Gender quota
[6] The second factor considers their enforcement, as quotas can either be required by law or voluntary, in which parties can choose to implement them.
One criticism is it targets the beginning of political recruitment, which doesn't guarantee an increase in women legislators.
According to Professor Richard Matland, another difficulty of these policies is the local-central struggle for power over candidate selection.
[6] Predominantly found in Europe, these quotas are applied in systems with liberal political culture and left-leaning parties.
The Ley de Cupos ("Law of Quotas") stipulates that the closed lists of candidates that parties present must have at least 30% women.
It also requires that female candidates are placed in winnable spots on the list, which depended on the number of seats a party is renewing from the previous election.
[19] In 1993, the Liberal Party of Canada aim to elect twenty-five percent women, although this has not been declared an official policy and is not strongly endorsed.
[19] Similar to the NDP, the Liberal Party has created a national women’s commission and a funding source to aid new female candidates.
[20] The GTFP policy functions by allocating funding to Canadian political parties based on the votes cast for women and men candidates in the previous election.
[20] The Green Party was able to achieve an equal slate of female and male candidates and increase their vote share by fifteen percent throughout the entire province.
[20] This in turn led to a ten percent increase in their annual subsidy received to fund their party.
[21] The Quebec provincial government created and funds a program named “Decision-making: A Matter of Equality”.
[21] Other groups such as the “Femme, Politique et Démocratie (FPD)” in Quebec and “Equal Voices” work with multiple levels of office in Canada.
[21] In a 2008 paper by Aili Tripp and Alice Kang, quotas were found to have a positive and statistically significant effect on the number of women in single or lower house legislatures.
[22] In 2015, Pamela Paxton and Melanie Hughes established that from 1990 to 2010, quotas became more effective over time in increasing women's representation.
In open list elections, voters select individual candidates based on their preferences, so placement mandates aren't a possibility.
[27] There are several types of vertical placement mechanisms: In majoritarian systems, quotas are effective if women are placed in winnable constituencies.
For this to occur, proper horizontal placement mechanisms must be instituted based on previous party success or failure in those constituencies.
Leslie Schwindt-Bayer explains that this creates an issue because parties can claim to not have found enough qualified women and continue to run mostly male candidates.
