In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

>> 127 7 Conclusion Why Contagion Matters This book set out to examine the influences of contagion on women’s political representation. As we have defined it here, contagion is the influence of women’s participation and political gains in one institution on others. To examine these influences, we studied legislatures, executive offices, high courts, and the adoption of voluntary and compulsory quotas in democracies across the globe from 1945 to 2006. We find strong evidence that one institution can influence others. Our results suggest that future work should consider such influences as we further explore women’s political participation. While there is strong evidence of contagion overall, the results of this book show that contagion’s influence manifests itself in different ways, depending on the institution under study. When we considered legislatures, we found that the lagged percentage of women in the legislature was a significant predictor of women’s political participation. This suggests that women’s 128 > 129 What is more surprising is that contagion fails to influence women’s representation on high courts in an expanded sample of countries outside the advanced, industrialized OECD. While a number of other variables had different effects across the two models (discussed later), the results suggest that all high courts may not be comparable, so understanding women’s gains in this institution may require more theoretical work about selection and judicial independence. Because the first gains by women came in the institutions of the legislature and the executive, we considered the influences of contagion in more traditional institutions before examining its influence on other types of institutions , such as parties and quotas. Nonetheless, we still find strong results for the influences of contagion when we move to newer institutions. The adoption of voluntary party quotas, for example, shows contagion’s significant effects on the time to adoption and the incidence of voluntary quotas. Increasing the percentage of women in the legislature decreases the time to the adoption of a voluntary party quota and increases the probability any party will adopt a voluntary quota, in part because there are more politically powerful women to push for such initiatives. Similarly, the presence of compulsory party quota laws and of greater numbers of other parties with quotas significantly reduces the time to adoption of a voluntary quota for any particular party. It also increases the probability that any party will adopt this type of quota. These results suggest that, as parties see the costs of such measures changing, they move toward adoption . The presence of a compulsory quota means that a voluntary party quota comes at no cost—the resulting change in the number of female legislators is already determined, so the party can enjoy the benefit of creating the voluntary quota to curry favor with women. In like fashion, as the parties around them adopt voluntary quotas, the pressure on any individual party to adopt a voluntary quota increases, as well; they need to stay competitive in the electorate . The Swedish case best highlights this phenomenon; were it not for left-wing parties’ early adoption of voluntary quotas, Sweden might not have such a significant number of women participating in politics today. The influence of contagion on the adoption of national quotas (either compulsory party or reserved seat) is more mixed than what we saw for voluntary quotas. Contagion had no effect on the time to adoption of a national quota, and the incidence of quotas could be negatively influenced by women ’s gains in other offices, which we discuss more fully later. The number of parties with voluntary quotas was positively associated with the adoption of a compulsory party quota, while the adoption of reserved-seat quotas was significantly more likely where women had served as the executive. Ireland is 130 > 131 and women’s labor force participation show the most mixed results, suggesting that, while a threshold of development or labor participation is positively associated with women’s political participation, both variables can cut against women’s participation when the values are extremely high or have no effect if they are extremely low. Traditions of women’s participation have more consistent effects on participation . We found that, across institutions, when the years since suffrage variable was significantly related to participation, it was positively signed. The importance of these traditions of women’s political participation cannot be stressed enough. Women typically have to participate as voters if they are to develop interest and ambition to serve in office themselves or to develop the...

Share