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The Desirability of Gender Quotas: Considering Context and Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2006

Mark P. Jones
Mark P. Jones
Affiliation:
Rice University
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Extract

October 3, 2005, marks a dozen years since Argentina started the quota ball rolling via the first use of gender quota legislation applying to all parties for the election of national legislators. For the October 3, 1993, Argentine Chamber of Deputies election, all political parties were required to present closed party lists on which women accounted for a minimum of 30% of the candidates, and furthermore, a comparable proportion of these women had to be placed in “electable” positions on the lists (Jones 1996). Although the initial implementation process was not free of problems (Durrieu 1999), in a short time the gender quota became an established fixture of the Argentine political system. The impact of the quota legislation on the representation of women in the Argentine congress was nothing short of dramatic, with women now accounting for 34% and 44% of the seats in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and Senate, respectively, a marked contrast to the situation prior to the adoption of the quota legislation, when women on average held a mere 5% of the seats in both legislative bodies.

Type
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER AND POLITICS
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , December 2005 , pp. 645 - 652
Copyright
© 2005 The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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