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Do Women Always Represent Women? The Effects of Gender Quotas on Substantive Representation

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Abstract

Although studies show that the increasing number of women in the legislature has led to greater representation in social policies, it is often unclear whether the effect is significant for quota-elected women and other legislators. In this study, we examine the case of Taiwan, where quotas have been implemented on one tier in a mixed electoral system. We compiled a data set from over 20 years of records to investigate how quotas affect the initiation and passage of legislation concerning welfare, health, and education issues. Using a difference-in-differences approach coupled with instrumental variable design, we find that gender quotas influence quota-elected women profoundly in initiating welfare and education issues. Moreover, quotas increase the probability of quota-elected women enacting further education issues into law. A related pattern could not be observed for non-quota-elected women throughout the legislative process. Moreover, the findings reveal no spillover effect of quotas on these issues for elected men.

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Data Availability

All data and code necessary for replication purposes can be found on Political Behavior’s Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VHWKQP.

Notes

  1. Appendix Figure S.1 shows that the proportion of female legislators increased by 20% on the PR tier after quota implementation.

  2. Appendix Table S.6 maps out quota implementation and the Taiwanese electoral system.

  3. In total, the data covers six legislative terms.

  4. Appendix Tables S.1 and S.2 present a detailed variable definition and sources for constructing the variables.

  5. The data excluded the last two sessions of the ninth legislature because those sessions were still taking place at the time of data collection.

  6. The Appendix provides a description (Table S.2) and summary statistics (Table S.5) of the control variables.

  7. Before testing our main theoretical implications, findings based on a set of logistic regression models with marginal effects can be found in Appendix Section 8, which tap into the quota effect on legislative initiation (based on binary data) between different legislator groups.

  8. Appendix Table S.10 presents the full findings with controls. Notably, in line with existing research (Achen & Wang, 2017), they reveal no major partisan divide on social policy issues. Table S.10 shows that, in comparison with non-partisan legislators (baseline), DPP and KMT partisanship has very similar effects on social policy legislation. Quite surprisingly, however, representation of Indigenous people does not reveal a significant positive effect on initiation of social policies.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Amy Alexander, Michael Becher, Jens Olav Dahlgaard, David Fortunato, Carsten Jensen, Mads Dagnis Jensen, Mads Meier Jæger, Janine Leschke, Anja Neundorf, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on this study. Any remaining errors are my own.

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  1. Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have 15, 2000, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Suen Wang

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Wang, S. Do Women Always Represent Women? The Effects of Gender Quotas on Substantive Representation. Polit Behav 45, 1979–1999 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09808-z

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