Quotas for Women in Politics

In recent years, political parties and national legislatures in more than 100 countries have adopted quotas for the selection of female candidates to political office. Despite the rapid diffusion of these measures around the globe, most research has focused on single countries — or, at most, the presence of quotas within one world region — and thus explains their adoption and impact based on a limited range of evidence, which frequently contradicts with findings from other cases. In contrast, this book addresses quotas as a global phenomenon in order to provide greater analytical leverage in explaining their spread and impact in diverse contexts around the world. It is organized around two sets of questions.…