Six electoral cycles since the implementation of Brazil’s gender quota, just 15% of the 513 members of the Chamber of Deputies are women. We ask how parties’ use of informal institutions mediates the ...effectiveness of the gender quota. Drawing on data from more than 4,000 state-level party organizations, we show that parties employ informal practices that intentionally and non-intentionally interact with gender equity rules to affect women’s political representation: the intentional nomination of phantom candidates (“laranjas”) allows parties to comply with the letter of the quota law, without effectively supporting women’s candidacies—to the detriment of women’s election; meanwhile, the extended use of provisional commissions to minimize oversight on candidate selection poses an obstacle to the quota and women’s candidacies and election more generally. Quota resistance characterizes an instance of both the likely inadvertent effects of informal institutions employed for non-gendered motivations and party leaders acting to preserve their own power.
The article compares analytically populism and technocracy as alternative forms of political representation to party government. It argues that populist and technocratic principles of representation ...challenge fundamental features of party democracy. The two alternative forms of representation are addressed theoretically from the perspective of political representation. First, the article identifies the commonalities between the two forms of representation: both populism and technocracy are based on a unitary, nonpluralist, unmediated, and unaccountable vision of society's general interest. Second, it highlights their differences. Technocracy stresses responsibility and requires voters to entrust authority to experts who identify the general interest from rational speculation. Populism stresses responsiveness and requires voters to delegate authority to leaders who equate the general interest with a putative will of the people. While the populist form of representation has received considerable attention, the technocratic one has been neglected. The article presents a more complete picture of the analytical relationship between them.
How do citizens want to be represented by elected officials in an era of affective polarization? Contemporary narratives about American politics argue that people embrace elite expressions of ...negative partisanship, above and beyond representation on policy. Using three conjoint experimentsf I examine how individuals weigh the relative value of substantive representation on issues, constituency service, and partisan affect. The findings challenge the notion that Americans are primarily motivated by their affective, partisan identities and demonstrate the value of policy congruence and service responsiveness in terms of perceptions of political representation. The implication is that people evaluate elected officials in ways that we would expect them to in a healthy, functioning representative democracy, rather than one characterized by partisan animus. Even if polarization is driven by "affect, not ideology," citizens prioritize representational styles centered around the issues that matter to them.
What does women's presence in political decision-making bodies signal to citizens? Do these signals differ based on the body's policy decisions? And do women and men respond to women's presence ...similarly? Though scholars have demonstrated the substantive and symbolic benefits of women's representation, little work has examined how women's presence affects citizens' perceptions of democratic legitimacy. We test the relationship between representation and legitimacy beliefs through survey experiments on a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens. Firsty we find that women's equal presence legitimizes decisions that go against women's interests. We show suggestive evidence that this effect is particularly pronounced among men, who tend to hold less certain views on women's rights. Second, across decision outcomes and issue areas, women's equal presence legitimizes decision-making processes and confers institutional trust and acquiescence. These findings add new theoretical insights into how, when, and for whom inclusive representation increases perceptions of democratic legitimacy.
This study investigates whether incidental electoral successes of women contribute to sustained gender parity in Finland, a leader in gender equality. Utilizing election lotteries used to resolve ...ties in vote counts, we estimate the causal effect of female representation. Our findings indicate that women’s electoral performance (measured by female seat and vote shares) within parties improves following a lottery win, potentially due to increased exposure. However, these gains are offset by negative spillovers on female candidates from other parties. One reason why this may occur is that voters and parties may perceive sufficient female representation has been achieved, leading to reduced support for female candidates in other parties. Consequently, marginal increases in female representation do not translate to overall gains in women elected. In high but uneven gender parity contexts, such increases may not be self-reinforcing, highlighting the complexity of achieving sustained gender equality in politics.
A focus on crisis is a mainstay of the literature on contemporary populism. However, the links between populism and crisis remain under-theorized and undeveloped. This article puts forward a novel ...perspective for understanding this relationship, arguing that crisis does not just trigger populism, but that populism also attempts to act as a trigger for crisis. This is because crises are always mediated and ‘performed’. The article presents a six-step model of how populist actors ‘perform’ crisis, drawing on empirical examples from Europe, Latin America, North America and the Asia-Pacific region. It explains how the performance of crisis allows populist actors to pit ‘the people’ against a dangerous other, radically simplify the terrain of political debate and advocate strong leadership. It ultimately suggests that we should move from thinking of crisis as something purely external to populism, towards thinking about the performance of crisis as an internal core feature of populism.
Are legislators responsive to the priorities of the public? Research demonstrates a strong correspondence between the issues about which the public cares and the issues addressed by politicians, but ...conclusive evidence about who leads whom in setting the political agenda has yet to be uncovered. We answer this question with fine-grained temporal analyses of Twitter messages by legislators and the public during the 113th US Congress. After employing an unsupervised method that classifies tweets sent by legislators and citizens into topics, we use vector autoregression models to explore whose priorities more strongly predict the relationship between citizens and politicians. We find that legislators are more likely to follow, than to lead, discussion of public issues, results that hold even after controlling for the agenda-setting effects of the media. We also find, however, that legislators are more likely to be responsive to their supporters than to the general public.
Browning focuses on the importance of empowering women to lead Australia into the future. Women in Australia make up just over half of the Australian population and 47.9% of all employed persons yet ...leadership, decision-making and priority setting has largely been in the hands of men. Research shows that increased female political representation leads to positive outcomes such as budgetary and financial stability, keeping within the legal debit limit in councils and the acceptance of more rigorous climate change policies across countries in national Parliaments. The author reflects on a presentation that she delivered at the 40th CPA Australia and Pacific Regional Conference held in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia which outlined the importance of building capacity among women to stand for election and how the Pathways to Politics for Women supports women to overcome the barriers to entering politics in Australia.
This essay examines the effect of Rwanda's gender quotas on political representation, especially in the Rwandan government, and proposes a few optimizing strategies for it to develop. Rwanda is a ...developing and post-genocide country in Sub-Saharan Africa, in which the average progress in gender equality is low. However, Rwanda outstands and ranks exceptionally high in gender equality, which largely depends on its gender quotas. Therefore, it is valuable to look at this country, which shows great controversy at the regional level. This essay mainly relies on the Literature Research Method, including the use of academic articles, reliable websites, and news reports to conduct the research. It is concluded that the effect on substantive and descriptive women's political representation of the Rwanda gender quota is quite complex and needs improvement. Utilizing party/ legislative gender quotas with rank order or switching the gender quotas to men are two feasible suggestions for Rwandan gender quotas. Through this study, a more critical perspective on gender quotas could be gained. Also, it inspires more thoughts on how gender quotas in post-genocide developing countries could survive and thrive.
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