María Inés Tula

Back Rooms or Ballot Boxes? Candidate Nomination in Argentina

How political parties select their candidates for public office profoundly affects the types of people who are elected as well as how these people behave in office. This selection process also provides important insights on how parties function internally and on where political power is located within a country. Only a few comparative studies of nomination procedures exist, and none explain why some parties at some points in time select candidates via direct primaries and others do not. The authors analyze an original data set of 610 district-level nomination processes for the biennial Argentine Chamber of Deputies elections held between 1983 and 2001. They conclude that several specific institutional and partisan features have a prominent effect on the probability that a political party will choose its candidates at the ballot box (direct primary) rather than in a smoke-filled back room (elite arrangement).

Critical Challenges of Quotas and Parity in Latin America

In Latin America, quota laws and parity are the most relevant public policies in promoting women’s political representation. This chapter analyzes the ongoing process of gender-equal political representation and identifies five “broken promises” in the journey to quotas and parity, namely, (i) the adoption of quotas without clear placement mandates, (ii) the fallacy that gender quotas per se would guarantee women’s equal access to decision-making, (iii) the limitation of quotas in achieving women’s equal (proportional) representation in legislative bodies, (iv) the fallen assumption that women legislators would represent women’s interests, and finally, (v) violence against women who reached political office as an unintended consequence of quota systems. Some shortcuts to these policies do not always arise from broken promises, but result from the contrast between high social expectations of change and centuries of patriarchal domination.