Introduction

A quick look at the emergence of sex quota laws to bring women into national legislatures in the past decade suggests that we may be witnessing the global development of a new measure to bring women into state institutions. The increasing use of national quota provisions suggests that the position articulated by George W. Bush above does not fit “what everybody else is saying.” In fact, outside of the United States, there is growing agreement that national legislatures need to raise their levels of female delegates via quotas. This chapter focuses on the adoption of constitutional or electoral quota laws to increase the level of women in the national legislature, in other words sex quota laws regulating the national legislature. Nearly fifty states, ranging from Nepal to Uganda, Ecuador and Djibouti, have adopted affirmative measures to boost their number of female legislators since 1990, and mobilization for quotas is present in over fifty other states across the world.

The swift emergence of quotas has been paralleled by an equally impressive growth in quota scholarship within the subfield of women and politics, almost all of which centers on the relative importance of various domestic factors. And yet as Krook ( and ) effectively points out, there are also crucial international dimensions to the rapid emergence of quota laws in different parts of the world, dimensions that are largely overlooked and certainly under-studied in the quota literature. The existing research, including Krook’s examination of international factors, asks many important questions of quotas: How did such measures come about? Are quotas effective in bringing higher numbers of women into legislatures? What accounts for the variation in quota types and effectiveness among states?