In recent years, more than a hundred countries have adopted quotas for
the selection of female candidates to political office. Examining
individual cases of quota reform, scholars offer four basic causal stories
to explain quota adoption: Women mobilize for quotas to increase
women's representation, political elites recognize strategic
advantages for supporting quotas, quotas are consistent with existing or
emerging notions of equality and representation, and quotas are supported
by international norms and spread through transnational sharing. Although
most research focuses on the first three accounts, I argue that the fourth
offers the greatest potential for understanding the rapid diffusion of
gender quota policies, as it explicitly addresses the potential
connections among quota campaigns. In a theory-building exercise, I
combine empirical work on gender quotas with insights from the
international norms literature to identify four distinct international and
transnational influences on national quota debates: international
imposition, transnational emulation, international tipping, and
international blockage. These patterns reveal that domestic debates often
have international and transnational dimensions, at the same time that
they intersect in distinct ways with international and transnational
trends. As work on gender quotas continues to grow, therefore, I call on
scholars to move away from simple accounts of diffusion to a recognition
of the multiple processes shaping the spread of candidate gender quotas
worldwide.I would like to thank Judith
Squires, Sarah Childs, Ewan Harrison, and participants in the Institute
for Social and Economic Research and Policy Graduate Fellows Workshop at
Columbia University, as well as the editors and three anonymous reviewers
at Politics & Gender, for their helpful comments. Earlier
versions of this article were presented as a paper at the International
Studies Association Annual International Convention, Montreal, Canada,
March 17–20, 2004, and at the British International Studies
Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK,
December 20–22, 2004.