To elect more women, countries should follow Costa Rica

To elect more women, countries should follow Costa Rica’s lead

BY PAM SHERIDAN
Special to the Rice News

In the past decade, a handful of Latin American countries, as well as Belgium and France, have adopted legislation to improve women’s representation in their legislatures. Not all of these laws have been effective, but in 2002, the percentage of women municipal legislators in Costa Rica was unmatched by any other democratically elected national legislature in the world.

Mark P. Jones, associate professor of political science at Rice, recently completed a study on quota legislation in Costa Rica, where significantly more women have been elected in that country’s municipal elections since 1990. Published in the November 2004 issue of The Journal of Politics, the report sheds light on the reasons for such a mixed record of success with other countries’ quota legislation and what might be learned from Costa Rica’s experience.

“There are few places in the world where there’s genuine equality between men and women and where quota legislation wouldn’t be useful,” Jones said. “Other than in a few Scandinavian countries, that type of equality has been elusive.”

Quota legislation was first adopted in Argentina in 1991, but the issue of women’s electoral representation did not receive worldwide attention until 1995 when the United Nation’s fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing recommended a series of steps to increase the number of women holding public office. In all, 17 democracies have enacted legislation addressing this issue, but many with mixed results.

“There really have only been a few unqualified successes,” Jones said. “One of them has been Costa Rica, whose experience with quota laws offered the best example for studying the circumstances in which they’d be effective and when they might fail.”

Over a relatively short period of time, the legislature in Costa Rica adopted three sets of progressively stringent quota laws, while other factors that may have influenced women’s electoral representation remained unchanged (for example, the political culture, status of women, political parties and the electoral system).

In his study, Jones used data from Costa Rican municipal elections to identify the relative effect of the three forms of quota legislation and compared these to the outcomes of all elections prior to the quota laws. The first quota legislation in 1994 relied on Costa Rica’s political parties to voluntarily increase the participation of women in elections. A second set of laws in 1998 mandated that women occupy at least 40 percent of each party’s candidate list, and in the 2002 election, the law required that women be in at least 40 percent of the electable positions.

Like the United States, Costa Rica is a presidential democracy whose power is distributed among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. Jones chose to analyze its 81 municipal legislatures, whose candidates are elected from closed-party lists.

“Very often, women who were selected to be on these lists were placed at the bottom of the list in positions from which they had no hope of being elected,” Jones said. “It took more than 12 years of constant effort by a strong quota advocacy movement, but their persistence paid off.”

In 1998, the percentage of female legislators increased to 34 percent from 14 percent, and in the 2002 elections, the percentage of women elected to municipal office reached 47 percent — higher than any other democratically elected national legislature.

Jones said Costa Rica’s experience provides “a silver lining for quota supporters in the many countries that have adopted ineffective quota legislation.”

In spite of its flaws, this legislation may provide supporters with leverage that can be used to achieve more effective quota legislation in the future.

“Clearly, stringent requirements are necessary, and supporters of such legislation need to be careful to push for the most effective laws possible,” he said.