Robert S. Frank II
PoliSci 339
Dr. Commuri
15 March 2009
There Are More Women in Parliament than Just Dawn Silva
The move toward democracies as the standard for human governance has taken some interesting turns. The world’s oldest constitutional democracy is practically the only one practicing a direct election system for its legislature (the United States), while the country it won its independence from has spread a form of Parliament around the world (the United Kingdom). Since these legislatures are more prominent, it is worth while to examine them and, in the context of the class, to see just how well women have fared in these systems. By the nature of how parliamentary systems work, they offer solutions and workarounds to the problem of the lack of women’s representation in government. Not all parliaments, however, are created equally, nor are they all able to overcome political trends such as entrenchment, party loyalty, and inertia.
In modern democratic political structures, there are two models that hold prevalence in the legislatures of the world. One is the direct-elect houses that have found favor in the United States and, until 2007, Russia. This, however, is by far the minority in legislative systems. Almost all other legislatures are built on a modified “Westminster” system, named from its point of origin, the British Parliament. While most systems provide that some seats are open to general and direct election, the majority of seats are assigned by a form of “proportional representation” that is allocated by the elected political parties. The political parties then seat the Members of Parliament (MPs) into the legislature by various ways, some related to the election itself. The two systems tied to the general election are the open-list and closed-list methods of proportional representation. In the open-list system, the general election also puts forth the names of the candidates the political party proposes to seat as MPs. A vote for each candidate is not only a vote for the party, but is also added to the respective weighting system the party uses to select candidates. This is opposed to the closed-list system, where, in its most extreme form, the internal lists are not posted. Electors vote for an entire party list, and the party itself assigns the seats according to its own inner rules, politics, needs, and ambitions. What makes proportional representation methods more effective in seating women MPs is that it, to different degrees, removes the social (and typically patriarchal) influence of the general public. Unlike American direct-election politics, there is almost always a legitimate degree of competition between candidates; parliamentary elections seldom have show-boating parties running “sacrificial lamb” candidates, which have been argued to turn the American public away from female candidates. As we will see below, each parliamentary election system has its own successes and failures when it comes to incorporating women into political structures.
The greatest success in integrating women into a national political scene has been in the Scandinavian countries: Norway, Denmark, and most notably Sweden. These countries all have high rates of women in the parliamentary structures, and all use the open-list system of MP selection. This trend has been mirrored throughout the northern European area, with constant gains in proportion of women sitting in parliaments in the rest of the European Union states, albeit lagging behind Scandinavia. These Nordic nations have had certain factors that have encouraged a more egalitarian outlook toward political participation. The countries here all lead the world in percentage of population having obtained a higher education degree, all are large-scale welfare states, have traditionally left-leaning (liberal) governments, and were early adopters of women’s suffrage rights. These factors have all lead to a higher percentage of people living within these countries to have a greater perception of political participation to go along with their egalitarian systems, and with that awareness, a greater tendency to accept female candidates who stand for election.
The open-list method, however, is not universally successful. In developing countries where local politics, attitudes, and mores still hold sway, the open-list structure allows for the general population to have their say on MP lists and have traditionally slowed the rate of women into the political structures. In Brazil, the government passed a decree that thirty percent of legislative seats should go to women MPs. In the first election, however, membership decreased slightly, and (with the solitary exception of the small state of Tocantins) has failed to even come close to achieving this goal. Being a decree of intent and still subject to the will of popular vote in the open-list system has not given this effort the “bite” it needs to quickly seat large numbers of female MPs. An even more extreme example is Chile’s new government following the overthrow of the Pinochet regime, where female membership in the parliament went from a sizeable majority to nonexistent in the first round of balloting.
In some countries, this has led to the specific and measured adoption of the closed-list system. Since the populace at large no longer has any influence on the selection process, the governments then simply mandate to the political parties a certain percentage of representation on many levels, including that of the gender of the people selected as MPs. In this setting, achieving the desired level of representation is simply a matter of government setting a policy that the parties have to follow. As opposed to Chile and Brazil, this is the method of MP selection used by Argentina to seat members. Removed from both the views of the general population and the internal politics of the parties, women are seated at the going governmental rate of thirty percent. This is taken to its largest extreme in the African country of Rwanda. There, the government mandates that forty eight percent of all seats must be allocated to women, giving them near parity.
But simply seating women does not necessarily give them a voice in parliamentary affairs. The effectiveness of female MPs has been measured in several studies around the world, tracking their influence in decision making, law drafting, and public issue debate. The consensus is that, by and large, women tend to be more comfortable with committee politics as opposed to on-floor debates. In Australia, this has been tied with the public’s growing discomfort with the confrontational and heated debates in their national assembly in the television era, with the Australian Democrats leader referring to them as “ritual stag fights”. Watching these debates, the public perception is that it is mostly posturing and not enough is getting done on the floor, rather they imagine progress in lawmaking is being made in the back-room councils and committees that are apparently more in favor to women MPs. However, when one looks at the National Assemblies of Wales and Scotland, women have little trouble voicing their views. These devolved regional parliaments still defer most of the foreign policy decisions to Westminster and therefore are in place to deal with primarily local and social issues, traditionally the “women’s issues” in political science. In the Welsh assembly, with its local and social focus, women’s participation is not restricted to the committee room. Rather, they show a remarkable tendency, even across party lines, to speak out on issues such as women’s equality policy, housing, and public health.
In other regions, however, other factors have combined to restrict the supposed gains that were to be had by increasing the representation of women. As is to be expected, this takes greatly different forms in various regions in the world. Going back to Australia, the recent trend in the creation of party lists has been a focus on “professional” members. The parties have been placing less and less emphasis on drawing from the ranks of community organizers, rank and file volunteers, and the traditional machine selection systems, and have started opting for parliamentary candidates who have had careers in law and/or local direct-selection government. These areas have traditionally been underrepresented by women and are beginning to show a reduction in number of women candidates on the lists, but not in the number selected. In Brazil, however, a different mechanism is at work. There, the local women’s organizations and political alliances have been seen to have been co-opted by the government itself. The public perception then follows that these NGOs are, in fact, profoundly influential on the government and that claims that “women’s issues” are not being addressed are unfounded, taking place at a quasi-ministerial level rather than in parliamentary halls. Rwanda shows a far more traditional trap for women MPs: internal politics. Being a one-party system, the rise to political position is governed entirely by maneuvering within the structure of the party. Women MPs, once they gain a seat within the assembly, then have a tendency to feel beholden to the policies of the party which may not always promote an agenda favorable to the interests of Rwandan women. Finally, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the prestige attached to being a parliamentarian in the new democracies of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania caused men to seek these positions with more aggressiveness. The old Soviet Councils had significant female participation; these numbers were reduced to zero in the initial 1992 elections. As time passed, the glamour waned and the positions became more open and “accessible to hitherto disadvantaged social categories” including women.
The final divide on the effectiveness on women in parliament centers on the differences between how conservative and liberal governments promote women’s participation in government. Liberal parties, as shown above, have had little qualms about setting quotas to establish a degree of women’s actual presence in government. There is little doubt that, in places, the numbers of female MPs have increased dramatically, especially in quota backed closed-listed elections. The conservative view, though, has centered on mentoring programs to increase women’s desire to enter the political field. Studies have shown that while liberal parties have seated more women in parliaments, conservative parties have almost as many ‘effective’ members in chambers, having been more specifically trained for the role. This holds true in most parliamentary systems as well as the United States.
The key factor in the level of participation, as well as what type of parliamentary election is most effective, is the location of the country. Open-list election success relies on high levels of both education and economic well being. Sweden, Wales, and Australia all have stable governments and high relative rates of women participation and effectiveness. Short-term and immediate gains that help offset cultural conventions and prejudices are best resolved with closed-list elections. Argentina and Rwanda both came out of civil strife (an economic collapse and a civil war) and installed systems of more equitable fairness to all minorities, including women. Brazil, Chile, and the Baltic States still lag behind in female MP representation rates after the governmental changes.
Finally, it is interesting to note that there are two countries that, although modern, industrial, and well educated states, lag far behind all others: Japan and Korea. Both nations have had very ultra-conservative governments dominate for a long time. In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party held an absolute majority in the Diet until 1989. With that election, women’s representation in the legislature doubled. Korea did not even grant woman’s suffrage until 1984, meaning that women have only had practical experience in the political arena for the last thirty-odd years.
The parliamentary system of proportional representation allows states the flexibility to reconfigure their legislatures to accommodate the needs of the country at a particular time, due in large part to the changeability of the internal rules of order. No such reconfiguration is possible in the United States, where to change the make-up of representative’s districts must be redrawn into odd shapes in a process known as “gerrymandering”. States that have an immediate need to change the makeup of the legislature need only to pass a rule of order to set a quota. By the statistics and research, the type of election can be altered to allow greater input from a well-informed populace or narrowed to prevent old prejudices from being mirrored in the assemblies. The parliamentary system has served Europe well as it has expanded the notion of civil rights in the last two hundred fifty years, and has also provided a voice for women practically overnight in newly emerging democracies. Parliamentary proportional representation has not been a universal success in granting women a vote, but it has been a strong tool in finally bringing gender balance to the halls of power.
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