Resolving the Democracy Paradox: Democratization and Women’s Legislative Representation in Developing Nations, 1975-2009
View/ Open
ASR 2012_1.pdf (753.3Kb)
Access Status
Full text of the requested work is not available in DASH at this time ("restricted access"). For more information on restricted deposits, see our FAQ.Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412443365Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Fallon, Kathleen M., Liam Swiss, and Jocelyn Viterna. 2012. “Resolving the Democracy Paradox.” American Sociological Review 77 (3) (May 7): 380–408. doi:10.1177/0003122412443365.Abstract
Increasing levels of democratic freedoms should, in theory, improve women’s access to political positions. Yet studies demonstrate that democracy does little to improve women’s legislative representation. To resolve this paradox, we investigate how variations in the democratization process—including pre-transition legacies, historical experiences with elections, the global context of transition, and post-transition democratic freedoms and quotas—affect women’s representation in developing nations. We find that democratization’s effect is curvilinear. Women in non-democratic regimes often have high levels of legislative representation but little real political power. When democratization occurs, women’s representation initially drops, but with increasing democratic freedoms and additional elections, it increases again. The historical context of transition further moderates these effects. Prior to 1995, women’s representation increased most rapidly in countries transitioning from civil strife—but only when accompanied by gender quotas. After 1995 and the Beijing Conference on Women, the effectiveness of quotas becomes more universal, with the exception of post- communist countries. In these nations, quotas continue to do little to improve women’s representation. Our results, based on pooled time series analysis from 1975 to 2009, demonstrate that it is not democracy—as measured by a nation’s level of democratic freedoms at a particular moment in time—but rather the democratization process that matters for women’s legislative representation.Citable link to this page
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33431738
Collections
- FAS Scholarly Articles [17917]
Contact administrator regarding this item (to report mistakes or request changes)
Comments made during the workflow steps
Viterna emailed 2016-05-18 MM Viterna emailed 2017-03-09 MM meta.dark