The importance of party ideology: Explaining parliamentarian support for political party gender quotas in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Party gender quotas are rules voluntarily adopted within political party structures that aim at securing a set percentage of women to appear on candidate lists in elections for political office. Although parliamentarian support is critical to the adoption and enforcement of party gender quotas, empirical studies of parliamentarian opinion on this matter are few, and none are concerned with countries of Eastern Europe. In the context of Poland, this study addresses two main questions: (a) why do some parliamentarians support party gender quotas? And (b) what are the most important reasons? Using survey data on Polish parliamentarians, I examine the role of three major determinants of variation in party gender quota support: parliamentarian’s gender; economic and religious political party ideologies; and placement on the candidate list. Cross-tabulations reveal that women parliamentarians and parliamentarians from parties with economic statist and anti-clerical ideologies are more likely to support quotas than are those from economic liberal and Catholic traditionalist parties. In addition, parliamentarians placed low on the party’s electoral list in the previous election are more likely to support quotas than those placed at the top. Logistic regression analyses including all these determinants show that the only statistically significant effects pertain to economic and religious party ideologies. Discussion of the theoretical implications of party ideology being the most important explanatory factor for parliamentarian support of party gender quotas concludes this article.

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