Introduction

• Date: 01 August 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12078
• Published date: 01 August 2015
• Author: Peverill Squire

Introduction

Beginning in the 1990s, a number of countries started implement-

ing electoral rules designed to increase the number of women serving in

their national legislatures. The relative success of these rules is examined

by Pamela Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes. They look at data from 145

countries at f‌ive-year intervals between 1990 and 2010. They f‌ind that

the sort of quota rules imposed make a considerable difference in the

number of women elected. Not surprisingly, reserved quotas, those that

assign a specif‌ic number of seats to be held by women, are the most

effective. Candidate quotas, rules that specify the proportion of candidate

slots political parties must allot to women, tend to be less effective,

depending importantly on the target set and the penalties assessed for

failure to meet the goal. But in perhaps the most interesting f‌inding

Paxton and Hughes report, it appears that considerable learning took

place over the time period they examine, with candidate quotas adopted

in the later time periods being set at higher levels and penalties strength-

ened in response to the perceived failures of those implemented earlier.

They also f‌ind that quota rules are not only becoming more effective

over time because targets and penalties have been increased, but because

it appears that the acceptance of the right of women to participate in the

electoral process has become a political norm.

It is widely agreed that in the United States the president is the

most important actor in the nation’s political system. But how the presi-

dent constructs the policy agenda that the administration presents to Con-

gress is not well understood. In their article, Jeremy Gelman, Gilad

Wilkenfeld, and E. Scott Adler propose a theory that presidents build

their legislative agendas around both opportunities presented by expiring

laws and issues that emerge as salient to the American public. Specif‌i-

cally, they argue that when Congress has to reauthorize legislation, the

president seizes the opportunity to attach additional proposals related to

the issue at hand. Additionally, when an issue becomes salient, presi-

dents respond by increasing the number of legislative requests in that

subject area. Testing their hypotheses on presidential legislative pro-

posals in 12 major issue areas from 1981 through 2008, they report

results that conf‌irm their theory that presidents largely respond to the

opportunities the political environment presents to them, rather than

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 40, 3, August 2015 327

DOI: 10.1111 /lsq.12078

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C2015 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa