Gender and Elections

Topic IndexLegislated reserved seats

“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]

A special nation-wide tier for female candidates only: this method takes a number of different forms, for example: (1) the election of a set number of women from districts designed for electing female parliamentarians only (in Rwanda, where women are elected in 24 provinces through a specially designated electoral college); (2) a separate tier of female MPs directly elected in single-member districts (in Uganda); and (3) a separate tier reserved for women to be elected from a special all-women national lists (such as the 60 reserved seats for women in Morocco elected through a women-only list PR system/closed list and in Mauritania, which elects 20 women through a women-only nationwide list).[1]
Rotational quotas: this method ensures that these districts will return only female candidates. It is used at the sub-national level in India by rotating reserved wards from one electoral cycle to another, in order to avoid eliminating male candidates from the contest in a given district/ward for a long period of time.”[2]
Alternate thresholds: “ […] systems establish two thresholds for being elected: one based on greatest absolute number of votes, the other based on greatest percentage of votes within a subset of candidates (in this case, women). Under this approach, all candidates (male and female) compete together in a single race and the candidate with the greatest number of votes wins the seat. Subsequently, an additional number of reserved seats are filled by those women candidates who received the highest proportion of votes without winning a majority/plurality in their district. This is sometimes referred to as the “best loser” system.”[3]

“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.

[3] Christensen, Skye and Bardall, Gabrielle (2014): “Gender Quotas in Single Member District Electoral Systems”, EUI Working Paper no. 2014/104, p. 24. See: http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/33772/RSCAS_2014_104.pdf?sequence=1

[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.

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Gender and Elections