“Electoral systems and party structures have important
implications for how easy it is to apply gender quotas or the difficulties that
advocates may encounter when lobbying for their adoption. […] [It is a commonly
believed that] candidate quotas (both legislated and voluntary) are easier to
implement in PR systems with large districts than in single-member districts,
in which decisions on which candidate (only one candidate per party) to field
in each district are much more heavily debated, and parties tend to favour male
candidates due to gender-based stereotypes and powerful male incumbents.
However, majority/plurality electoral systems based on single-member or
multi-member districts have also been successfully combined with candidate
quotas, for example in the UK, where the Labour Party has instituted a
voluntary system of all-women shortlists (AWS) for selecting candidates
nominated in certain districts for parliamentary elections. […] Other examples
of legislated candidate quotas matched with plurality/majority systems include
Senegal, which uses a parallel electoral system in which parties are required
to field an equal number of male and female candidates in multi-member
districts. Uganda has an additional tier of women-only districts where women
are elected directly, and India has districts/wards reserved for women at the
sub-national level, where women are directly elected.”[1]
Gabrielle Bardall and
Skye Christensen’s 2014 research on “Gender Quotas in Single-Member
District Electoral Systems” refutes the myth of the incompatibility
of quotas in single-member districts (SMD), drawing on case examples from
different regional contexts, and investigates effective strategies to implement
quotas in SMDs.[2]
International IDEA
published in 2007 “Designing
for Equality: Best-fit, medium-fit and non-favourable combinations of electoral
systems and gender quotas”, which “offers an overview of the various
electoral systems and combinations with electoral quotas, by illustrating which
outcomes can be expected when a certain quota is applied under a certain
electoral system.”[3] The
table below, extracted from this International IDEA publication, summarizes
possible combinations of types of quotas for women with electoral systems.
[1] International IDEA,
Inter-Parliamentary Union and Stockholm University (2013): op. cit., p. 29.
[2] Christensen, Skye and
Bardall, Gabrielle (2014): “Gender Quotas in Single-Member District Electoral
Systems”, European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced
Studies, EU Working Paper RSCAS 2014/104.
See:
http://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/33772
