Jennifer M. Piscopo

Gender Quotas and Women's Substantive Representation: Lessons from Argentina

This article integrates the comparative literature on gender quotas with the existing body of research on womens substantive representation. Quota laws, which bring greater numbers of women into parliaments, are frequently assumed to improve womens substantive representation. We use the Argentine case, where a law mandating a 30% gender quota was adopted in 1991, to show that quotas can affect substantive representation in contradictory and unintended ways. To do so, we disaggregate womens substantive representation into two distinct concepts: substantive representation as process, where women change the legislative agenda, and substantive representation as outcome, where female legislators succeed in passing womens rights laws in the Argentine Congress. We argue that quota laws complicate both aspects of substantive representation. Quotas generate mandates for female legislators to represent womens interests, while also reinforcing negative stereotypes about womens capacities as politicians. Our case combines data from bill introduction and legislative success from 1989 to 2007 with data from 54 interviews conducted in 2005 and 2006. We use this evidence to demonstrate that representation depends on the institutional environment, which is itself shaped by quotas. Institutions and norms simultaneously facilitate and obstruct womens substantive representation.

Sustaining Gendered Practices? Power, Parties, and Elite Political Networks in Argentina:

This article investigates whether and how gender shapes access to elite political networks, using the case of Argentina, the first country in the world to adopt a national-level quota law in 1991. Quotas have significantly improved women’s access to elected office, without altering either the gendered hierarchies or gendered power networks that govern political advancement. We find that while men and women elected to the national congress have considerable political experience, men are more likely to have held executive office, particularly posts that provide access to resources that sustain clientelism. We further find that female legislators are less likely to be married and have children than male legislators, indicating that women’s domestic responsibilities circumscribe their political careers.

Equality, Democracy, and the Broadening and Deepening of Gender Quotas

The diffusion of gender quotas reflects the legitimation of the normative principle of womens equality in public life. Legislative gender quotas, whether adopted through top-down elite decision making or through bottom-up feminist activism, are frequently justified via appeals to norms of inclusion and fairness. These democratic ideals of womens full representation and participation have indeed gained traction: Over the past two decades, quotas have extended beyond legislatures to public institutions, such as cabinets and executive agencies, and to state advisory councils, subnational governments, labor union directorates, and corporate boards. Such diffusion signals a profound gendering of public space and leadership, a transformation initiated by states assuming active roles as the guarantors —rather than mere promoters—of equality.

Supermadres, Maternal Legacies and Women's Political Participation in Contemporary Latin America

Elsa Chaney once argued that Latin American women turned to motherhood to justify their political participation. Now that Latin American women have gained unprecedented access to national-level office, we ask whether these cultural narratives of maternalism still condition female politicians’ access to political power. Using public opinion data, media analysis, and elite interviews, we conceptualise four strategic frames deployed by elite women to justify their national-level political careers: the traditional supermadre, the technocratic caretaker, the macho minimiser, and the difference denier. We argue that while todays female politicians have developed diverse responses to maternalism, their access to public office remains profoundly shaped by structural constraints and cultural narratives that privilege traditional feminine ideals of caretaking.

Democracy as gender balance: the shift from quotas to parity in Latin America

Seven Latin American countries – Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama – have recently shifted from quota laws to parity regimes. This paper offers the first scholarly examination of the discourses underlying this parity shift, exploring how proponents frame and justify the measure in these seven cases. I find that Latin Americas parity advocates appeal to womens presence in the population and to the equality of outcomes. In doing so, they argue that gender balance constitutes a prerequisite of the democratic state. This framing is further legitimated by court decisions validating the constitutionality of affirmative action. In becoming widely shared, these discourses should continue to influence parity innovations across Latin America.

The Impact of Women in Parliament

O’Brien and Piscopo examine how increases in the number of female parliamentarians shape three outcomes: policies and policymaking, public opinion, and the legislature as a workplace. Reviewing the literature, the authors conclude that female representatives indeed diversify legislative agendas, especially regarding women and other vulnerable groups. Women’s presence also erodes negative perceptions about women as political leaders, both among the public and among politicians. However, O’Brien and Piscopo also find that women’s presence meets resistance, particularly because parliaments’ internal cultures and leadership structures remain male-dominated. Gender quotas mediate all these trends: Quotas raise the number of female parliamentarians and accelerate political and social change but may also provoke backlash. The authors conclude by calling for more research on this latter trend.

Electing Women to National Legislatures

This chapter examines women’s numeric representation in national legislatures as it relates to women’s political empowerment. Women’s presence in parliament symbolizes the political empowerment of female citizens, broadly defined, as higher levels of representation signal the openness, inclusivity, and equity of the political system. Yet women’s presence in legislatures may not translate into high levels of individual empowerment for female lawmakers. Institutional, organizational, and structural barriers—such as masculine cultures and male-dominated political parties—limit women’s abilities to exercise their talents and qualifications. Future research should examine how this measure of political empowerment varies across different conceptualizations of “women.” Scholars should examine not just women as a group but women as individuals and as differentiated by race, ethnicity, class, and other identity-based categories.

Challenging Gender Inequality Within the State: Policy Agencies and Quota Laws in Latin America

As part of democratization, Latin American nations created institutions to increase women’s political representation and to promote gender equality. This chapter compares the implementation and success of the national gender machinery in Chile (Servicio Nacional de la Mujer) to Argentina’s pioneering gender quota law. Both institutional mechanisms succeded in representing womens interest in certain policy areas. Yet, neither policy agencies nor gender quotas can fully combat women’s marginalization within the apparatus of the state as a whole. The chapter suggest that institutional layering, meaning the evolution of new formal rules and informal practices, can either challenge or uphold elite mess dominance over the policy agenda.

Gender and Populism in Latin America: Passionate Politics edited by Karen Kampwirth

The rise of such leaders as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia has reinvigorated academic interest in populism. Gender and Populism in Latin America, an edited volume, provides a welcome departure from studies concerned with merely classifying and comparing the region’s populist leaders. Editor Karen Kampwirth brings together historians, sociologists, and political scientists to explore populism’s ability to channel, mobilize, and restructure cultural notions of masculinity and femininity. This book wisely does not retheorize populism, building instead on scholars’ previous identifications of Latin America’s populist leaders. Populist regimes are characterized by leaders’ direct, unmediated relationships with mass publics; representation unfolds outside democratic institutions, and charismatic leaders mobilize previously marginalized populations—“the people”—in projects of social and political change. In sharing this point of departure, the theoretical framework and the case studies fit together fluidly, allowing the contributors’ different disciplinary backgrounds to enhance the analysis. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate historical and geographical breadth. Jocelyn Olcott and Ximena Sosa-Buchholz cover women’s integration into classical populist regimes in Mexico and Ecuador, respectively. Joel Wolfe tells a similar story in Brazil, while Michael Conniff compares female participants’ roles in classical and contemporary Brazilian populism. Karin Grammático explores women’s political participation in different moments of Argentine Peronism, while Stéphanie Rousseau compares women’s mobilization under neoliberal populist Alberto Fujimori and ethnopopulist Evo Morales. Two chapters on Nicaragua, by Victoria González-Rivera and Karen Kampwirth, respectively address women’s relationships to the Somoza dictatorship and to Daniel Ortega. Finally, the chapters on Venezuela, one by Sujatha Fernandes and one by Gioconda Espina and Cathy A. Rakowski, illuminate women’s social, economic, and political opportunities beneath Hugo Chávez. Collectively, the chapters identify key themes in the study of gender and populism, which are underscored in Kurt Weyland’s preface and