Beyond Gender Quotas: A Multi-Level Approach to Expand Female Political Participation
Institutional barriers to female political participation have fallen worldwide in recent decades, resulting in a dramatic increase in the number of women elected to public office. Despite these gains, women continue to face deep-seated challenges when attempting to seek, win, hold, and succeed in public office. This has significant implications for democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) interventions that aim to promote substantive female political participation.
This brief, developed by the International Republican Institute (IRI) as part of its 2021 Learning Agenda and alongside academic partners at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), offers an overview of the institutional, economic, and cultural hurdles women commonly face throughout the electoral process. The brief concludes with recommendations and good practices for DRG efforts designed to promote women’s political empowerment at three levels of intervention: institutional, candidate, and community.
Key Takeaways:
- Despite reduced legal and institutional barriers to female political participation, significant challenges persist at every stage of the electoral process, categorized here as (i) identifying aspirants, (ii) campaigns, (iii) once elected, and (iv) upward mobility.
- DRG programs designed to expand female political participation generally focus on the candidate and/or institutional level. Such interventions might seek to increase the supply of female candidates by training and encouraging women to run for office, and they might grow demand for such candidates by engaging political parties or encouraging institutional reforms. While vital to expanding the ability of women to engage politically, these types of interventions are often less well-placed to address community-based constraints on women’s political participation.
- Female empowerment programs should expand beyond candidate and institutional engagements to incorporate community-based interventions, which can reduce social and cultural barriers, including gender-based stereotypes.