ABSTRACT
Women form more than half the population in most countries around the world, but until very recently, constituted only a small minority of all political representatives. This pattern has begun to change as women’s groups around the world have mobilised for measures to increase the proportion of women elected to political office. While only about 20 countries had some sort of quota policy prior to 1990, quotas appeared in more than 50 states in the 1990s and more than 40 more since the year 2000.1 The global diffusion of any policy is a notable development, but the rapid diffusion of candidate gender quotas per se is particularly remarkable. This is because positive action for women in electoral processes challenges, and even contradicts, a number of other recent trends in international and feminist politics, namely rising neo-liberalism, supposed decline in women’s movement activity, growing scepticism about the unity of ‘women’ as a category, and ongoing challenges to links between descriptive and substantive representation. The spread of gender quotas thus raises two related sets of questions. First, why have quotas been so readily adopted in diverse countries around the world? Second, does the apparently widespread support for quotas constitute a demand articulated by a new global women’s movement, or instead, reflect a more cynical attempt among elites to mask other struggles under the guise of concern for the political status of women?
