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Ratchets and See-Saws: Exploring Temporal Patterns in Women’s Political Representation
John A. Scherpereel James Madison University
scherpja@jmu.edu
Suraj Jacob James Madison University
jacobsx@jmu.edu
Melinda Adams James Madison University
adams2mj@jmu.edu Abstact This paper takes up Darhour and Dahlerup’s (2013) call to determine factors that promote the “sustainable representation of women in politics.” We conceptualize and analyze within-country temporal variation in women’s political representation. We introduce two concepts: the ratchet effect and the see-saw effect. Legislatures are generally characterized by ratchet effects: levels of women’s representation tend to rise over time and experience little backsliding. Cabinets, in contrasts, are often characterized by see-saw effects: representational gains are often followed by declines .After establishing these different patterns, we explore factors that account for variation in the extent of cabinet see-sawing experienced by states. Drawing on case studies of Ireland, Poland, and Japan, we suggest that leadership characteristics, institutional characteristics (particularly the structure of executive-legislative relations), and the structure and focus of women’s movements affect representational trajectories. Paper prepared for presentation at the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research, Salamanca, April 2014.
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Levels of women’s political representation in legislature have increased steadily over
time. Figure 1, which plots a long time series of global mean and median values, demonstrates
this trend.1 Even though overall levels of women’s legislative representation still fall far below
parity, the steady forward march in legislative representation is heartening.
To what extent do similar trends characterize cabinets? Because scholars of women and
politics are ultimately interested in women’s relationship to power, and because cabinet positions
often carry more power than legislative positions, this is an important question to answer. Until
recently, however, the lack of global time series data has made it difficult to explore systematic
time trends for cabinets. The time series data collected by Jacob, Scherpereel, and Adams (2014)
and summarized in Figure 2 reveals a trend line that, at first glance, closely resembles the global
trend line for legislatures.
Together, Figures 1 and 2 seem to imply that countries are making slow but steady
progress in both legislatures and cabinets. The paper begins, however, by stressing that
aggregated trend lines can be misleading. We argue, in fact, that legislatures and cabinets are
subject to quite different dynamics. For legislatures, individual countries rarely experience
representational backsliding. Rather, a ratchet effect generally pertains: the gains that women
make in a country’s legislature, however modest, are typically not reversed, and progress is
cumulative.
We argue that there is no equivalent ratcheting in the realm of women’s cabinet
representation. The global trend line for cabinets resembles the global trend line for legislatures,
1 The data are from Paxton, Green, and Hughes (2003), supplemented by Inter-Parliamentary Union data for later years.
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but the cabinet line masks major cross-country variation. The global average is slowly increasing
each year, but individual countries are moving in very different directions. In many countries,
there is a significant increase in women’s cabinet participation one year, followed by a dramatic
decrease in the next year or two. While gains in legislative representation seem to “lock in,”
increases in women’s cabinet participation are often much more precarious. We describe this
phenomenon as a see-saw effect—an asymmetric process in which countries often experience one
or more step back for every two steps forward. Here, we document the see-saw effect and begin
to examine why backsliding (declines in women’s cabinet presence) occurs more often in some
countries than others.
We seek to highlight the difference between the legislative ratchet and the cabinet see-
saw, to explore possible sources of variation in the extent of cabinet see-sawing, and to trace out
methodological and policy implications of the different temporal dynamics that characterize
legislatures and cabinets. Analyzing three cases with different extents of see-sawing—Ireland
(low), Poland (medium), and Japan (high)—we argue that the system of legislative-executive
relations, the preferences of heads of government, and the structures and priorities of the
domestic women's movement help to explain cross-country variation. Leaders who are party
outsiders are more likely to appoint women to cabinet posts. Their ability to appoint women is
affected by their countries’ institutions (e.g., rules regarding who may serve as a minister) and
the strength and focus of women’s movements. Shifts from outsiders to party insiders tend to
promote backsliding, especially in countries where women’s movements are weak and focused
on issues other than women’s political representation.
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Global Trends in Women’s Representation
Legislatures: The ratchet effect
For legislatures, trends within individual countries generally mirror global developments;
countries tend to experience slow and steady upward movement. This is somewhat remarkable:
not only do global averages increase year-on-year, but this trend is reflected in the relative
absence of year-on-year reductions in individual countries. To demonstrate this point, we
introduce two simple concepts, backsliding and upward movement. Backsliding for year t is
defined as the change in representation between t-1 and t if the change is negative, and upward
movement is defined as change in representation between t-1 and t if the change is positive.
Figure 3 plots time-series graphs for the percentage of countries with annual backslides and
upward movements in women’s legislative representation. The majority of countries show no
annual variation, which is not surprising given that legislative terms typically last several years.
However, the percentage of countries with annual backslides is particularly low for all years. The
number of countries backsliding in a given year is less than half of the number of countries
experiencing annual upward movements. The figure reveals the presence of a ratchet effect for
most of the world’s legislatures.
A well-established literature directs attention to the factors that affect women’s
legislative representation worldwide (Caul 1999; Matland 1998; Paxton & Hughes 2007, 2010;
Stockemer 2009; Viterna, Fallon, and Beckfield 2008; Wangnerud 2009). Within the legislative
literature, scholars have juxtaposed two pathways—the incremental approach versus the fast-
track approach (Dahlerup and Freidenvall 2005)—through which the proportion of women in
office has increased. In countries characterized by the incremental approach, there is a slow but
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steady growth in the proportion of women legislators over time. Nordic countries are the
paradigmatic examples of this model, which is demonstrated in Figure 4. The left graph shows
incremental ratcheting in Nordic legislatures. There are no episodes of dramatic backsliding;
rather, we see periods of stasis interspersed with upward movements. The right graph focuses on
cabinets. Here, by contrast, we see more episodes of backsliding, including a particularly
dramatic backsliding episode in the case of Finland.
The second pathway to increasing women’s legislative representation involves the
adoption of gender quotas, the “fast-track” approach. In fast-track countries (e.g., Senegal), the
adoption of a gender quota leads to a sharp instantaneous increase in the proportion of women
legislators. If implemented properly, legislative gender quotas can also put a floor on women’s
representation, thereby building ratchet effects into formal institutional arrangements (Krook
2009; Franceschet, Krook, and Piscopo 2013).
Interestingly, though, even countries without legislative quotas exhibit year-on-year
increases in women’s legislative representation—and not just the Nordics. This trend is shown in
Figure 5, which focuses on recent years (during the period when quotas have gained momentum
worldwide). The left graph, which focuses on countries that have not adopted quotas, shows that
even those countries have relatively few instances of backsliding. This is true both in absolute
terms and relative to instances of upward movement. In fact, backslides and upward movements
in countries with quotas (right graph) are not dramatically different than in countries without
quotas. This comparison suggests that the factors driving women’s legislative representation—
institutional, social, cultural, and other—are themselves relatively irreversible. It suggests,
furthermore, that the ratchet effect characterizes legislatures in incremental and fast-track
countries alike.
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It is neither surprising nor problematic, given this fact, that scholars, activists, and
journalists have tended to focus on upward movement. Activists frequently spotlight countries
when their levels of women’s representation cross a certain threshold (say, 30% or 50%) for the
first time. Within the scholarly literature, there is little discussion of legislative backsliding,
precisely because backsliding is so rare. One exception to the trend comes form post-Soviet
countries and post-communist countries of central and eastern Europe. For the duration of the
communist era, legislatures in these countries were rubber stamps for party policy. As the
process of democratization began and legislatures gained real power, however, women’s
representation dropped off (Paxton and Hughes 2007, 77-80).
Cabinets: the see-saw effect
Backsliding is much more common for women’s cabinet representation than for women’s
legislative representation. To explore backsliding in cabinets, we assembled an original dataset
using information from the CIA’s Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments
reports. We have determined the sex of all ministers in the in the CIA reports through Internet
searches, press scrutiny, and correspondence with embassies and country experts. Figure 6 (right
graph) shows, for each year, the percentage of countries with backslides and upward movements.
There are more upward movements than backslides. But what is striking is (a) that the absolute
number of backslides and upward movements is high, (b) that there are many more episodes of
cabinet backslides than legislative backslides, and (c) that there are many more episodes of
cabinet upward movements than legislative upward movements.
To demonstrate the magnitude of upward movements in women’s cabinet representation
and how they are interspersed with episodes of backsliding, we separately aggregate each set of
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episodes. Aggregate backsliding is defined as the sum of all year-on-year down backslides.2
Aggregate upward movements are defined analogously. To demonstrate, consider the following
example: In country A, women control the following percentages of cabinet seats for each of the
eleven years between 2000 and 2010: 10, 15, 16, 12, 18, 15, 16, 12, 10, 14, 18. In this case, there
are ten corresponding year-to-year changes: +5, +1, -4, +6, -3, +1, -4, -2, +4, +4. We discard all
cases where year-to-year changes have absolute values of two or lower. This leaves four
instances of upward movement (+5, +6, +4, +4) and three instances of backslide (-4, -3, -4).
Country A’s aggregate upward movement is the sum of its upward movement instance values
(19); its aggregate backslide is the sum of its backslide instance values (11).
Figure 7 presents aggregate backslides and upward movements in 2000-2010 for each
country. The figure brings some interesting points to light. First, the extent of aggregate
backsliding is considerable, averaging as much as 16 percentage points in 2000-2010. Only 16%
of countries have no cabinet backslides in the 2000-2010 period. Second, countries with greater
aggregate backslides tend to have greater aggregate upward movements, as well. The solid line is
the quadratic line of best fit, which shows a strong positive association. These two points are
usefully contrasted with Figure 8, which presents the equivalent figure for legislatures. In the
case of legislatures, the extent of cumulative backsliding is small (averaging less than two
percentage points). Seventy percent of countries have no legislative backslides in this period, and
there appears to be little relationship between aggregate backsliding and upward movements
across countries.
Note that for both cabinets and legislatures (Figures 7 and 8), the extent of aggregate
upward movements is greater than for backslides—for cabinets, averaging 21 percentage points
2 We use a cutoff of two percentage points to account for the possibility of measurement errors. That is, the aggregates use information only for episodes of backslides and upward movements where annual variation was at least two percentage points.
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(compared to 16 for backslides) and for legislatures, averaging 7 percentage points (compared to
less than two for backslides). This is why both institutions exhibit a similar global upward trend
line for the 2000-2010 period.
Figures 9 and 10 provide two additional pieces of information that serve as robustness
checks to the emerging argument that backslides and upward movements are much larger in
cabinets than legislatures. Figure 9 presents aggregate cabinet backslides and upward movements
in 2000-2010 for countries whose average cabinet representation was close to the global mean.
The fact that it resembles Figure 7 in terms of magnitudes suggests that large global backslides
and upward movements are not being driven by outliers. Figure 10 presents the percentage of
countries with backslides in each year, where representation is defined in terms of absolute
numbers—number of women in the cabinet—rather than percentage. On average, 18% of
countries experienced a net decrease of one woman from the cabinet, 8% experienced a net
decrease of two, and 3% experienced a net decrease of three.
This discussion establishes that women’s cabinet representation is fundamentally
different than women’s legislative representation. Cabinet representation is characterized by see-
saws—interspersed upward movements and backslides. Legislative representation is
characterized by ratchets. See-saws are particularly important, we posit, because backslides
erode progress towards gender equality. In this sense, we pick up on Darhour and Dahlerup’s
(2013, 133) concept of “sustainable representation of women in politics,” which they define as
“durable, substantial numerical political representation of women, freed of the risk of immediate
major backlash.” We suggest that the absence—or at least the reduction—of backslides can serve
as a measure of the sustainability of women’s representation.
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The fact that individual country developments look very different in the executive branch
than in the legislative branch calls for closer analysis of the factors that lead to backsliding.
Which Factors Might Affect Cabinet See-Sawing?
Worldwide, cabinets are much less likely to experience ratcheting than legislatures. But, as
the analysis above has shown, there is significant cross-country variation in the extent of cabinet
see-sawing. Some countries experience dramatic shifts between upward movement and
backsliding, while others experience steadier temporal paths. While there are few studies of
women’s cabinet representation over time, scholars have begun to identify factors that affect the
likelihood that a cabinet at any particular moment will contain more or less women. These
studies offer a useful theoretical point of departure and help to generate intuitions about why
some more upward movement and backsliding than others. Three sets of possible explanations
emerge from the literature—one on political institutions, the second on leader characteristics, and
the third on characteristics of women’s movements.
Institutional characteristics
Leaders are often constrained by rules (constitutional or otherwise) governing who can
serve as a minister. Most parliamentary systems permit cabinet ministers hold legislative
mandates; others require them to be legislators. In contrast, many presidential systems expressly
prohibit ministers from serving simultaneously in the legislature. Where ministers must be drawn
from the legislature (in part or in full), the pool of potential women ministers is likely to be more
limited, thereby limiting both upward movements and backslides. This distinction is similar to
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Davis’s (1997) intuition that leaders in states with specialist systems that prohibit ministers from
being MPs (e.g., the United States) are able to recruit ministerial appointees from a variety of
professional arenas where qualified women may be more plentiful, while leaders in states with
generalist systems (e.g., the United Kingdom) are limited to recruiting ministers from the
legislature.
It is worth noting, however, that Davis concentrates on the West European context, where
economies are more differentiated and pools of professional women in the economy at large are
generally deeper than in the rest of the world. Nonetheless, evidence from developing countries
also suggests that generalist cabinets may impede women’s cabinet presence. In Ghana, for
example, John Evans Atta Mills announced a commitment, during the 2008 presidential
campaign, to achieve at least 40% women in government. After winning the election, however,
Mills reneged on this promise, arguing that since only five women from his party won legislative
seats and the majority of cabinet appointees must be MPs according to Ghanaian law, there was
not a sufficient pool of eligible women to keep his commitment. In short, legislative-executive
relations shape the pool of potential women ministers, increasing or limiting the opportunities for
upward movement or backsliding. Specialized systems may decrease the likelihood of large
upward movements and backsliding.
Leader characteristics
The process of government formation depends critically upon the values and dispositions
of the head of government. Leaders who identify as feminists, for example, should be more
likely to appoint women to cabinet posts than non-feminist leaders. After appointing a parity
cabinet in 2004, for example, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero commented:
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“I am not just anti-machismo, I’m a feminist” (Williams 2011). Zapatero maintained a near-
parity government throughout his time in office. After the 2008 elections, women held eight out
of 17 cabinet posts. During subsequent cabinet reshuffles, the proportion of women dropped
slightly below 50%. When Mariano Rajoy succeeded Zapatero, the proportion of women in the
cabinet declined, suggesting that a change from a feminist to a non-feminist head of government
can lead to backsliding.
Leaders’ ties with their parties may also influence their likelihood of appointing women.
Siavelis and Morgenstern (2008) have created a typology of executives that includes party
insiders, party adherents, and free-wheeling independents. Party insiders are predicted to appoint
ministers with “strong party credentials” (32). Given the underrepresentation of women among
party leaders, this fact may decrease the likelihood of women gaining cabinet posts. The cabinets
of free-wheeling independents, on the other hand, are “likely to be ad hoc, made up of outsiders,
and based primarily on the personal networks of support” (34). These characteristics may create
openings for more women to gain access to the cabinet. In an analysis of Latin American
presidents’ appointments, Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson (2008) find that party insiders
appoint fewer women to their cabinets and that free-wheeling independents appoint more women
to ministerial posts. They speculate that the “promotion of women might be yet another way for
[a free-wheeling independent] to exhibit his or her independent style and to show that his or her
administration is a break from the past” (349).
The literature also suggests that leaders’ political ideology will affect the likelihood that
they will appoint women to the cabinet. Specifically, leaders that identify with the left will be
more likely to include women in their cabinets, due to left parties’ commitment to egalitarianism
(Reynolds 1999; Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2008). Reynolds (1999) finds that the
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composition of the coalition (e.g., left leadership or inclusion of a left party) affects women’s
inclusion more than left parties’ share of the vote. Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson
(2008) find that party loyalists and party adherents from left parties are more likely to appoint
women to their cabinets than party loyalists and party adherents from right parties. This
relationship, however, does not hold for free-wheeling independents.
One might expect, given studies of leadership characteristics, that shifts from feminists to
non-feminist, from left-dominated governance to right-dominate governance, and from free-
wheeling independents to party insiders would coincide with episodes of backsliding.
Characteristics of women’s movements
In their global study of women’s cabinet participation, Bauer and Tremblay (2011, 184)
argue that the gains in women’s cabinet presence would not be possible without women’s
organizations that promote women’s political representation. Countries with strong women’s
movements mobilized around women’s political representation should have less backsliding than
those without active women’s movements. Women’s movements, on this view, may provide a
floor for women’s inclusion that prevents large declines in women’s representation. By
organizing protests, publicly criticizing parties and leaders, and imposing other costs on leaders
and parties that fail to include a sufficient number of women in government, women’s
movements can decrease the likelihood of backslides.
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Institutional Characteristics: A Preliminary Probe
While the possible effects of leader characteristics and women’s movements are best
observed through fine-grained case studies (see below), we can conduct a preliminary test to
determine whether certain institutional characteristics might be associated with cabinet see-saws.
To carry out one such test, we code countries according to whether (a) legislators cannot be
ministers, (b) legislators can be ministers, and (c) ministers must be legislators. Our coding,
which is based on Fish and Kroenig (2009), allowed us to code 78% of the countries in our
dataset of 200. Of these countries, slightly less than half (44%) fit into category (a), 21% in
category (b), and 13% in category (c). Figure 11 shows aggregate upward movements and
backslides averaged for each category. Backsliding and upward movement are both greatest
where heads of government must look outside of the legislature (the first pair of bars in Figure
10). Both types of movement are less, on average, in countries where a part of the cabinet is
appointed from amongst the set of legislators (the second pair of bars). Movements are still less
in countries that limit cabinet seats exclusively to legislators. Interestingly, countries that we
could not code have the least see-sawing – these are typically small countries that do not make it
to cross-national databases like Polity.3
A second institutional factor that may drive upward movements and backslides is cabinet
size. Larger cabinets may allow chief executives to distribute patronage and minimize the risk of
extra-constitutional threats to their rule (Arriola 2009), but, we reason, each increase in the size
of the cabinet marginally decreases the prestige of the cabinet as an institution. The cost of
3 These are Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Antigua & Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei, Burma, Cape Verde, Djibouti, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Grenada, Iceland, Kiribati, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Maldives, Malta, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Monaco, Montenegro, Nauru, Palau, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome & Principe, Serbia & Montenegro, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Suriname, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Yugoslavia.
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replacing a dismissed woman minister with another woman may therefore be higher in a state
with a small cabinet than it is in a state with a large cabinet. That is, smaller cabinets may make
it more difficult for chief executives to replace departing women with new women.
To gauge whether larger cabinet size might reduce backslides, we plot the two variables in
Figure 11 (we use our original database to calculate cabinet size). The first part of Figure 12 does
show a negative relationship – that is, on average, larger sized cabinets have fewer aggregate
backslides in 2000-2010. Similarly, on average, larger-sized cabinets have less aggregate upward
movements, too. The difference, therefore, which gives the net change in women’s cabinet
representation, does not have much relationship with cabinet size. However, there is considerable
noise in the scatter plot, suggesting that much of the variation in both aggregate backslide and
aggregate upward movement is left unexplained by accounting for cabinet size alone. The size of
the legislature, similarly, does not appear to be much related to aggregate upward movements
and backslides, as shown in Figure 13.
Case studies
To generate deeper insights into the possible effects of institutional, leadership, and
women’s movement characteristics, we consider three relatively similar cases with different
dependent variable outcomes. As Figure 14 demonstrates, Ireland has experienced few upward
movements or backslides between 2000 and 2014. In the early 2000s, Poland experienced
significant see-sawing but, since 2007, has held relatively steady. Japan has experienced
dramatic see-sawing over the period observed.
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Ireland
Viewed from a certain (acute) angle, Ireland is a global trendsetter in women’s executive
leadership; for 21 of the last 25 years, the country’s president (the head of state) has been a
woman, and Ireland is the only country in the world to have had one woman president (Mary
McAleese, 1997-2011) replace another (Mary Robinson, 1990-1997). Robinson and McAleese
increased the visibility and political relevance of the Irish presidency, and both women, despite
different ideological backgrounds, have advocated throughout their careers on behalf of women’s
rights.
As Figure 14 makes clear, however, Ireland is not a leader in the executive offices that
matter most. In the cabinet, the country’s recent temporal trajectory involves stagnation.
Although two women—Mary Harney (1997-2006) and Mary Coughlan (2008-2011)—have
recently served as deputy prime minister (Tánaiste), overall levels of women’s presence have
remained flat. In addition, the few women who have achieved cabinet office in recent years have
failed to ascend to high-power posts. Women ministers in the last two cabinets have been kept
out of high-power, high-prestige posts, reverting to gendered positions such as education, health
and children, and social protection. Cultural and institutional characteristics, in addition to
factors related to the structure of the Irish women’s movement, stand out as potentially important
sources of these trends. Traditional Catholicism is an always-present background variable in
modern Ireland, and members of the country’s church hierarchy have generally emphasized
women’s roles as mothers and caregivers. Within this context, women have faced significant
hurdles with respect to labor force incorporation, equal pay, reproductive rights, and gender-
based violence.
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The historical and institutional features of Irish democracy have made it difficult for Irish
women to address these issues from within state structures. Unlike most West European states,
Ireland’s party system has not been characterized by a strong and balanced left-right split. The
division between the republic’s two main parties—Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael—can be traced
back to disputes about the Anglo-Irish relationship (instead of disputes related to capitalist
industrialization). As Mair and Weeks (2005, 136) noted, the two main parties “tend to converge
around the centre of the ideological spectrum, often crossing sides between centre-left and
centre-right, or occupying both simultaneously.” Their respective European party affiliations—
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael belong, respectively, to the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for
Europe (ALDE) and the European People’s Party (EPP)—suggest that the parties’ self-
conceptions remain right of center.
Throughout the period of independence, other parties have gained seats in parliament
and, since 1989, Ireland has been ruled exclusively by coalition governments. According to
Gallagher et al.’s calculations (2006, 232-241) Ireland’s left (including the long-standing Labour
Party and other, smaller left parties) was weaker than the left in any other West European state
over the course of the post-war period. In the most recent (2011) general elections, which took
place in the wake of the financial crisis, Labour took advantage of the governing parties’ (Fianna
Fáil and the Greens) deep unpopularity and, for the first time in its history, finished second in an
election. Labour eventually formed a two-party coalition with Enda Kenny’s Fine Gael. Time
will tell whether this development results in a deeper restructuring of the party system or a
fundamental fortification of the Irish left. Historically, nonetheless, the record is clear: Ireland’s
left has been quite weak.
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The Irish constitution establishes a particularly strict fusion of executive and legislative
powers. It requires that the prime minister (Taoiseach), deputy prime minister (Tánaiste), and
minister of finance be selected from, and serve simultaneously as members of, the country’s
lower legislative chamber (the Dáil Éireann). It places the same stipulation on all other ministers,
with the slight exception that a maximum of two of those ministers may be members of the upper
chamber (the Seanad Éireann). A prime minister wishing to increase women’s representation in
the cabinet is, therefore, constitutionally restricted in a way that most presidents (and, indeed,
many prime ministers in parliamentary systems) are not – effectively, he or she may only choose
women from a pool of TDs (Teachtaí Dála, or Dáil members). For this reason, cabinet dynamics
depend critically upon electoral system design and parties’ systems of candidate selection.
Ireland uses a PR-single-transferrable vote system to select TDs. The country is divided
into multiple multi-member districts, which return between three and five TDs apiece. Voters
may use ballots to indicate ordinal preferences, marking a “1” adjacent to their favored
candidate, a “2” next to their second favorite candidate, etc. One notable feature of Irish STV is
that a party may select more than one candidate to place on a ballot. Depending on district
characteristics, such a decision represents a certain risk—it pays off if voters select multiple
candidates from the same party and backfires of voters split votes between a single party’s
candidates.
Candidate selection processes vary by party, but, traditionally, selection processes have
been decentralized and animated by a localist ethos. The established parties (Fianna Fáil, Fine
Gael, and Labour) have placed a premium on candidate visibility within electoral districts; this
norm has often militated against the selection of women candidates. From the late 1970s
onwards, newer/smaller parties and Fine Gael spearheaded efforts to promote women as
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parliamentary candidates. The defunct Progressive Democrats and currently reeling Greens, for
example, adopted 40% candidate quotas in the early 1990s, and Galligan (1993, 157) showcases
the “discovery of gender by the traditional parties from the 1977 general elections onward.”
Developments at the candidate selection phase, however, have not had a strong effect on
levels of women’s legislative representation. One might have expected Labour—as the country’s
most stable force on the left and that party that chose Mary Robinson as its presidential
candidate—to have prioritized the selection of women. In the legislative arena, however,
Labour’s strategy has often been driven by a minimal-loss strategy (Galligan 1993); motivated
by fears of splitting Labour votes, the party has often placed only one name on each
constituency’s ballot. The selection, in this case, mirrors the gendered strategic dynamics (e.g.,
“if we can only choose one candidate, we will choose a man, since some voters are sexist”) that
have often been observed in single-member district electoral systems (Matland 2002). Thus, the
configuration of factors discussed so far—a traditional culture, a weak left, an electoral system
that personalizes PR, and a system of legislative-executive relations that restrict cabinet
eligibility to members of a single legislative chamber, help to stack the deck against aspiring
women ministers.
These structural barriers aside, Irish prime ministers still have significant discretion to
increase and decrease women’s cabinet shares. Why have they not taken more frequent
advantage of this discretion? As noted above, coalition government has been the norm in Ireland
since 1989. Perhaps, as Krook and O’Brien (2012) have suggested, coalition governance has
worked against women in the cabinet. The intuition here is that there is a relatively finite number
of cabinet positions; the greater the number of parties in a cabinet, the fewer party members any
one party can appoint to the cabinet. Because party leaders tend to be men, it is unlikely for
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women to take on cabinet seats. In Ireland, however, this intuition is not supported. The 2000s,
for example, were dominated by a Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat coalition. The Progressive
Democrats were a small liberal party that collapsed at the end of the decade. For the better part
of the 2000s, their one and only cabinet post was held by the party leader—Mary Harney.
Despite having many more seats to distribute, senior coalition partner Fianna Fáil never
distributed more than two ministerial dossiers to women. The Fine Gael-Labour coalition that
has been in power since 2011 has been characterized by rather similar dynamics. The junior
partner (Labour) has consistently allocated one of its relatively few (five) cabinet seats to a
woman, while the senior partner (Fine Gael), despite its surfeit of seats, has only assigned one
seat to a woman.
It is also worth noting that Ireland has lacked an avowedly feminist Taoiseach and that all
Irish prime ministers over the last three decades have been “creatures of the system.” The
premiership has bounced back and forth between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, but the political
biographies of the men who have served as Taoiseach are remarkably similar. Before taking on
the premiership, the six men who have served as prime minister since 1979 have possessed, on
average, over 23 years of service as a TD (Albert Reynolds, with fifteen years as a TD, had the
least experience; Enda Kenny, with 36 years, had the most). All six prime ministers had served
in multiple ministerial roles before becoming prime minister, and all had survived years of intra-
party politicking within their respective parties (Fine Gael for John Bruton and Enda Kenny;
Fianna Fáil for Charles Haughey, Albert Reynolds, Bertie Ahern, and Brian Cowen).
The clubbiness of the Irish political system might seem ripe for challenges from below,
e.g., from the Irish women’s movement. The scholarship on the movement is large and diverse,
covering multiple historical periods. Coulter (1993, 59) proposes that, over the grand sweep of
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the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Irish women’s groups and movements have positioned
themselves as alternatives to the state, rather than as means toward achieving state power:
The great movements which have involved women in this country over the past two hundred years have all developed outside the institutions of the existing state, and have usually been opposed to them. . . . women have been accustomed to finding alternative ways of organizing and networking. They have fixed their eyes, not on capturing positions within the existing institutions, but on creating different institutions, which would be more responsive to the needs of the majority of people, particularly women and children. If a strong strain of anti-political and locally based organizing has characterized Irish
women’s mobilization, scholars (Connolly 2002; Coulter 1993; Galligan 1998; Reilly 2007;
Smyth 1988) generally agree that the early 1970s witnessed more movement crystallization,
followed by a return to more decentralized battles. From the mid-1970s onward, fragmentation,
issue-oriented mobilization, and intra-organizational campaigns have again become predominant.
This fragmentation has not necessarily led to disappointment. Indeed, the awakening of parties to
issues of women’s representation, discussed above, owed much to the strategic activities of
women’s campaigns within the various parties in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Diverse
organizations picked up on the global “women’s rights as human rights” framework, interpreting
and deploying it in diverse contexts, and occasionally achieving goals (Reilly 2007). The
traditional decentralization and extra-institutional nature of Irish women’s mobilizing, however,
arguably worked against a concerted and highly organized local push, in the wake of Beijing and
other international developments in recent decades, for increased women’s representation in
parliament and the cabinet.
Ireland has a strong history of women’s mobilizing, and women have ascended to the
presidency and the deputy premiership. Party leaders, over the past decades, have clearly felt
some pressure to appoint women to cabinet posts and to avoid dramatic drops in women’s
20
cabinet presence. At the same time, institutional factors and the decentralized and policy-
centered (as opposed to representation-centered) nature of the Irish movement continue to work
against upward movement in women’s cabinet representation.
Poland
Women’s cabinet representation in Poland rose significantly between 2000 and 2014. In
January 2000, Poland had no women ministers. By January 2011, this number had risen to 29.4%
(five out of seventeen) and has remained at a similar level in recent years. Currently, four of the
country’s seventeen ministers (23.5%) are women. The Polish line in Figure 14 see-saws in the
early 2000s before climbing and plateauing from 2008 onward.
Which developments might explain this trajectory? In terms of context, Poland resembles
Ireland in numerous ways. Poles and Irish citizens are sometimes seen as “the strongest
Catholics left in Europe.” Catholicism has played a central role in both countries’ nationalist
movements, and national Catholic hierarchies have been active (and, on occasion, actively
hostile to gender equality initiatives) in both states. In partisan terms, both states are competitive
democracies that have been dominated, at least over the last decade, by the political right.
Poland’s post-communist left enjoyed significant popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s (see
below) but has struggled to reestablish itself following devastating corruption scandals. Since
2005, Poland has witnessed a pattern of vigorous intra-right conflict that resembles, without
directly mimicking, the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael dynamic in Ireland. In Poland, the two major
protagonists of this millennium’s politics have been Civic Platform (a liberal-conservative party
that has ruled in coalition with the Polish People’s Party since 2007) and Law and Justice (a
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national-conservative party that led an ill-fated coalition between 2005 and 2007 and has been
the major opposition party ever since).
In terms of executive-legislative relations, however, Polish prime ministers are enabled
and constrained in different ways than their Irish counterparts. On one hand, the Polish head of
state (the president) enjoys more political power than the Irish head of state. While Poland is
often classified as a “semi-presidential regime,” it is more accurately characterized as a premier-
presidential regime (Shugart and Carey 1992)—a regime in which the president takes legislative
partisan balances and negotiations into account, nominates a prime minister for parliament’s
confirmation, and lacks the power to dismiss the PM or individual ministers once they have
achieved parliament’s vote of confidence. Discord between presidents and prime ministers often
occurs in such systems, particularly (but not exclusively) in moments of cohabitation (Protsyk
2006). Regardless of the party identities of the office holders, however, Polish presidents have
tended to leave the details of cabinet formation—including personnel selection and portfolio
allocation—to prime ministers. Other constitutional provisions reinforce the prime minister’s
relative freedom, particularly Article 103, which allows prime ministers to legislators and “non-
legislators” to cabinet posts. Unlike Irish prime ministers, whose pool of potential women
ministers is limited to the universe of women parliamentarians, Polish prime ministers can (and
often do) choose women (and men) who lack legislative mandates. Of the nine women who have
served as ministers between 2010 and 2014, for example, four have been sitting MPs; the other
five have come from outside of parliament.
While the Polish left has languished for the last decade, an understanding of gendered
cabinet dynamics since 2000 must begin with the observations that the early 2000s belonged to
the Polish center-left. The Democratic Left Alliance (SLD)/Labor Union coalition, dominated by
22
the SLD and headed by Leszek Miller, easily won the September 2001 elections, garnering 41%
of the popular vote and nearly half of the seats in Poland’s lower chamber (the Sejm). Maciej
Płażyński’s Civic Platform, which was contesting parliamentary elections for the first time, came
in second place with (only) 12.7% of the vote, and the only other parties to receive seats were
four conservative and nationalist parties (including Law and Justice, which was also contesting
its first national election). The fragmented right-wing parties were divided by personality and
ideology and had a hard time finding common ground. As a result, Miller initially led a minority
government that was very secure and faced few viable threats. For this reason, he may have felt
comfortable appointing a cabinet (in 2001) with only two female ministers.
The SLD government’s margin of comfort quickly narrowed, though. Over the course
2002 and 2003, it pushed through a series of unpopular austerity measures. It supported the
unpopular US-led invasion of Iraq. It found itself embroiled in a deeply unpopular corruption
scandal that revolved around film producer Lew Rywin. Its growing distance from voters (and
the increasing popularity of various right-wing alternatives) may have encouraged Miller to
increase the number of female ministers in hopes of attracting female voters. Right-wing parties,
internally divided and confident that their electoral fates would improve as time passed, elected
not to push for snap elections. As a result, upon Miller’s early resignation in May 2004, a kind of
caretaker center-left government led by the SLD’s Marek Belka took office. Interestingly, this
government had zero female ministers. The SLD seems to have become so unpopular at this time
that Belka went into deep preservation mode, trying to minimize losses rather than expanding the
party’s broader electoral appeal. In other words, Belka may have appointed more established
(male) ministers who would placate the SLD’s hard core of strong supporters, despite the SLD’s
shrinking overall attractiveness.
23
In the years that followed, the SLD sustained massive losses, and robust competition
between the liberal right (Civic Platform) and the nationalist right (Law and Justice) intensified.
The September 2005 elections represented a major shift in Polish politics and were completely
dominated by different strands of broadly right-wing groupings. Law and Justice, headed by
Jaroslaw Kaczyński, won 27% of the votes, followed by Civic Platform (24.1%), the nationalist
Self-Defense Party (11.4%), the SLD (11.3%), the conservative/nationalist League of Polish
Families (8%), and the agro-conservative Polish People’s Party (7%). Law and Justice had run
on a socially conservative platform, campaigning against abortion rights and defending
traditional family values. Kaczyński assembled a coalition with Self-Defense and the League of
Polish Families. One of the resulting government’s first legislative achievements was a pro-
natalist bill that established payments to women for each new child they bore. The government
clearly clung to a traditional vision of gender relations but seemed eager to use female
appointments to parry the opposition’s accusations of sexism and backwardness. The Law and
Justice-led government appointed two female ministers in 2005 and two more in 2006. What is
more, of the four ministries that women controlled in January 2007, two (finance and foreign
affairs) were high-prestige postings.
As the leaders of the coalition’s two junior partners committed various gaffes and the
liberal opposition (Civic Platform) continued to gain steam, the Sejm voted to dissolve itself in
2007. In the resulting early elections, Civic Platform (with 41.5% of the votes) emerged
victorious and formed a minimum-winning center-right coalition with the Polish People’s Party
(which had received 8.9% of the vote). Since 2007, this coalition has lasted. Opposition from the
left continues to be weak. But opposition from the conservative/nationalist right has been
significant. While Civic Platform won the 2010 presidential elections and became the first senior
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governing party in post-communist Poland to be reelected in 2013, Poland’s party system has
become quite competitive, despite the lack of a strong center-left alternative.
While party competition seems to be an important factor driving Poland’s trend line, the
Polish women’s movement—which has emerged as a strong, unified, and centralized political
force over the course of the last five years—has also encouraged prime ministers not to
backslide. Since the 1990s, a diverse and dedicated set of Polish feminists has agitated for
women’s concerns. These have not been fringe movements; rather, various Polish newspapers
and magazines with wide distributions (e.g., Gazeta Wyborcza) have featured regular
contributions from leading academics and activists. Also, in 2007, best-selling novelist Manuela
Gretkowska founded the Women’s Party, which, despite its eventually dire showing at the polls
(0.28%), was one of the most commented-upon phenomena of the campaign (due largely, but not
exclusively, to a campaign poster featuring nude party leaders). For each of the past five years, a
highly visible organization, the Congress of Polish Women, has met to discuss the status of
Polish women in general and, more specifically, the incorporation of Polish women into political
decision-making positions. The Congress’s annual plenary session is large (estimated annual
attendance for the last five years has been 4000, 4000, 7000, 10000, 8500), and is generally
preceded by a series of regional congresses. The Congress is a diverse affair, bringing together
women leaders from the worlds of business, politics, NGOs, the academy, labor unions, and
elsewhere, and it is notable for being a wide partisan tent. The Congress’s plenary meetings have
become major media events, and the group’s leaders have been granted numerous high-level
meetings with Poland’s presidents and prime ministers.
One of the Congress’s first demands was a parity law, which would have require 50% of
the names of all party lists for parliamentary, European Parliament, and local elections to be
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women. The Congress did not meet this goal, but politicians from all parties were forced to take
it seriously. A parity bill was eventually submitted to parliament, and, after a long debate that
also involved consideration of electoral systems in both national legislative chambers and a
range of sub-national legislatures, Poland passed a law on legislative quotas for elections to the
Sejm. As of 2011, at least 35% of the names on all electoral lists must be men, and at least 35%
of the names on all electoral lists must be women. While many women’s advocates had hoped
for a zipper system that would prohibit parties from relegating women to the bottom of lists, the
quota seems to have mattered in the 2011 election. The percentage of women candidates doubled
in 2011 vs. the previous election (2007), and women’s share of parliamentary seats increased
moderately from 20% to 23.7%.
How do these developments relate to women’s representation in the cabinet? There has
been no law on cabinet quotas, but the prominence of the legislative quota campaign and the
broader visibility of women’s issues has clearly encouraged all political parties, regardless of
their ideological persuasion, to consider gender balance in public positions. Druciarek et al.
(2012, 10) considered the extent to which the quota debate affected parties’ approaches to Polish
local government elections (which were not covered by the quota law) and found that while
quotas “were not applied to the local government elections, [they] undoubtedly influenced the
tone of the public debate that preceded the 2010 voting. The issue of women’s participation in
politics became one of the key issues discussed during the electoral campaign.” Gender issues
also featured prominently in the 2011 electoral campaign and its aftermath. While the lead story
of that election was the success of the incumbent (Civic Platform-Polish People’s Party)
government, an important secondary story was the third-place finish by Palikot’s Movement, an
ideologically ambiguous secular and youth-oriented party led by former Civic Movement
26
member Janusz Palikot. Palikot’s Movement placed more women on its lists (43.9%) than any
party besides the SLD, and two of its most visible successful candidates were Robert Biedroń
(Poland’s first openly gay MP) and Anna Grodzka (Europe’s first openly transsexual MP).
Despite the weakness of the Polish left and the traditionalism of Polish culture, the
discretion left to prime ministers, the competitiveness of the party system, and, especially, the
vigor and common purpose of civil societal mobilization have helped to keep gender issues on
the agenda and to sustain women’s progress in cabinet representation.
Japan
As Figure 14 demonstrates, Japan experienced dramatic upward movement in women’s
cabinet representation in the early 2000s. Within three years, however, Japan had experience
significant backsliding, and, over the last few years, very few Japanese women have ascended to
high ministerial positions. The structure of party politics and weaknesses of the women’s
movement help to explain Japan’s see-sawing pattern.
The Japanese constitution ensures a moderately tight fusion between executive and
legislative branches but grants the prime minister some discretion to make appointments from
beyond the Diet (Japan’s bicameral legislature). Specifically, Article 68 of the constitution
requires at least half of all cabinet ministers, including the prime minister, to be a member of
either the House of Representative or the House of Councilors. Theoretically, then, a prime
minister may appoint a significant number of individuals without legislative mandates to his or
her cabinet.4 An amendment passed in 2001, however, capped the total number of cabinet
4 Constitutionally, the Japanese parliament selects the prime minister via votes in both chambers of the National Diet. If the two houses select different individuals and the dispute is not resolved within ten days, the House of Representatives’ choice is sent to the Emperor (Secretariat 2014). The Emperor appoints the individual selected by
27
members (not including the prime minister) at fourteen, which could be expanded, under
ambiguous conditions of “special necessity,” to seventeen. Thus, the constitutional framework
affords Japanese prime ministers a degree of appointment freedom somewhere between the
highly restrictive Irish case and the more permissive Polish case.
The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has dominated Japanese politics for the bulk
of the post-war period, has exercised its power within this basic constitutional context. Because a
majority of cabinet members must come from the Diet, it is necessary to mention the significant
barriers faced by women seeking legislative seats. Anyone seeking to represent the LDP in the
Diet, for example, must build a party constituency (jiban), gain publicity and endorsements
(kanban), and raise money (kaban). Women (especially those without connections to husbands,
fathers, or other male relatives who are or have been politicians) face disproportionately high
hurdles in gaining access to these three resources (Ogai 2001; Reed, McElwain, and Shimizu
2009; Stockwin 2008).
While these hurdles have often discouraged women from seeking legislative seats, they
have been further handicapped by the structure of the LDP and links between the LDP and the
state. For most of the post-war period, the LDP has dominated the Diet, and the LDP party
president has served simultaneously as prime minister (Kabashima and Steel 2007). The LDP
constitution limits party presidents to two consecutive three-year terms, so LDP prime ministers
have traditionally faced de facto six-year limits. Before 2001, the party constitution incentivized
networking with LDP Diet members.5 As a result of the party-state relationship and the internal
the Diet (or, in the rare case of Diet division, the individual selected by the lower chamber) as prime minister. Once appointed, the prime minister selects line ministers. 5 To be nominated as a candidate for the party presidency, a prospective party leader had to receive endorsements from thirty Diet members (not including himself). All candidates who received at least thirty endorsements then went before the party convention. The convention brought together (a) all current LDP members from the House of Representatives, (b) all current LDP members from the House of Councilors, and (c) party delegates from LDP chapters in each of the country’s 47 prefectures. Before 2001, each prefecture had only one vote in the party
28
LDP rules, party presidential (and, thus, prime ministerial) candidates were especially responsive
to LDP Diet members’ concerns and tended to discount provincial concerns (Reed, McElwain,
and Shimizu 2009).
LDP Diet members, aware of their king-making powers, organized themselves into strict,
hierarchical factions and voted in blocs at the party convention. Faction leaders provided their
juniors with leadership positions of increasing prestige, based on seniority, in exchange for
support in intra-party leadership elections. Not surprisingly, the structure of Japan’s legislative
electoral system affected the structure of LDP factions. Specifically, the country’s multi-member
district/single, non-transferrable vote system (MMD-SNTV) limited faction size and required
factions to form coalitions with each other in order to elect party presidents. In general, to win
the LDP presidency (and, thus, the premiership), a candidate required the support of three or
more factions. Altogether, the system rewarded long-serving party loyalists and worked against
party mavericks or upstarts.
In the early 1990s, however, the LDP’s grip on power weakened. Numerous high-level
party members resigned from the party and established new parties. The LDP sustained heavy
losses in the 1993 general election, and, for the first time since 1955, a coalition that did not
include the LDP (an eight-party alliance led by Morihiro Hosokawa) was formed. Hosokawa’s
government fell apart within a year. Its only notable accomplishment was an overhaul of the
election system that replaced MMD-SNTV with a joint PR/SMD-P system modeled loosely on
Germany. Hosokawa’s government was replaced by an LDP-Socialist Party coalition in 1994,
but the LDP remained shaken by the 1993 defeat. In an attempt to recover, the party—facing
significant pressure from prefectural branches and the media—reformed its presidential selection
presidential selection process. This placed prefectural delegates at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis the 300-400 Diet standing members, since each Diet member possessed one vote apiece.
29
process in a way that gave more strength to prefectural branches (Reed, McElwain, and Shimizu
2009).6 This intra-LDP shake-up provided the backdrop of the dramatic upward movement in
Japanese women’s cabinet representation in the early 2000s.
The new system provided an opportunity for Junichiro Koizumi to ascend to the positions
of LDP boss and prime minister. While Koizumi is often remembered as a maverick, he was not
an LDP outsider. His grandfather and his father had served in the Diet. Koizumi himself had
been a member of the House of Representatives since 1972 and had held three separate cabinet
posts between 1988 and 1998. After the shocks of the early 1990s, however, Koizumi staked out
ground as a leader of the party’s reformers, and he took advantage of the new system of party
elections to emerge as party leader in 2001 (Reed, McElwain, and Shimizu 2009; Stockwin
2008).
Koizumi’s championing of women’s representation was an integral component of his
initial appeal. By supporting women—a group that had always been dramatically
underrepresented in the party and the state—Koizumi could attract new supporters to the party
and burnish his credentials as a maverick (Gelb 2003; Kobayashi 2004). When Koizumi took on
the premiership in 2001, he selected women to lead five of eleven ministerial dossiers—foreign
affairs; justice; environment; education, culture, sport, science, and technology; and land,
infrastructure, and transport. Two of the five women (Atsuke Toyama at Education and Yoriko
Kawaguchi at Environment) did not hold Diet seats at the time of their selection, furthering the
6 Three particular party reforms paved the way for the spike. First, the number of Diet endorsements needed to become a presidential candidate decreased from thirty to twenty, effectively lowering the bar for candidacy. Second, the prefectures’ weight in the selection process was tripled; instead of one vote, each prefectural chapter would now have three votes. Third, prefectural branches would be permitted (a) to decide if they wanted to administer an open primary at the prefectural level and (b) to determine how to allocate their three votes. In the event, most prefectural branches elected to use a winner-take-all system. Diet members would be restricted to endorsing candidates that had been selected by the prefectures. Diet members were also allowed to see all prefectural results prior to voting, thereby reducing the influence of faction bosses on individual Diet members’ behavior (Reed, McElwain, and Shimizu 2009; Rosenbluth and Thies 2010; Stockwin 2008).
30
impression of “freshness.” Makiko Tanaka, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, had an insider’s
pedigree—she was a serving MP, and her father, Kakuei Tanaka, was a two-time prime minister
and LDP scion—but was still seen as a firebrand within the party, not unlike Koizumi himself.
Tensions between Koizumi and Tanaka mounted however, and Koizumi replaced her in 2002.
Despite Tanaka’s departure, Koizumi seems to have remained at least partially wedded to
the strategy of promoting women; he promoted environment minister Kawaguchi to the foreign
affairs portfolio but filled the vacant environmental post with a man, Hiroshi Oki. At numerous
points throughout his premiership (2001-2006), Koizumi championed women leaders. In the run
up to the 2005 elections in which LDP would triumph, for example, he endorsed women
opponents, stylized as “female assassins,” over the LDP incumbents who had opposed his postal
reform package (Reed, McElwain, and Shimizu 2009).
In many ways, however, the Koizumi case highlights the distinction between party
outsiders and feminist heads of government. Koizumi was certainly the former; but it is not clear
that he was also the latter. Unlike José Luis Zapatero in Spain, for example, Koizumi never
identified himself as a feminist. One searches in vain for evidence of a strong personal
commitment to gender equality in Koizumi’s pre-premiership biography, and Koizumi’s
commitment to women’s empowerment within in the cabinet clearly waned as his term as prime
minister developed. After the LDP’s electoral success in the 2003 elections, for example,
Koizumi appointed only two women to the cabinet (Yuriko Koike at Environment and, again,
Yoriko Kawaguchi at Foreign Affairs), and, by time he stepped down in 2006 (due to the LDP
party term limit), only Koike was the only woman minister remaining.
While Koizumi helped to restabilize the LDP and led the party in three successful
election campaigns (two for the House of Representatives, one for the House of Councilors), his
31
three LDP successors as prime minister—Shinzo Abe (2006-2007), Yasuo Fukuda (2007-2008),
and Taro Aso (August 2008-September 2008)—decreased the number of women in the cabinet.
Abe, Fukuda, and Aso all enjoyed the traditional support of multiple LDP factions (Krauss and
Pekkanen 2010) and relied for their respect ascents on Diet members rather than prefectural
delegates. For these reasons, and in the absence of sustained pressure from outside the party (see
below), they appointed cabinets with no women leading portfolios.
The Democratic Party of Japan—the LDP’s major oppositional rival—politicized the
LDP’s gender backsliding in the 2009 House of Representatives elections. The DPJ has
traditionally been more attuned to women’s and gender issues than the LDP (Reed, McElwain,
and Shimizu 2009), and Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ’s head campaign strategist in 2009, intentionally
ran 34 female candidates against older, male LDP candidates. The effort proved successful, with
26 of the 34 being elected into office. While “Ozawa’s Girls” only constitute one-fifth of the
DPJ’s gains in the election, they still made headlines. From its early days in power, however, the
DPJ struggled to maintain party loyalty. None of the three DPJ prime ministers—Yukio
Hatoyama (September 2009-June 2010), Naoto Kan (June 2010-September 2011), and
Yoshihiko Noda (September 2011-December 2012)—evidenced of deep commitment to
women’s representation, and “Ozawa’s Girls” did not make strong inroads into the cabinet. All
three DPJ prime ministers “awarded” women with two junior minister positions (these positions
are not counted in the data displayed in Table *, which are restricted to full ministers); all of the
DPJ’s full ministerial positions were distributed to men.
To this point, the discussion has stressed that at particular moments—e.g., the moment of
LDP crisis in the 1990s and the 2009 electoral campaign—actors within political parties
(Koizumi, Ozawa) have sought political advantage through the strategic promotion of women.
32
To what extent have they been assisted or constrained by independent women’s groups? While
patterns of Japanese women’s mobilization have changed over time (Gelb 2003), most observers
agree that the women’s organizing has not been strongly feminist in content and that the
movement has tended to orient itself toward broader social or public issues rather than issues
related to gendered power dynamics or unequal representation (Fujimura-Fanselow 2011; Liddle
and Nakajima 2000; Matsui 1990; Murase 2006). In the nineteenth century, women played
significant roles in Japan’s Popular Rights Movement, which ultimately helped to achieve the
ratification of the Meiji Constitution (1889). While that document created a national assembly, it
severely restricted the franchise, excluding women entirely and restricting the suffrage to one
percent of the male population. Meiji-era rules went further in restricting women’s activity and
political mobilization with the creation, via the 1898 civil code, of the ie system. This system
defined the role of women as wives and mothers, transferred women’s property to their
husbands, and gave the head of household (usually the eldest male) unquestioned authority over
all household members. In addition, Article 5 of 1900’s Police and Security Regulations banned
women from joining political organizations, attending meetings with political speeches and
lectures, and organizing any such meetings (Fujimura-Fanselow 2011; Liddle and Nakajima
2000; Patessio 2011; Stockwin 2008).
These legal foundations, which would prove temporally sticky, did not succeed in
eliminating women’s mobilizing, but they steered such mobilizing into decentralized, apolitical
fujinkai (women’s groups). During the Taisho period (1912-1926), a germinal first-wave national
women’s movement came to life, which re-emerged after WWII. In 1945, Japanese women
finally gained the suffrage, and in 1947 the ie system was eliminated.
33
As the postwar period developed, though, Japanese women’s organizing came to bear a
closer resemblance to the localist and depoliticized fujinkai than to the nationally visible,
politically motivated suffrage and anti-ie movements. While a nascent Second Wave movement
took root in the early 1970s, it never achieved the concentration or success that some Western
movements reached (Liddle and Nakajima 2000; Matsui 1990; Rosenbluth and Gies 2010). In
her contemporary study of 889 women’s organizations at the local, prefectural, and national
levels, Murase (2006) finds that just 31% of such organizations deal with women’s issues, such
as domestic violence and women retaining their surnames after marriage. Only a third of that
31% “explicitly embrace gender equality as their goal.” Overall, Murase concludes that there is
no central issue or policy focus that unifies Japanese women’s groups. Women’s political
representation, for example, is not the star cause around which women’s efforts rotate, in the
manner that suffrage or the elimination of ie had been for earlier generations. The diversity and
depoliticization of the Japanese women’s movement make it difficult for the movement to
provide a “floor” below which levels of women’s cabinet presence may not sink.
It is in this environment—a democracy where women are enfranchised and frequently
turn out to vote, where party environments (as in the LDP after 1993) provide institutional
opportunities for mavericks, and where the women’s movement is decentralized, depoliticized,
and diverse—that Japanese see-sawing has developed.
Conclusions
Worldwide, levels of women’s representation are rising in both legislatures and cabinets.
We have emphasized, though, that the similar global trend lines mask important differences in
34
intra-country dynamics. In legislatures, most countries experience ratchet effects—once levels of
women’s representation reach a certain level, they rarely drop much below that level. Cabinets,
on the other hand, often experience see-sawing; backsliding frequently follows upward
movement. Because of this fact, women’s relationship to the heights of public power is often
tenuous. The notion that levels of women’s representation are growing may be encouraging, but
scholars and activists must bear in mind that cabinet gains are often (but not always) transitory
and that gains in year t may well be wiped out in year t+1 or t+2.
Our basic statistical probes suggest that there may be some relationship between certain
institutional features—most notably, the ability of a prime minister to appoint ministers from
outside of the legislature—and temporal trajectories in women’s cabinet representation. The
three cases, in addition, suggest that certain combinations of leaders, institutions, and women’s
movement characteristics are more likely to limit backsliding than others. Ireland’s institutional
set-up does not lend itself to upward movements in women’s cabinet presence. The constitution
prohibits prime ministers from appointing non-MPs to cabinet posts, and the country’s electoral
system (STV) poses significant obstacles to women seeking legislative office. In addition, while
the Irish women’s movement has managed to unite disparate streams at particular historical
moments, its dominant mode of organizing has involved anti-political, issue-based, and often
localist concerns. This decentralized nature has paid off in certain ways – advocates used to
mobilizing in local venues have carried out significant women’s promotion campaigns, for
example, within particular Irish political parties. These dynamics, in turn, have allowed Ireland
to hold steady at approximately 20% over the course of the current millennium. But they have
not promoted significant upward movement.
35
The Irish case contrasts with that of Poland, which, after years of see-sawing, has more
recently witnessed upward movement and “lock-in.” Poland’s institutional environment is more
permissive than Ireland’s. The constitution neither restricts cabinet posts to the universe of sitting
MPs nor caps total cabinet size, and the legislative electoral system (party-list PR, recently
supplemented by a 35% quota) opens pathways to women’s candidacy. Poland’s women’s
movement, furthermore, has been more cohesive and broader than Ireland’s or Japan’s, and the
movement, since the late 2000s, has consistently emphasized women’s political representation.
These conditions, in addition to related developments in the party system (e.g., the rise of
Palikot’s Movement), have kept issues of women’s representation visible to leaders from all
political parties and seem to have placed a limit on backsliding.
In Japan, the institutional barriers that worked against women’s cabinet representation
have decreased somewhat in recent years. The party system has become more competitive. The
rules within the LDP have been rewritten in a way that generates more opportunities for party
outsiders. While the majority of the seats in the House of Representatives are now determined on
the basis of single-member district/plurality elections, a significant number of seats (180 out of
480) are allocated via party lists, and parties are allowed to list particular individuals
simultaneously on both SMD-P ballots and party lists. These institutional changes open spaces
for “mavericks” and generate opportunities for aspiring women politicians, but other institutional
features (e.g., the upper limit on the number of cabinet members and the limitations on
appointments from outside the Diet) continue to constrain Japanese prime ministers. Beyond the
institutional setting, Japanese see-sawing has been enabled by the absence of a cohesive
movement that prioritizes representational issues. Some male politicians have taken strategic
advantage of women’s status as “untainted outsiders.” But the country has had no devoted
36
feminist leader, and the likelihood of such a leader emerging is low, given the fragmentation of
the movement and the lack of an explicitly representational movement agenda.
While the paper’s empirical sections have not directly tested the potential relevance of
partisan (left-right) leadership for gender see-sawing and ratcheting, it is worth noting, in
conclusion, that Ireland, Poland, and Japan are all “weak left” cases. Many of the headline-
grabbing examples of women’s cabinet empowerment—including Zapatero’s Spain and Renzi’s
Italy—have involved parties of the left with (in Zapatero’s case) avowedly feminist leaders.
Together, Ireland, Poland, and Japan suggest that left leaders are not necessary for (a) significant
upward movement in women’s cabinet representation (Japan) or (b) maintenance of women’s
representational gains (Ireland and Poland). Future research might subject the notions that left-
wing parties promote upward movement and/or prevent backsliding to deeper scrutiny.
In the meantime, scholars and activists should continue to pay close attention to issues of
women’s cabinet representation, appreciating that while cabinet dynamics may be related to
developments in the legislature, the cabinet is generally (a) more powerful and (b) more volatile
than the legislature. Regardless of institutional features, a party leadership committed to
women’s representation and a cohesive women’s movement that prioritizes representation can
help to limit backsliding and promote more equal representational outcomes.
37
Figure 1: Women’s Representation in the World’s Legislatures
05
1015
20
perc
enta
ge p
oint
s
1940 1960 1980 2000year
mean medianFitted values
38
Figure 2: Women’s Representation in the World’s Cabinets
05
1015
perc
enta
ge p
oint
s
1979 1989 1999 2009year
mean medianFitted values
39
Figure 3: Backslides and Upward Movements in Women’s Legislative Representation
010
2030
40
perc
enta
ge o
f cou
ntrie
s
1940 1960 1980 2000year
increase decreasedecrease (more than 2 percentage points)
40
Figure 4: Nordic Countries
010
2030
4050
60
1979 1989 1999 2009year
Denmark FinlandNorway Sweden
legislature
010
2030
4050
60
1979 1989 1999 2009year
Denmark FinlandNorway Sweden
cabinet
41
Figure 5: Backslides and Upward Movements in Women’s Legislative Representation, for Countries with and without Quotas
010
2030
40
1995 2000 2005 2010year
increase decreasedecrease (more than 2 percentage points)
countries without quotas
010
2030
40
1995 2000 2005 2010year
increase decreasedecrease (more than 2 percentage points)
countries with quotas
42
Figure 6: Legislatures vs. Cabinets: Backslides and Upward Movements
010
2030
40
2000 2005 2010year
increase decreasedecrease (more than 2 percentage points)
legislature
010
2030
40
2000 2005 2010year
increase decreasedecrease (more than 2 percentage points)
cabinet
43
Figure 7: Aggregate Backslides and Upward Movements in Women’s Cabinet Representation
AFG
ALB
DZA
ADO
AGO
ATG
ARG
ARMABW
AUS
AUT
AZE
BHS
BHR
BGD
BRB
BLR
BEL
BLZ BEN
BMU
BTN
BOL
BIH
BWABRA
BRN
BGR
BFA
MMR
BDI
KHM
CMR
CANCPV
CAF
TCD
CHL
CHN
COLCOM
ZAR
COG
CRI
CIV
HRV
CUB
CYP
CZE
DNK
DJI
DMA
DOM
ECU
EGY
SLV
GNQ ERI
EST
ETH
FJI
FIN
FRA
GAB
GMB
GEO
DEU
GHA
GRC
GRD
GTM
GIN
GNB
GUY
HTI
HND
HUN
ISL
IND IDN
IRN
IRQ
IRL
ISR
ITA
JAM
JPN
JOR
KAZ
KEN
KIRPRK
KOR
KSV KWT
KGZ
LAO
LVA
LBN
LSO
LBR
LBY
LIE
LTU
LUX
MKD
MDG
MWI
MYS MDV
MLI
MLT
MHL
MRT
MUS
MEX
FSM
MDA
MCO
MNG
MNE
MAR
MOZNAM
NPL
NLD
NZL
NIC
NER
NGA
NOR
OMN
PAK PLW
PAN
PNG
PRY
PER
PHL
POL
PRT
QAT
ROM
RUS
RWA
KNA
LCA
VCT
WSM
SMR
STP
SAU
SEN
SRB
SYC
SLE
SGP
SVK
SVN
SLB SOM
ZAF
ESP
LKA
SDNSUR
SWZ
SWE
CHE
SYR
TWN
TJK
TZA
THA
TMP
TGO
TON
TTO
TUN TUR
TKM
UGA
UKR
ARE
GBR
USA
URY
UZB
VUT
VEN
VNM
YEM
SRB
ZMB
ZWE
020
4060
aggr
egat
e ba
cksl
idin
g in
200
0-20
10 (%
)
0 20 40 60 80aggregate upward movements in 2000-2010 (%)
44
Figure 8: Aggregate Backslides and Upward Movements in Women’s Legislative Representation
AFG ALBDZA
ADO
AGOATG
ARG
ARMABW
AUS
AUTAZE
BHS
BHR
BGD
BRB
BLRBEL
BLZ
BENBMU
BTN
BOL BIH
BWA
BRABRN
BGR
BFAMMR BDIKHMCMRCAN CPVCAF TCDCHLCHNCOLCOM
ZARCOG
CRICIV
HRV
CUBCYPCZEDNK DJI
DMA
DOM ECUEGY
SLV
GNQ
ERI ESTETH FJIFIN FRA GAB
GMBGEO
DEU
GHA
GRC
GRD
GTM GIN
GNB
GUYHTI
HND
HUN
ISL
IND IDNIRN
IRQ
IRL ISR ITAJAM JPNJORKAZKEN
KIR
PRK
KORKSV KWT KGZLAO
LVA
LBN LSOLBRLBY LIE
LTU
LUX MKD
MDG
MWIMYS
MDV
MLI
MLTMHL MRT MUS
MEX
FSM MDAMCO
MNG
MNE
MARMOZ
NAM
NPL
NLD
NZL
NIC
NERNGA NOR
OMN
PAKPLW
PAN
PNG PRY PER
PHL
POL PRTQAT ROMRUS RWA
KNA
LCA
VCT
WSM
SMR
STPSAU SENSRB
SYC
SLE SGP
SVK
SVN
SLBSOM
ZAFESPLKA SDN
SUR
SWZ
SWE
CHESYRTWN TJK TZATHATMP TGOTON TTOTUNTUR
TKM
UGA
UKR
AREGBRUSA URY UZBVUT
VEN
VNMYEM SRBZMB
ZWE
05
1015
aggr
egat
e ba
cksl
idin
g in
200
0-20
10 (%
)
0 10 20 30 40aggregate upward movements in 2000-2010 (%)
45
Figure 9: Aggregate Backslides and Upward Movements in Women’s Cabinet Representation for Countries Near the Global Mean
AGO
BGD
BOL
BFA
CAF
COG
CIV
DOM
EST
GABGRD
GNB
GUY
HTI
HND
IRL
ITA
JAM
JPN
KAZ
KSV
MWI
MLT
MEX
NGA
PRT
ROM
VCT
SRB
SUR
TZATGO
ZMB
020
4060
aggr
egat
e ba
cksl
idin
g in
200
0-20
10 (%
)
0 20 40 60 80aggregate upward movements in 2000-2010 (%)
46
Figure 10: Aggregate Backslides in Women’s Cabinet Representation, Absolute Values
05
1015
2025
perc
enta
ge o
f cou
ntrie
s
2000 2005 2010year
decrease decrease (> 1)decrease (> 2)
47
Figure 11: Relationships between Legislatures and Cabinets
05
1015
2025
leg. cannot be min. leg. may be min. min. has to be leg. pathway unclear
upward movements backsliding
48
AFG
ALB
DZA
ADO
AGOATG
ARG
ARMABW
AUS
AUT
AZE
BHS
BHR
BGD
BRB
BLR
BEL
BLZBEN
BMU
BTN
BOL
BIH
BWABRA
BRN
BGR
BFA
MMR
BDI
KHM
CMR
CANCPV
CAF
TCD
CHL
CHN
COLCOM
ZAR
COG
CRI
CIV
HRV
CUB
CYP
CZE
DNK
DJI
DMA
DOM
ECU
EGY
SLV
GNQERI
EST
ETH
FJI
FIN
FRA
GAB
GMBGEO
DEU
GHA
GRC
GRD
GTM
GIN
GNB
GUY
HTI
HND
HUN
ISL
INDIDN
IRN
IRQ
IRL
ISRITA
JAM
JPN
JORKAZ
KEN
KIR PRK
KOR
KSVKWT
KGZ
LAOLVA
LBN
LSO
LBR
LBY
LIE
LTU
LUX
MKDMDG
MWIMYSMDV
MLI
MLT
MHL
MRT
MUS
MEX
FSM
MDA
MCO
MNG
MNEMAR
MOZNAM
NPL
NLD
NZL
NICNER
NGA
NOR
OMN
PAKPLW
PAN
PNG
PRY
PER
PHL
POL
PRT
QAT
ROM
RUS
RWA
KNA
LCA
VCT
WSM
SMR
STP
SAU
SEN
SRB
SYC
SLE
SGP
SVK
SVN
SLB SOMZAF
ESP
LKA
SDNSUR
SWZ
SWECHE
SYR
TWN
TJK
TZA
THA
TMP
TGOTON
TTO
TUNTUR
TKM
UGA
UKR
ARE
GBR
USA
URY
UZB
VUTVEN
VNM
YEM
SRB
ZMB
ZWE
020
4060
agg.
bac
kslid
ing
(%)
0 20 40 60
backsliding
AFG
ALBDZA
ADO AGOATG
ARG
ARM
ABW
AUS
AUT
AZE
BHSBHR
BGD
BRB BLR
BEL
BLZBEN
BMUBTN
BOL
BIH
BWA
BRA
BRN
BGR
BFA
MMR
BDI
KHM
CMRCAN
CPV
CAF
TCD
CHL
CHN
COL
COM ZAR
COG
CRI
CIV
HRV
CUB
CYP
CZE DNK
DJI
DMADOM
ECU
EGY
SLV
GNQ
ERI
EST
ETHFJI
FIN
FRA
GAB
GMB
GEO
DEU
GHA
GRC
GRD
GTM
GIN
GNB
GUY
HTI
HND
HUN
ISL
IND
IDN
IRN
IRQ
IRL
ISRITA
JAM
JPN
JOR
KAZ KEN
KIR
PRK
KOR
KSV
KWT
KGZ
LAO
LVA
LBN
LSO
LBR
LBY
LIE
LTU
LUX
MKD
MDG
MWI
MYSMDV MLI
MLT
MHLMRT
MUS
MEX
FSM
MDA
MCO MNGMNE
MARMOZ
NAM
NPL
NLD
NZL
NIC
NER
NGA
NOR
OMN
PAK
PLW
PAN
PNG
PRY
PER
PHL
POL
PRT
QAT
ROM
RUS
RWA
KNA
LCA
VCTWSMSMR
STP
SAU
SEN
SRB
SYC SLESGP
SVK
SVN
SLB
SOM
ZAF
ESP
LKA
SDNSUR
SWZ
SWE
CHE
SYR
TWN
TJKTZA
THA
TMP
TGO
TON
TTO
TUN
TUR TKMUGAUKR
ARE
GBR
USA
URY
UZB
VUT
VEN
VNM
YEM
SRB
ZMB
ZWE
020
4060
80
agg.
upw
ard
mov
emen
ts(%
)0 20 40 60
upward movements
AFG
ALB
DZAADO
AGOATGARG ARM
ABW AUS
AUT
AZE
BHS
BHR
BGDBRB
BLRBEL
BLZBEN
BMUBTN
BOL
BIHBWA
BRA
BRN
BGRBFA
MMR
BDI
KHMCMR
CAN
CPV
CAF TCD
CHL
CHN
COL
COMZAR
COG
CRI
CIV
HRV
CUB
CYP
CZEDNK
DJI
DMADOM
ECU
EGY
SLV
GNQERI
ESTETH
FJI
FINFRA GABGMB
GEODEU
GHAGRC
GRD
GTM
GIN
GNB
GUY
HTI
HNDHUN
ISL IND
IDNIRN
IRQIRL ISRITA
JAMJPN
JORKAZ
KEN
KIR
PRKKORKSV
KWT
KGZ
LAO
LVA
LBN
LSO
LBR
LBY
LIE
LTU
LUXMKD
MDG
MWI
MYSMDV
MLI
MLT
MHL
MRT MUSMEX
FSM
MDA
MCO
MNG
MNE
MAR
MOZ
NAMNPL
NLDNZL
NIC
NERNGA
NOR OMN
PAK
PLW
PAN PNGPRY PER PHL
POLPRT
QAT
ROM
RUSRWAKNA
LCA
VCTWSM
SMR
STP
SAU
SEN
SRB
SYC
SLE
SGP
SVK
SVN
SLB
SOM
ZAF
ESP
LKA
SDNSUR
SWZSWE
CHE
SYRTWN
TJK
TZA
THA
TMP
TGO
TONTTO
TUN
TUR
TKM
UGA
UKR
ARE
GBRUSA
URY
UZB
VUT
VEN
VNM YEMSRBZMB
ZWE
-40
-20
020
4060
net c
hang
e (%
)
0 20 40 60average cabinet size (%)
net change
AFGALB
DZA
ADO
AGOATG
ARG
ARM
ABW
AUS
AUT
AZE
BHS
BHR
BGD
BRBBLR
BEL
BLZBEN
BMU
BTN
BOL
BIH
BWA
BRA
BRN
BGR
BFA
MMR
BDI
KHM
CMRCAN
CPV
CAF
TCD
CHL
CHN
COL
COMZAR
COG
CRI
CIV
HRV
CUB
CYP
CZEDNK
DJI
DMA
DOM
ECU
EGY
SLV
GNQERI
EST
ETH
FJI
FIN
FRA
GAB
GMB GEO
DEU
GHA
GRC
GRD
GTM
GIN
GNB
GUY
HTI
HND
HUN
ISL
INDIDN
IRN
IRQ
IRL
ISRITA
JAM
JPN
JORKAZ
KEN
KIRPRK
KOR
KSVKWT
KGZ
LAO
LVA
LBN
LSO
LBR
LBYLIE
LTU
LUX
MKDMDGMWI
MYSMDV
MLIMLT
MHL
MRT
MUS
MEX
FSM
MDA
MCO
MNG
MNE
MARMOZ
NAM
NPL
NLD
NZL
NIC
NER
NGA
NOR
OMN
PAK
PLW
PAN
PNG
PRY
PER
PHL
POL
PRT
QAT
ROM
RUS
RWA
KNALCAVCT
WSM
SMR
STP
SAU
SENSRB
SYC
SLE
SGP
SVKSVN
SLBSOM
ZAF
ESP
LKA
SDNSUR
SWZ
SWE
CHE
SYR
TWN
TJK TZATHA
TMPTGO
TON
TTO
TUNTUR
TKMUGA
UKRARE
GBR
USA
URY
UZB
VUT
VEN
VNM
YEM
SRB
ZMB
ZWE
050
100
150
back
slid
ing
+ up
war
d m
ovem
ents
(%)
0 20 40 60average cabinet size (%)
tot. seesaw
Figure 12: See-saws and Size of the Cabinet
49
AFG ALB DZAAGOATG
ARG
ARM
AUS
AUTAZEBHR
BGD
BLR BELBEN
BTN
BOLBIH
BWA
BRA
BGR
BFAMMR BDIKHM CMR CANCAF TCDCHL COLCOM
ZARCOG
CRI CIV
HRV
CUBCZEDNKDJI DOMECU EGY
SLV
GNQ
ERIESTFJI FIN FRAGAB
GMBGEO
DEU
GHA
GRCGTMGIN
GNB
GUYHTI
HND
HUN
INDIDNIRN
IRQ
IRLISR ITAJAM JPNJORKAZ KEN
PRK
KORKWT KGZ LAO
LVA
LBNLSOLBRLBY
LTU
MKDMDG
MWIMYS
MLI
MHL MRTMUS
MEX
MDAMCO
MNG
MARMOZ
NAM
NPL
NLD
NZL
NIC
NER NGANOR
OMN
PAK
PAN
PNGPRY PER
PHL
POLPRTQAT ROM RUSRWA
LCASMR
SAU SENSRBSRBSLESGP
SVK
SVN
SLBSOM
ZAFESPLKASDNSWZ
SWE
CHE SYRTWNTJK TZA THATGOTTO TUN TUR
TKM
UGA
UKR
ARE GBRUSAURY UZB
VEN
VNMYEMZMB
ZWE
05
1015
agg.
bac
kslid
ing
(%)
0 200 400 600 800
backsliding
AFG
ALB
DZA
AGO
ATGARGARMAUS
AUT
AZE
BHR
BGD
BLR
BEL
BEN
BTN
BOLBIH
BWA
BRA
BGR
BFA
MMR
BDI
KHM
CMR
CANCAF
TCDCHL
COLCOM
ZAR
COG
CRI
CIV
HRV
CUB
CZE
DNK
DJI
DOM
ECU
EGY
SLV
GNQ
ERI
EST
FJIFIN
FRAGAB
GMB
GEO
DEUGHA
GRC
GTM
GIN
GNB
GUY
HTI HND HUN IND
IDN
IRN IRQIRL
ISR
ITA
JAM
JPNJORKAZKEN
PRK
KORKWT
KGZ
LAO
LVA
LBN
LSO
LBR
LBY
LTU
MKD
MDG
MWI
MYSMLIMHL
MRT
MUS MEX
MDA
MCOMNG
MARMOZ
NAM
NPL
NLD
NZL
NICNER
NGANOR
OMN PAK
PAN
PNG
PRYPER
PHL
POLPRT
QAT
ROMRUS
RWA
LCASMR
SAU
SENSRB
SRB
SLE
SGP
SVK
SVN
SLBSOM
ZAFESP
LKA
SDN
SWZ
SWE
CHE
SYRTWN
TJK
TZA
THATGO
TTO TUN
TUR
TKM
UGA
UKR
ARE
GBR
USA
URY
UZB
VEN
VNMYEMZMB
ZWE
010
2030
40
agg.
upw
ard
mov
emen
ts(%
)
0 200 400 600 800
upward movements
AFG
ALB
DZA
AGO
ATG
ARGARM
AUS
AUT
AZEBHR
BGD
BLR
BEL
BEN
BTN
BOLBIH
BWA
BRA
BGR
BFA
MMR
BDI
KHMCMR
CANCAFTCDCHLCOLCOM ZAR
COG
CRI
CIV
HRV CUB
CZE
DNK
DJI
DOM
ECU
EGYSLV
GNQ
ERIEST
FJI FINFRAGABGMB
GEO DEUGHA
GRC
GTM
GIN
GNB
GUY
HTI
HND
HUNIND
IDN
IRN
IRQ
IRL
ISR
ITA
JAM
JPNJORKAZKEN
PRK
KORKWT
KGZ
LAOLVALBN
LSO
LBR
LBY LTU
MKD
MDG
MWI
MYSMLI
MHL
MRT
MUSMEX
MDA
MCO
MNG
MARMOZ
NAM
NPL
NLDNZL
NICNER
NGANOR
OMNPAKPANPNG
PRYPER
PHLPOL
PRT
QAT
ROM RUS
RWA
LCASMR
SAU
SENSRB
SRB
SLE
SGP
SVKSVN
SLBSOM
ZAFESP
LKA
SDN
SWZ
SWE
CHE
SYRTWN
TJK
TZA
THATGO
TTO TUN
TUR
TKM
UGA
UKR
ARE
GBRUSA
URY
UZB
VEN
VNMYEMZMBZWE
-20
020
40
net c
hang
e (%
)
0 200 400 600 800average legislature size (%)
net change
AFG
ALB
DZA
AGO
ATGARG
ARMAUSAUT
AZE
BHR
BGD
BLR
BEL
BEN
BTNBOL
BIH
BWA
BRA
BGR
BFA
MMR
BDI
KHM
CMR
CANCAF
TCDCHL
COLCOM
ZAR
COG
CRI
CIV
HRV
CUB
CZE
DNK
DJI
DOM
ECU
EGY
SLV
GNQ
ERI
ESTFJI
FINFRA
GAB
GMB
GEO
DEU
GHA
GRC
GTM
GIN
GNB
GUY
HTI
HND
HUNIND
IDN
IRN
IRQ
IRL
ISR
ITA
JAM
JPNJORKAZKEN PRK
KORKWT
KGZ
LAO
LVA
LBN
LSO
LBR
LBY
LTUMKD
MDG
MWI
MYSMLI
MHL
MRT
MUSMEX
MDA
MCO
MNG MARMOZ
NAM
NPL
NLD
NZL
NIC
NER
NGANOR
OMNPAK
PAN
PNG
PRYPER
PHL
POLPRT
QAT
ROMRUS
RWA
LCASMR
SAU
SENSRB
SRB
SLE
SGP
SVK
SVNSLBSOM
ZAFESP
LKA
SDN
SWZSWE
CHE
SYRTWN
TJK
TZA
THATGO
TTO TUN
TUR
TKMUGA
UKR
ARE
GBR
USA
URY
UZB
VEN
VNMYEMZMB
ZWE
010
2030
40
back
slid
ing
+ up
war
d m
ovem
ents
(%)
0 200 400 600 800average legislature size (%)
tot. seesaw
Figure 13: See-saws and Size of Legislature
50
Figure 14: Women’s Political Representation in Ireland, Poland, and Japan
010
2030
4050
2000 2005 2010year
Ireland
010
2030
4050
2000 2005 2010year
Poland010
203040
50
2000 2005 2010year
cabinet legislature
Japan
51
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