politics, and bureaucratic politics.<\/p>\n

Key findings of female electoral quotas in India<\/strong><\/h3>\n