Women’s Political Participation. The Sociology of the (Im)Possibility of Adopting Gender Quotas

This paper compares four European Union member states – Poland, Romania, Spain, and Sweden – to examine the conditions under which institutional change is effective. Variation in economic development, cultural context, and levels of democratisation across these countries provides the basis for assessing how these factors shape women’s descriptive representation in politics, and the adoption and implementation of electoral gender quotas. Using empirical data provided by official statistics, World Values Survey and European Values Study, it analyses the cross-country differences and similarities in trends in gender role attitudes on family, employment, and politics that could determine the possibility of adopting voluntary or legislative electoral gender quotas, and their impact on women’s descriptive representation in parliament. Since cultural change is linked to modernisation theory, the association between the descriptive representation of women in politics and economic development is assessed for each of the four states using scatter plots, drawing on data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union database and national Gross Domestic Product data provided by the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The main findings lead to the conclusion that institutional change, such as the introduction of electoral gender quotas, can produce results when society has a high level of economic and cultural development. In the absence of economic and cultural development, institutional change is unsustainable.