Lisa Baldez

Elected Bodies: The Gender Quota Law for Legislative Candidates in Mexico

In the past decade, 21 countries have adopted gender quota laws that require between 20% and 50% of all legislative candidates to be women. What explains the adoption of these laws? I argue that three factors make politicians more likely to adopt gender quota laws. First, electoral uncertainty creates an opportunity for internal party reform that factions within a party can exploit to their advantage. Second, the courts play an important role because of the centrality of the issue of equal protection under the law to gender quotas. Finally, cross-partisan mobilization among female legislators raises the costs of opposing such legislation by drawing public attention to it. I examine these three claims with regard to Mexico, where the federal congress passed a 30% gender quota law in 2002.

Presidential Agenda Control and Spending Policy: Lessons from General Pinochet's Constitution

Formal institutions put in place upon the establishment of a new democracy can have profound effects on political bargaining. We demonstrate how the budgetary procedure bequeathed by the outgoing Chilean military regime affects policy choices available to elected officials. Chilean budget procedure should discourage deficits, allow for a reduction in the relative size of the defense budget, and facilitate cuts in executive proposals when the institutional interests of the legislature are at stake but not under conditions of coalitional conflict. We present a simple spatial model of bargaining over spending decisions between the executive and Congress that facilitates comparisons between the Chilean budget procedure and that of other presidential systems. The model suggests that, relative to other regimes, Chiles budget process should constrain spending and favor the presidents preferences over the legislatures. Comparative fiscal data from twelve other presidential democracies and from the first eight Chilean budgets since the transition to democracy, as well as interviews with key legislators and executive officials, all support our hypotheses.

The Pros and Cons of Gender Quota Laws: What Happens When You Kick Men Out and Let Women In?

What country currently boasts the highest percentage of women in parliamentary office? If you ask most people, they will guess one of the Nordic countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland, or Denmark. These guesses are close in one sense but very far off in another. The answer is Rwanda. As of this writing, women make up nearly half of the members of the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies—48.8% according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union ( 2005b ). Most people find this answer surprising. Sadly, we tend to associate Rwanda with the genocide of 1994 rather than with gender equality. What has put Rwanda in the number one spot on the list of women in elective office, an important indicator of womens equality?

Does the U.S. Constitution Need an Equal Rights Amendment

For over 3 decades, those engaged in the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), along with many scholarly commentators, have argued that ratification of the amendment will lead U.S. courts (1) to elevate the standard of law they now use to adjudicate claims of sex discrimination, which, in turn, could lead them (2) to find in favor of parties claiming a denial of their rights. We investigate both possibilities via an examination of constitutional sex discrimination litigation in the 50 states—over a third of which have adopted ERAs. Employing methods especially developed for this investigation, we find no direct effect of the ERA on case outcomes. But we do identify an indirect effect: the presence of an ERA significantly increases the likelihood of a court applying a higher standard of law, which in turn significantly increases the likelihood of a decision favoring the equality claim.

The UN Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW): A New Way to Measure Women's Interests

Questions about the quality of political representation are central to research on women and gender, and to political science in general. Given a certain set of interests, how well do political institutions and political actors address and advance those interests? Research about the quality of political representation relies a priori on the existence of fixed, stable, and measurable interests; we need to know what women want before we can assess how well politicians represent them. Perfect measures of the interests that all women share have proven elusive. The measures of womens interests that scholars commonly employ lend themselves reasonably well to research, but have unfortunate side effects: They essentialize gender norms, exclude certain groups of women, or define womens interests too narrowly. In this essay, I explore the political implications of the empirical measures of womens interests on which scholars have relied in research on womens political representation. I offer a way to measure womens interests that draws upon the United Nations Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW provides a way to think about womens interests that is broad, inclusive, and sufficiently flexible to reflect changes over time. Furthermore, it enjoys the explicit approval of almost every nation in the world; 186 countries have ratified CEDAW since the UN General Assembly approved it in 1979.

Quotas and qualifications: the impact of gender quota laws on the qualifications of legislators in the Italian parliament

This article addresses concerns that candidates nominated because of gender quota laws will be less qualified for office. While questions of candidate quality have long been relevant to legislative behavior, quota laws requiring a certain percentage of candidates for national office to be women have generated renewed interest. Gender quotas are often perceived to reduce the scope of political competition. By putting gender identity center stage, they preclude the possibility that elections will be based on ‘ideas’ or ‘merit’ alone. Other electoral rules that restrict candidate selection, such as the centralization of candidate selection common in closed list PR systems, have been found to reduce the quality of candidates. Rules that open selection, such as primaries, result in higher quality candidates. We exploit the institutional design of Italy’s mixed electoral system in 1994, where quotas were applied only to the PR portion of the list, to compare the qualifications of men, women, and ‘quota women’. We estimate regressions on several measures of deputies’ qualifications for office and performance in office. We find that unlike other rules limiting candidate selection, quotas are not associated with lower quality on most measures of qualifications. In fact, quota women have more local government experience than other legislators and lower rates of absenteeism than their male counterparts. Contrary to critics, quota laws may have a positive impact on legislator quality. Once the quota law was rescinded, quota women were less likely to be re-elected than non-quota women or men, which suggests that discrimination – not qualification – limits women’s status as candidates.

Geopolitics and Drafting the UN Treaty on Women’s Rights

Cold War battles between the United States and the Soviet Union had blocked progress on women’s rights, both at home and in the transnational arena, since the end of World War II. In the 1970s, a window for change opened up as the result of two major shifts, one domestic and the other geopolitical. Within the US, the emergence of the feminist movement led to strong bipartisan support for women’s rights legislation. The Democrats and Republican both supported ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, publically funded childcare, and family planning. Representatives from both parties participated in the committee that drafted CEDAW. Within the UN, developing countries formed a majority bloc that voted down the preferences of the United States and, often, the Soviet Union. The Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations supported women’s rights to capitalize on women’s electoral support at home, to strengthen their alliances with third world countries, to challenge the dominance of the Soviet Union on women’s rights, and to reassert leadership within the United Nations. The US supported two major UN initiatives for women — International Women’s Year and the drafting of CEDAW — as a way to press its advantage with regard to the Soviets.