“While legislated and voluntary candidate quotas regulate the
minimum number of women or candidates of an under-represented sex to be
included on candidate lists, reserved seats stipulate the number of women or
representatives of an under-represented sex to be elected to legislative
bodies. Reserved seats are the least-used quota type globally, but they are
increasingly used in Africa and South-East Asia. To date, 36 countries and
territories have adopted the system of reserved seats using three main methods
for lower and/or upper houses and/or sub-national level councils:[1]
“Certain countries reserve a fixed number of seats for
women—such as Tanzania, where 30 per cent of seats are reserved for women—but
do not require these candidates to be publicly elected, and instead allocate the
special seats for women among winning parties in proportion to the number of
seats awarded to them in Parliament. Lists of women who will eventually take up
these mandates are submitted to the election management body in advance of the
elections, and the methods parties use to select these candidates are diverse,
from internal party elections to appointments. A similar system is used in
Zimbabwe and in Pakistan to designate women members to reserved seats in the
lower house, and in Lesotho’s sub-national elections.[4]
A review of experiences in the use and impact of reserved
seats suggest that designing reserved seat quotas needs to consider how to give
women ‘elected legitimacy’—i.e., reserved seats should be subject to
competitive election among several female candidates, where the elected women
have their own power base/constituency.”[5]
[1] International IDEA,
Inter-Parliamentary Union and Stockholm University (2013): op. cit., p. 25.
[2] International IDEA,
Inter-Parliamentary Union and Stockholm University (2013): op. cit., p. 26.
[4] International IDEA,
Inter-Parliamentary Union and Stockholm University (2013): op. cit., p. 26.
[5] International IDEA,
Inter-Parliamentary Union and Stockholm University (2013): op. cit., p. 26.
[1] International IDEA,
Inter-Parliamentary Union and Stockholm University (2013): op. cit., p. 25.
