"Failures to recruit competent politicians and achieve equal gender representation remain sources of concern in many mature democracies. The academic and popular debate sometimes sees the goals of diversity and competence as in tension with one another. For example, in the debate on gender quotas, it is often claimed that a supply constraint for women results in a quota replacing competent men by mediocre women. We have argued, to the contrary, that achieving gender parity through quotas can actually promote competence by reducing the number of mediocre men. We believe the paper makes theoretical, as well as empirical, contributions. Theoretically, we propose a model, which portrays low representation of women before the quota as an equilibrium outcome that reflects a combination of mediocre leaders, who fear for their own political careers, and weak electoral competition. This model delivers sharp predictions, which we take to the data. Empirically, we find heterogeneous effects of a quota, unilaterally imposed by Sweden’s largest political party, across 290 municipalities. This heterogeneity mirrors the baseline political representation, particularly its dependence on the competence of the male party leadership. Moreover, the findings line up with the theoretical prediction that the competence of male politicians increases more in municipalities where the quota had more bite due to low leadership competence. This pattern is not the consequence of pre-trends in representation, nor is it just a temporary effect." This study uses Swedish data from the proportional list system. Would be interesting to see whether the same effect was produced in FPTP systems. people.su.se/~tpers/papers/Paper_121126.pdf
Posted on: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 12:41:16 +0000
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