Abstract
This chapter reviews a number of factors that hamper the recruitment and advancement of women in politics as well as the implementation of quota regulations, more specifically the lack of social acceptance of quotas, influential male networks, persistent gender images and practices, lack of qualified women candidates, shortage of resources, and problems in reconciling political work with family and professional work responsibilities. While these factors are powerful quota inhibitors, the authors claim that they do not fully account for the observed failure my major parties to implement their quotas. Moreover, as these factors play a similar role in both Germany and Austria, they do not account for variation among the two cases.
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Notes
- 1.
The majority of factors speak also more generally to the question why often fewer women engage in parties and in political office, regardless of the existence of quotas.
- 2.
It is important to point out the paradox of norms: As the previous chapter highlighted, quotas were adopted because of the normative consideration to represent women and men equally. Also, such norms seem to play out differently in different regions of the world. Piscopo (2016) illustrates that the recent shifts from quota laws to parity regimes in Latin America can be attributed to framing gender balance as a prerequisite of democracies.
- 3.
Contrary to this assumption, various studies highlight the positive effects of quotas on recruiting more qualified and diverse politicians (Bjarnegård 2013; Franceschet et al. 2012; Mügge and Erzeel 2016; Murray 2010; Besley et al. 2017).
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Sigrid Sparkelis-Sperk in 1977 was a newly elected member of the ASF Federal Council and a strong quota supporter.
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Contrary to this general account, Kroeber et al. (2018) found for Germany no straightforward pattern and showed instead the constant up and down of women’s representation on all electoral levels below the federal level.
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- 7.
Reconciling caretaking, job, and political career can also be successful. Some studies point out that particularly women politicians perceive having additional priorities as a comparative advantage to their male colleagues (Geißel 2000).
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Ahrens, P., Chmilewski, K., Lang, S., Sauer, B. (2020). The Post-Quota Gender Gap: Standard Explanations. In: Gender Equality in Politics. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34895-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34895-3_4
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