Expanding democracy: debating legislative and corporate board quotas In five European states

Abstract

ABSTRACT This project examines the puzzle posed by different types of quotas, which both seem to be part of similar gender equality policies and yet differ; legislative and corporate board quotas regulate sectors with different patterns of state intervention and play different roles in the democratic process, have different practical and political dynamics and tend not to occur in the same places. We use parliamentary debates in five European nation-states to analyze how policy-makers use conceptualizations of equality and democracy in these different policies and how these differ across quota types and cases. We determine that the two policies reflect similar conceptualizations of equality and democracy that are shared across the cases, although the understanding in the later CBQ debates is more expansive than in the earlier LQ ones, especially among MPs on the right. It takes women’s equal qualifications to participate in decision-making bodies as a given and expands the agenda for dismantling unequal power structures. These new norms derive their legitimacy from the experience of other comparator nation-states with quotas and concern for the state’s international reputation. Thus, CBQs are extensions of LQs but the mechanism of their relationship arises as much through international diffusion as domestic policy expansion.