Person:
Weeks, Ana

Profile Picture

Email Address

AA Acceptance Date

Birth Date

Research Projects

Organizational Units

Job Title

Last Name

Weeks

First Name

Ana

Name

Weeks, Ana

Filters

20161

Settings

Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.4e2cfa61-c436-4b06-92a6-109c880cb0d0

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Publication
    Identity and Policymaking: The Policy Impact of Gender Quota Laws
    (2016-04-20) Weeks, Ana; Iversen, Torben; Hochschild, Jennifer; Baldez, Lisa; Ichino, Nahomi
    Does politician identity matter to policy outcomes? Political scientists tend to be skeptical of the idea because of the strong role of electoral incentives. Yet the argument for greater diversity in public office often relies upon exactly this claim. To make progress on this question, my dissertation examines the political impact of gender quota laws, which require all parties to include a percentage of women in their candidate lists. I argue that quotas help overcome a political market failure, whereby group interests are unlikely to be represented in politics if the group faces high barriers to entry and their interests lie off the main left-right (class-based) dimension in politics. Using survey data, I show that the largest gender gap in advanced democracies exists on maternal employment, and it cuts across partisan ties. I evaluate the argument using a mixed methods approach, combining statistical analysis of time series data with qualitative evidence from two matched pair case studies -- Belgium and Austria, and Portugal and Italy. After showing that quota laws are one of the most important determinants of women's descriptive representation, I demonstrate that they also increase both party- and national-level attention to women's preferences. Implementing a quota law increases coverage of women's social policy concerns in manifestos, and raises public spending on child care, which encourages maternal employment. Evidence from case studies suggests that increased numbers of women and rising issue salience after a quota are both important mechanisms linking quotas to policy change. Overall, the findings provide new insights about when and how politician identity is relevant to policies. Results point towards the importance of descriptive representation particularly when group demands are orthogonal to the left-right dimension. They highlight several ways that quotas, and increased numbers of women, can shift policies even in the context of strong parties.