Increasing the Number of Women in Latin American Politics

Socioeconomic and cultural gender equality has significantly improved in Latin America since many countries in the region transitioned to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s. The gap between women’s and men’s participation in the paid labor force has decreased by almost half since 1990, and women’s enrollment in higher education now outpaces men’s in much of the region.¹ The influence of the Catholic Church on politics and society has declined, which has helped loosen traditional gender role expectations and allowed for the development of more supportive attitudes toward gender equality in society and politics. As of 2008, only the Dominican Republic had less than half of its population “disagree” or “strongly disagree” that men make better political leaders than women (43 percent), and support for women in politics ranged between 69 percent (Colombia) and 77 percent (Bolivia) in all other countries (Morgan and Buice 2013).

Modernization theories argue that these trends should increase gender equality in governments because women are increasingly part of the pool of potential candidates for political office, and because cultural attitudes have become more accepting of women in what have been traditionally male roles (Camp 1998; Craske 1999; Inglehart and Norris 2003; Staudt 1998). This logic appears to have some merit, if one is comparing regional averages of societal gender equality and women’s presence in office, focusing on some exceptional countries. Since 1990, six women have been elected president—Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua (1990–1997), Mireya Moscoso in Panama (1999–2004), Michelle Bachelet in Chile (2006–2010; 2014–2018), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina (2007–2011; 2011–2015), Dilma Rousseff in Brazil² (2011–2015; 2015–2016), and Laura Chinchilla in Costa Rica (2010–2014). In addition, presidents throughout the region have increasingly appointed experienced women to their cabinets, with a rare cabinet even achieving gender parity (e.g., Chile in 2006). The average percentage of Latin America’s national legislatures that is female has more than doubled since 1995 to 25 percent (IPU 2016), and four Latin American countries are among the top 10 in the world in terms of women’s representation in national parliaments—Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Women make up more than 40 percent of congress in each (IPU 2016). In subnational governments and political parties, women’s presence hovers around 25 percent, on average, as well (Escobar-Lemmon and Funk 2018; Morgan and Hinojosa 2018).

Yet modernization in the region has not produced full gender equality in politics. Despite cultural and socioeconomic improvements in the region, 12 of 18 Latin American democracies have never elected a female president. Of the six countries that have had female presidents, three rank near the bottom in terms of women’s representation in national legislatures—Panama, Chile, and Brazil. Chile has had a parity cabinet, but it is also one of the countries with the lowest representation of women in congress, political party leadership, and subnational offices. Similarly, whereas women’s representation has nearly doubled in national legislatures, it has remained almost constant in subnational legislatures (Escobar-Lemmon and Funk 2018). Within government arenas, representation is also highly gendered, with rules and norms such as seniority, “old boys clubs,” and gendered divisions of labor that advantage men, disadvantage women, and limit women’s access to full political power (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2016; Schwindt-Bayer 2010). These inconsistencies in women’s representation across government arenas in Latin American countries and the unequal access to power for women in politics cannot be explained by country-level changes in socioeconomic and cultural gender inequality over the last 30 years.

What are the reasons, then, for women’s political inequality in Latin America? This issue brief includes key findings from a recently published book that I edited, Gender and Representation in Latin America, which determines the factors that help increase women’s political presence in Latin American governments. The book shows that institutions—the rules and norms about how politics operates—and political contexts play a critical role in explaining women’s representation in government. Political institutions that prioritize gender equality and establish rules that provide opportunities for women can facilitate women’s entry to government posts. In addition, governments that are not mired in crises, are led by leftist parties that are more likely to promote gender equality, and are supported by party politics that are not fragmented among numerous factions produce environments in which more women get elected and appointed to political office. Of course, what these facilitating institutions look like and how political contexts affect women varies from one arena of government to another. The brief summarizes these issues.

Candidate Selection

One key factor that may affect gender representativeness in Latin America is who selects candidates for election or appoints political leaders to nonelected posts. Hinojosa (2012) argued that centralized candidate selection processes facilitate women’s access to candidacies and political appointments. Gender and Representation in Latin America provides compelling evidence to support this. In Argentina, for example, centralized candidate selection norms in the Partido Justicialista (PJ) were key to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s election as president after her husband served his term (Barnes and Jones 2018). Similarly, women in Chile have had more success securing appointed posts than elected positions. A key reason for women’s success in cabinets, specifically, is the fact that cabinet appointments are made by one person—the president—rather than being in the hands of myriad party and coalition leaders, as is the case for nominating candidates for Chile’s legislative elections (Franceschet 2018). One reason women do poorly in Brazilian legislative elections is that nomination is highly decentralized (Araújo, Calasanti, and Htun 2018). This creates weak party leaders and encourages candidates to self-nominate, which women are less likely to do. Politicians also must rely on traditional political networks, which women historically have had less access to, in order to enter or remain in both elected and appointed office.

Informal party norms, however, can moderate the effect of centralized candidate selection processes or directly work to limit women’s access to political office. Women’s absence from party leadership in Argentina is often a direct result of the fact that leadership selection occurs through informal processes and backroom deals largely conducted by men (Barnes and Jones 2018). In Uruguay, a lack of formal selection rules in most parties creates informal norms that are “male biased” and disadvantage women’s election opportunities (Johnson 2018). Candidate selection is centralized among the leaders of specific factions within political parties, but factions informally negotiate to choose which candidates are placed on the party ballot. This puts women at a disadvantage because it leads to “recruitment by patronage,” and women are often absent from patronage networks. The norms of proportionality used to allocate faction candidates to party ballots leave little room for consideration of other criteria, such as gender.

Gender Quotas

Many parties and governments have adopted gender quota rules that explicitly aim to increase women’s presence in politics. Quotas have been a successful mechanism for increasing the number of women in legislatures, subnational governments, and political parties in Latin America. National legislatures with quotas have, on average, 10 percentage points more women than national legislatures without quotas. Further, well-designed quotas requiring a higher percentage of the ballot to be female, placement mandates that require women to be in electable positions on ballots (i.e., positions where they have a reasonable probability of winning a seat), and enforcement mechanisms to ensure party compliance do much better than poorly designed quotas (i.e., those with small quota sizes and the absence of placement mandates and enforcement mechanisms) (Schwindt-Bayer and Alles 2018). Subnational legislatures with quotas also feature more women than those without quotas (Escobar-Lemmon and Funk 2018), and quotas for party leadership explain some of the differences in women’s representation as party leaders. Additionally, the 2009 Mexican quota reform was critical to increasing women’s representation in the Mexican congress in recent years (Zetterberg 2018).

Quotas are not a guaranteed solution to political gender inequality, however. Parties that wish to subvert quota rules have been able to do so either by adopting weak and ineffective quotas or finding loopholes in existing laws. Many Mexican parties adopted primary elections in part as a way to bypass the 2000 quota law because the law did not apply to parties using primary elections (Zetterberg 2018). This exception was reformed in 2009. In Uruguay, a quota was adopted in 2009 and was to be implemented in only one election in 2014. Its implementation led to approximately only 20 percent of the congress being female, however, because small districts and the small number of candidates elected from each party in those districts reduced the effectiveness of the quota (Johnson 2018). In Brazil, the quota passed in 1996 only required parties to reserve ballot positions for women but not actually fill them, which significantly watered down the quota (Araújo, Calasanti, and Htun 2018). That loophole was closed with the 2009 quota reform, but women’s legislative representation still has not improved dramatically.³

Even in contexts where quotas were well designed and have been effective, party elites often do not apply gender parity rules to the top positions on the ballot. In Uruguay’s 2014 election, women were poorly represented in top positions in small districts, leading to no more women getting elected than were elected in 2009, prior to the quota (Johnson 2018). In Costa Rica, women’s representation significantly increased after the implementation of a much stronger quota in 2002, but improvements have been inconsistent since then, even with the adoption of a zipper quota (i.e., a quota requiring the alternation of women and men on the ballot) (Piscopo 2018). A key explanation Piscopo (2018) noted for the subsequent weak improvement was that women were less likely to lead party ballots (i.e., be represented at the head of the ballot). Similarly, in Costa Rican mayoral races, parties simply nominated women as mayoral candidates in the districts they thought they were less likely to win to get around the quota.

Thus, quotas are an important tool for increasing women’s representation in Latin American politics. However, they only work when parties and male elites rally behind the quotas’ spirit of gender equality.

Electoral Rules

Electoral rules are also important for increasing women’s representation in elected offices in Latin America. One of the most important rules is district magnitude (M)—the number of representatives elected from an electoral district. Small electoral districts hurt women’s electoral opportunities because they discourage parties from paying attention to gender balance across the ballot. With few positions to nominate, parties are more likely to stick to status quo politicians, which have traditionally been men. This challenge is particularly evident in Chile. Until recently, Chile’s national lower house had a district magnitude of 2 in every electoral district, along with a rule requiring a party to secure twice as many votes as the second-place party in a district in order to win both seats.⁴ This, coupled with coalition norms that require parties within a coalition to negotiate over the candidates put on the ballot, significantly limits the number of female candidates and, subsequently, members of congress (Franceschet 2018).

In contrast, Mexico demonstrates that the use of a mixed electoral system, in which one tier uses a proportional representation system with a large district magnitude (M = 40), has been instrumental to women’s electoral success in the national congress, particularly when combined with a strong gender quota (Zetterberg 2018). In Uruguay, more women were elected in larger magnitude districts in both national and subnational legislatures before the quota went into effect in 2014. After the quota was implemented, it led to more women getting elected in large magnitude districts but not in small magnitude ones, thus highlighting the power of district magnitude (Johnson 2018).

Other electoral rules also hurt women’s election or appointment chances, such as the candidate-centered nature of the party system and the use of suplente (substitute) systems that require parties to nominate primary candidates along with substitutes to a party ballot. Brazil and Colombia illustrate how open-list proportional representation and the candidate-centered election norms that result from it put women at a disadvantage (Araújo, Calasanti, and Htun 2018; Pachón and Lacouture 2018). In Brazil, specifically, the candidate-centered electoral system has hurt women’s election chances because such systems create contests in which personal resources and political capital, which women have less of in Brazil, are critical to winning (Araújo, Calasanti, and Htun 2018). Uruguay, Colombia, and Costa Rica (at the subnational level) have used suplente systems for their elections, and they have allowed party leaders to put women in secondary, less important positions on the ballot and still claim gender representation (Johnson 2018; Piscopo 2018). As Johnson (2018) notes, suplentes often do the majority of the grunt work but do not garner the visibility or resources needed to sustain a political career.

The Power and Prestige of Political Offices

Norms of power and prestige in various political offices also help to explain why women have not been elected or appointed to some offices in Latin America. In general, the more prestigious and powerful the political office, the less likely it is to be held by a woman (Schwindt-Bayer and Squire 2014). This is evident in Latin American cabinets, where women’s representation has increased overall but women still are rarely appointed to the powerful economy ministry (Taylor-Robinson and Gleitz 2018). It also is evident in party leadership positions, where the posts that women get appointed to most often are not those that are the most powerful and prestigious or that have control over candidate selection (Morgan and Hinojosa 2018). Similarly, research has found that the increasing economic power of local executives as a result of fiscal decentralization in Latin America makes mayoral offices more attractive to male candidates, which crowds out women (Escobar-Lemmon and Funk 2018). In countries with particularly powerful executive posts (e.g., governors and mayors in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico), fewer women hold office.

Political Crises

Political crises have had paradoxical effects on gender equality in politics. On one hand, they have spurred political parties and voters to look for candidates outside the traditional class of political elites in order to break with incumbents whom voters blame for their country’s poor political, economic, and social performance. For example, intraparty turmoil and crises have helped several Latin American women become elected president because women represent “continuity and change” (Reyes-Housholder and Thomas 2018). Laura Chinchilla in Costa Rica illustrates this well; she provided “continuity” by being former President Óscar Arias’ choice for a successor but also “renewal” by being a woman (Piscopo 2018). Similarly, Michelle Bachelet in Chile benefited from being considered outside the core group of disparaged party elites in the Concertación coalition when she was elected president in 2006 (Franceschet 2018).

On the other hand, however, women who are elected in contexts of crisis enter political environments in which they are most likely to fail, which in turn makes women appear unsuited for the job or incapable of being good political leaders. This has been called the “glass cliff” theory (Bruckmüller and Branscombe 2010; Ryan and Haslam 2005) and has been raised as a potential problem for women who run for office in Costa Rica in the post-Chinchilla period. The crises that enveloped the Chinchilla government may have long-term negative consequences for how citizens and elites view women in politics (Piscopo 2018).

Ideology

The rise of the left in Latin America, starting with the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998, was a boost for women in politics in the region. Leftist parties have nominated more women to election ballots and elected more women to legislatures than rightist parties in many countries in the region (Araújo, Calasanti, and Htun 2018; Johnson 2018; Piscopo 2018). Five of the six elected female presidents in Latin America won office after the left turn, and four of them were elected from left or left-of-center parties (Reyes-Housholder and Thomas 2018). Leftist political parties have also attained greater gender equality in party leadership posts. Again, using Costa Rica as an example, the center-left National Liberation Party (PLN) had gender parity in its party leadership, whereas women made up only 25 percent of the party leadership in the center-right Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC) (Morgan and Hinojosa 2018).

Party System Fragmentation

Increased fragmentation in party politics and party systems in Latin America has created real challenges for gender equality in government. Even countries that have had two or three main political parties for the better part of the last century have experienced a decline in legislative seats and vote shares in recent elections amid the emergence of new parties. This fragmentation has been an obstacle to women’s representation, as statistical evidence indicates that party system fragmentation reduces the percentage of a national legislature that is female and limits the effectiveness of gender quotas (Schwindt-Bayer and Alles 2018). This occurs because more parties in a district means seats are more likely to be spread across many different parties and each party wins only a small number of seats. Reducing the “party magnitude” like this has the same effect as small district magnitudes on women’s representation. Fragmentation makes candidacies at the top of the ballot, where women are less likely to be located, critical for getting elected.

Conclusion

Latin American countries’ transitions to democracy brought increased cultural and socioeconomic equality for women. Yet this did not translate directly into gains for women in the political arena. Increasing gender equality in political representation is not just a question of improving citizens’ attitudes toward women in politics, getting more women to aspire to politics, or building a larger base of women with the qualifications and experiences needed for office. Crafting rules and norms that explicitly take gender equality concerns into account and taking advantage of political contexts that can boost women’s opportunities are critical strategies for increasing the political presence of women in Latin America. Governments and elites should continue to pay attention to gender equality in politics and consider efforts to further promote equality. Time will not bring change on its own.

Endnotes

1. Based on data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, women’s labor force participation in the region in 1990 was 42 percent, compared to 85 percent for men; it has increased to 57 percent for women, compared to 84 percent for men, in 2014. In 1970, women’s enrollment in higher education in Latin America was half that of men’s, but today it is one-third larger.

2. Rousseff was impeached before her second term was completed.

3. Women’s candidacies, however, did increase in 2014 to record numbers.

4. Elections at the end of 2017 occurred under new electoral rules.

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