Unintended Institutional Interactions: Presidential Coattails and Gender Parity Quotas

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211017242
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211017242

Political Research Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211017242

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Several countries have taken explicit efforts to increase

the descriptive representation of women. An increasingly

common tool employed is the adoption of candidate

quotas. However, not all quotas are equally effective.

Research has shown that only properly designed quotas—

those with placement mandates and strong penalties for

non-compliance—have had a significant impact on the

number of women elected to the parliament (Jones 2009).

Those that leave room for the continuation of a male bias

are often taken advantage of. Where a poorly designed

quota law largely leaves open the potential for continued

bias, factors beyond the quota may end up determining its

impact on the number of women who actually end up

obtaining office. Sometimes these other factors take on

different values over time, making the quota’s perfor-

mance seem inconsistent or hard to understand.

Research has shown that in electoral systems where

parties provide lists of candidates to potentially fill mul-

tiple seats, quotas without a placement requirement fre-

quently have little impact. Parties could field some

sought-after number of women but put them in unelectable

list spots. What are known as “zipper” quotas—with can-

didates in list positions alternating by gender—tend to

work significantly better (Schwindt-Bayer 2009). It has

been argued that electoral systems that select one member

of parliament per district are unlikely to pursue the

descriptive representation through quotas because female

candidates cannot be nominated as part of party slate that

also contains (perhaps many more) male candidates.

Potential female candidates are in a zero-sum competi-

tion with their male copartisans (Krook 2018). However,

more recent work has shown that a simple proportional

versus majoritarian distinction is probably not suffi-

ciently nuanced (Krook 2018) and that creative institu-

tional choices in majoritarian systems can work to put

more women in office (Christensen and Bardall 2016).

Since 1991, when the first candidate-based quota was

implemented in Nepal, fifty-two additional countries

have adopted some type of candidate quota.1 The average

candidate quota called for 30.22 percent of candidates to

be women (Hughes et al. 2019). Across these cases, in the

first election after the adoption of the quota, women won

5.83 percent more of the seats in parliament than they had

held in the previous term. While often not having an

immediate impact, the success of candidate quotas seems

to gain momentum over time. In the forty-three countries

that maintained candidate-based quotas, women won

15.06 percent more of the seats in parliament in the most

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17242PRQXXX10.1177/10659129211017242Political Research QuarterlyCunha Silva and Crisp

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1Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Brian F. Crisp, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063,

One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.

Email: crisp@wustl.edu

Unintended Institutional Interactions:

Presidential Coattails and Gender

Parity Quotas

Patrick Cunha Silva1 and Brian F. Crisp1

Abstract

Democratic institutions provide incentives for voters and candidates. When reformers tinker with multiple institutions,

the likely effect of each individual change may be well understood, but their potential interaction may go unanticipated.

Prior to elections in 2002, the French legislature adopted a gender parity candidate quota for parties participating in

parliamentary elections. In addition, voters ratified a constitutional referendum making the president’s term match

that of parliament, and presidential elections were set to be held immediately prior to parliamentary ones. We show

that the unanticipated consequence of these separate institutional reforms was to make the fate of female candidates

for parliament very much a function of presidential coattails. When the party of the president failed to fulfill the

candidate quota, the number of women in parliament showed little change. Conversely, in years when the party of the

president took the candidate quota seriously, the number of women in parliament increased.

Keywords

gender quotas, presidential coattail, electoral calendar, France

2022, Vol. 75(3) 620–631

Article