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Changing female representation: Reanalyzing the impact of
gender quotas through the evolution of congressional discussions
Iñaki Sagarzazu
School of Social and Political Sciences
University of Glasgow
[email protected]
Thiago Silva
Graduate Student in Political Science
Texas A&M University
[email protected]
April 8, 2015
Abstract
In 1995, Brazil adopted a gender quota law to increase female representation in
Congress. However, this law has had very little eﬀect, with an increase in representation of only 3% after 20 years of enactment. While significantly increasing the number
of female members of congress is a goal of the law, representation broadly understood
can be evaluated through the changing patterns of bill initiatives in Congress. By using
quantitative text analysis over a corpus of more than 50,000 Brazilian bill initiatives
from 1990 to 2013, we evaluate whether the gender quota law influenced the bill initiatives and women’s issues that where presented and discussed in Congress. We find
that, even though the Brazilian gender quota did not fully reach its goal, it is not necessarily a failure, as the political representation in Congress has been influenced by the
adoption of quotas for women.
Paper prepared to be presented in the workshop “Thirty Years of Democracy in
Brazil,” at Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame,
South Bend IN, April 20, 2015.
1
Introduction
In 2012, the Brazilian population was estimated at 196.9 million people (PNAD-
IBGE 2013); the majority of which is composed by women (51.3%). Women are also the
majority of the Brazilian electorate. According to data from Brazil’s Supreme Electoral
Court (TSE do Brasil 2014), out of the 142 million Brazilian voters by December 2013,
74 million were women (52%). Women, however, aren’t equally present in the country’s
elected positions, and while women have made inroads into the political arena, with a
sitting president for instance, disparity still persists in the Brazilian political system.
As such albeit the majority in the country, women still occupy a very restricted place
in Brazilian politics. This reality is far from being unique to Brazil, however, as this
country is not alone in having a significant gap between the percentage of women in
the population and the percentage of women representatives in Congress (see table 1).
While we would expect that our representative bodies ‘represent’ the characteristics of
the population that elects them (Reingold 2000, p. 31), the gap reveals that almost
half of the citizens might be being excluded from the highest levels of policy-making
(Sapiro 1981; Whicker and Whitaker 1999, p. 187).
As we can see in Table 1, Brazil in the beginning of 2015 occupies the 124th place in
the ranking of women representation at the Lower House, with 51 female representatives
from a total of 513 members in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies elected in October
of 2014. This represents the worst position among the Latin American nations. In an
attempt to overcome the restricted and unequal place that women occupy in Brazilian
politics, Brazil adopted a gender quota law for elections into the country’s Chamber
of Deputies in 1995. Paragraph three of this quota law (law number 9100/95) defined
that “at least twenty percent of the positions of each party or coalition must be filled
by women candidates.” This was amended in 1997 (9504/97), to increase the quota to
30%. Yet, almost 20 years after the enactment of the gender quotas law, the female
presence in the Brazilian lower house reaches a mere 9.9% of the total number of seats
available, an increase in representation of less than 4% since 1997. As it can be seen
2
Table 1: Women representation rank at Lower Houses (Sample with the first and last positions, United States and Latin American Democracies)(2014)
Rank
Country
Rwanda
Bolivia
..
.
Number of
Seats
80
130
..
.
Number of Women
Legislators
51
69
..
.
% of Women
Legislators
63.8%
53.1%
..
.
1
2
..
.
9
10
..
.
Nicaragua
Ecuador
..
.
92
137
..
.
39
57
..
.
42.4%
41.6%
..
.
18
..
.
Mexico
..
.
500
..
.
187
..
.
37.4%
..
.
20
..
.
Argentina
..
.
257
..
.
94
..
.
36.6%
..
.
26
..
.
Costa Rica
..
.
80
..
.
51
..
.
33.3%
..
.
41
..
.
El Salvador
..
.
84
..
.
23
..
.
27.4%
..
.
62
..
.
Peru
..
.
130
..
.
29
..
.
22.3%
..
.
67
..
.
Dominican Republic
..
.
183
..
.
38
..
.
20.8%
..
.
72
..
.
Colombia
..
.
166
..
.
33
..
.
19.9%
..
.
75
76
..
.
Panama
United States of America
..
.
57
435
..
.
11
84
..
.
19.3%
19.3%
..
.
87
..
.
Venezuela
..
.
165
..
.
28
..
.
17.0%
..
.
91
..
.
Uruguay
..
.
99
..
.
16
..
.
16.2%
..
.
93
..
.
Chile
..
.
120
..
.
19
..
.
15.8%
..
.
96
..
.
Paraguay
..
.
80
..
.
12
..
.
15%
..
.
105
..
.
Guatemala
..
.
158
..
.
21
..
.
13.3%
..
.
124
..
.
Brazil
..
.
513
..
.
51
..
.
9.9%
..
.
148
Vanuatu
52
0
-
Source: Elaborated by the authors from information gathered from Inter-parliamentary Union (IPU 2015).
189 countries were classified by descending order of the percentage of women in the Lower or Single House.
3
in Table 2 below, while the percentage of women representation has indeed increased
from 1996 to 2015 this increase has been very small1 .
Table 2: Latin American Gender Quota Laws
Country
Adoption’s % of the
Women Representation
Year
Quota
1 yr Before Law January 2015
Brazil
1995
30%a
7%
10%
Paraguay
1996
20%
3%
15%
Venezuela
1998
30%
6%
17%
Panama
1997
30%
8%
19%
Dominican Republic
1997
25%
12%
21%
Peru
1997
25%
10%
22%
Costa Rica
1997
40%
14%
33%
Argentina
1991
30%
6%
36%
Ecuador
1997
20%
4%
42%
Bolivia
1997
50%
11%
53%
a. Although Brazil adopted the gender quotas law in 1995, the increase of quota from 20% to 30% was adopted in 1997.
Source: Adapted from Jones (2000, p. 39). Information updated from Inter-parliamentary Union (IPU 2015).
Although Table 2 shows that only Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia are currently
achieving the quota percentage determined by their respective laws, all other Latin
American countries that adopted a gender quotas law had an increase of at least 10%
of the women representation in Congress, with Brazil being the notable exception.
The literature has pointed out to some reasons behind the small eﬀect the quota
laws have had on representation in Congress. For instance, the absence of a punishment mechanism for parties that do not meet the law and the open-list electoral system
have been suggested as causes of the ineﬀectiveness of female quotas in Brazil (Miguel
and Feitosa 2009, p. 202). Also, a system with values that discourage women’s influence on the legislative process still persist in the society (Dodson 2005, p. 131).
Similarly, surveys reveal that the public still sees representative’s rulers acting dichotomously: congresswomen as “warm, compassionate, kind and passive" and congressmen
as “strong, knowledgeable, tough, direct and assertive" (Dolan 2005, p. 41).
As aforementioned, Brazil is not alone in an infamous position where the percentage
of women in Congress is significantly lower than their proportion in the population.
1
The evolution of the percentage of women representation in Brazilian Lower House from 1987 to 2015
can be seen in the Appendix A.
4
The United States, for instance, where women are also the majority of the population,
occupies position 76 in the ranking (See Table 1). Rankings like this, however, do not
report possible contrasts. As Htun et al. (2013, p. 96-97) reveal, for example, it is
not only number of members that matter but the legislation they enact. Looking at
it this way we see that in the United States there is more feminist legislation than
for example in Rwanda, country occupying the first position in the ranking (Htun and
Micozzi 2013).
As such while increasing the number of female members of congress significantly
is certainly a goal of quota gender laws, representation broadly understood can be
evaluated through the changing patterns of bill initiatives in Congress. By using quantitative text analysis over a corpus of more than 50,000 Brazilian bill initiatives from
1990 to 2013 (six legislatures), we evaluate whether the enactment of gender quotas law
influenced the bill initiatives and bill amendments in Congress.
The literature on female representation topic has profusely tested whether the increase in the number of women legislators impacts women substantive representation.
Our contribution to this literature is to test the impacts (if any) of policy—the gender
quotas law—on women substantive representation. According to our theory, regardless
of the number of women legislators, the enactment of the gender quotas law intensifies
the number of bill initiatives related to women’s issues. We find that, even though the
Brazilian gender quota did not fully reach its goal, it is not necessarily a failure, as the
political representation in Congress have been influenced by the adoption of quotas for
women.
This paper is structured as follows: In the next section (2), we review the literature
based on studies that addressed female representation; In section 3 we present our
theory and hypotheses; In section 4 we present the method and the data used to test
our hypotheses; The results are presented and discussed in section 5; In section 6 we
present our final comments.
5
2
Women’s Representation
It has been consistently found that women legislators are more prone to intro-
duce legislation addressing women issues (see for instance Saint-Germain 1989; Dodson
and Carroll 1991; Carroll 2001; Bratton 2002; Swers 2002; Reingold and Haynie 2014;
Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2014b). Congresswomen have been found to
be vigorous advocates for interests concerning women, children and families in legislative committee and on the Floor (Dodson 2005; Dolan and Swers 2011). This is the
case both in developed and developing nations such as Honduras (Taylor-Robinson and
Heath 2003). Part of their advantage on these issues is that Congresswomen “often
point to their experiences as women or as mothers to gain credibility on an issue”
(Swers 2002, p. 112). For instance, “women talk more for their constituents and also
for the marginalized constituencies, members of social groups typically ignored in the
legislative process” (Walsh 2002, p. 382). Specifically regarding Brazil, Miguel and
Feitosa (2009, p. 209-212) has found that congresswomen speeches have a high concentration on social topics (specially human rights, family, reproductive rights, childhood
and adolescence).
These general findings of the literature regarding female political representation provides support for the often called “substantive representation.” As the number of congresswomen increase—descriptive representation—so increases the presence of women’s
issues in the legislative process. The argument in this case is that an increased women’s
presence at the Congress can regender institutions (Dodson 2011, p. 249), as well as
enlarge the scope of perspectives brought to the the legislature (Walsh 2002).
Some studies, however, have found that there is no direct relationship between an
increase in descriptive and substantive representation. Firstly, because when women’s
presence in the legislature is a really small minority this hinders on their ability to really influence the policy making process (Miguel and Feitosa 2009). Secondly, because
the presence of Congresswomen on issues of lesser prestige contributes to keep them
marginalized in the legislative process. For instance, while the approval of a quota law
6
in Argentina increased the number of women in the Argentinian Congress and subsequently the number women’s rights bills introduced, the approval rate of these actually
decreased (Franceschet and Piscopo 2008; Htun and Micozzi 2013). As such “elected
women are successfully gendering the legislative agenda but not successfully gendering
legislative outcomes" (Franceschet and Piscopo 2008, p. 406). In the same manner,
Brazilian congresswomen tend to be marginalized within the legislative process by belonging to committees that are considered less important (environment, family and
human rights) (Neiva and Ogando 2010). Such results uncovers that representation depends not only on gender, but also on institutional environment and political positions.
These cases might be outliers, however, due to the small number of women represented in Congress. It might instead be needed that women participation in Congress
crosses a threshold—or tipping point—after which congresswomen’s presence starts to
make a substantive diﬀerence. The so-called critical mass theorists argue that just after
reached this greater proportion of women in the House, usually around 30%, congresswomen can have an impact on politics (Saint-Germain 1989; Thomas 1994; Rule 1999;
MacDonald and O’Brien 2010). Still, however, some studies reveal that women deputies
can do make the diﬀerence on policy priorities even when they are only a few in the
House (Taylor-Robinson and Heath 2003, p. 95). The reason behind these disparate
findings might be found not only behind institutional rules but also at the point where
legislative behavior is aﬀected by other factors other than gender such as partisanship,
ideology, and constituency cleavage (Neto and McCubbins 2003; Htun and Power 2006;
Neiva and Ogando 2010; Dolan and Swers 2011; Htun and Micozzi 2013; Arriola and
Johnson 2014)).
Therefore, although the literature usually provides support for the diﬀerence that
women can make in the Congress, the relationship between descriptive and substantive
representation is not categorical (Dodson 2011, p.8). Scholars have been asked whether
the increase in the number of congresswomen also increases the legislative issues related
to women, but whether gender quotas law even when it does not increase the descriptive
representation leads to substantive representation has been an underrated topic in the
7
literature.
3
Descriptive and substantive representation
In a seminal work on representation, Pitkin (1967) suggests the distinction between
descriptive representation and substantive representation2 . Descriptive representation
concerns how the representative body resembles the society. The important element
here is to know with what the representatives look like and if they share common characteristics with those they represent (on race, class, sex and other ascriptive similarities)
(Dolan and Swers 2011, p. 238). In this case, what matters is how the legislative body
is composed, more precisely, in the normative idea that the House of Representatives
should be the image of the nation (should reflect the diversity of views and interests
of the society). Achieve a descriptive representation, therefore, concerns an accurate
correspondence between representatives and represented. Ultimately, the concern here
is not with the right and responsibility to perform or take actions, but rather with what
those that represent the society look like and if they “stand for” their group. This conceptualization, according to Pitkin (1967, p. 81), is more appropriate and relevant in
contexts where the purpose of representation is to provide information about something
that is not present and tells us nothing about public policy formulation or government
action for a certain portion of society.
Substantive representation, in turn, relates to the activity of representatives “in the
interest of," as an “agent of," or as a “substitute" of those that are being represented.
Here the central question focuses on whether the representative meets the policy preferences and the interests of those represented. Representation, in this case, means that
political outcomes are meeting or serving the interests of defined groups or population
subgroups (Curtin 2006; Tremblay 2007; Piscopo 2011). Pitkin (1967, p. 143) then
2
Actually, Pitkin (1967) does not use the term “substantive representation,” but rather representation
“as acting for” (Dahlerup 2014, p. 62). Nevertheless, substantive representation has become the popular
nomenclature in the literature in relating representation as policy outputs for a specific group. Beyond
descriptive and “substantive” representations, Pitkin (1967) defines other two concepts of representation:
formalistic and symbolic.
8
states that acting “on behalf of others" involves special behavior and obligations reasonably well distinguished in practical terms. According to the author, in this case, we
talk about representation only when the actions of the substitute are linked somehow
to others (so substantive actions).
In the literature on female political representation a recurrent research question is
whether descriptive representation led to substantive representation. Scholars addressing this question expect that greater the number of women in the government, greater
the women’s issues being debated by representatives and greater the introduction of
bills concerning women interests. But a logical possibility not stated or underrated by
this literature is to ask whether the gender quota law per se transform and shape the
issues of the bills proposed by legislators.
In this study, our focus is still on substantive representation, but we don’t take
descriptive representation as a logical necessary condition for a greater presence of
women’s issues in Congress. We are concerned on an institutional change. That is,
the gender quotas law. Our interest is in the question whether the gender quotas law
impacts the issues of bill initiatives, and we expect that gender quotas law can influence legislators not initially concerned with women issues; increasing the bill initiatives
related to women interests.
Figure 1: Theory. From Gender Quotas Law to Women Substantive Representation
1. Gender
.
Quotas Law
2. Descriptive
Representation
3. Substantive
Representation
As aforementioned, studies on gender quotas law are usually concerned to answer the
question whether gender quota laws increase the descriptive representation—number of
women legislators—and, consequently, the substantive representation—greater presence
of women’s issues in Congress. According to our theory, we expect that the enactment
of gender quotas law, regardless of the number of women legislators in Congress (and
9
the apparent failure of that law in cases such as Brazil), can leads to substantive representation. Therefore, we suggest a path that goes from gender quotas law to women’s
substantive representation, not necessarily undergoing an increase in the number of
congresswomen (see the upper arrow in Figure 1).
Two reasons are presented here as not using descriptive representation as a logical necessary condition for substantive representation. The first one, following Pitkin,
the mere fact that a representative “is a very good descriptive representative does not
automatically guarantee that they will be good representatives in the sense of acting
for [. . . ]” (Pitkin 1967, p. 142; Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2014a, p. 5).
In this case, we assume that a greater presence of women in the Congress it is not
necessarily the most important condition for having more women issues in the bills
proposed by legislators. Our second reason relates to the concept of “surrogate representation.” Surrogate representatives represent issues of those whom interests lie
beyond the representatives’ own electoral constituency or district (Mansbridge 2003, p.
523). Mansbridge (2003, p. 523) states that,
representatives who are female, African American, or of Polish ancestry,
who have a child with a disability, or who have grown up on a farm, in a
mining community, or in a working-class neighborhood, often feel not only
a particular sensitivity to issues relating to these experiences but also a
particular responsibility for representing the interests and perspectives of
these groups, even when members of these groups do not constitute a large
fraction of their constituents.
Based on our theory, we can formulate the following hypotheses:
• Hypothesis 1a. After the enactment of gender quotas law in 1997, the number of
bill proposals related to women’s issues increased in the Congress, regardless of
the gender of the representatives.
• Hypothesis 1b. More than a general increase, it is expected a higher presence of
bill proposals related to women issues in the bills proposed by women legislators.
A common hypothesis in the literature is that left-leaning Congresswomen tend to
advocate more progressive and liberal (non-conservative) policies, including a feminist
10
policy agenda (Htun and Power 2006, p.83; p. 99). Beyond the importance of gender,
party membership has been considered one of the most consistently predictor of how
representatives behave (Htun and Power 2006, p. 84; Dolan and Swers 2011, p. 241).
Therefore, in addition to testing for the importance of gender, we should control the
eﬀect of legislator’s party ideology. By controlling for the ideologic eﬀect, we are able
to know if a supposed increase in women substantive representation is attributed to
the gender quotas law or if it is because the legislator belongs, for example, to a leftist
party.
• Hypothesis 2. As the percentage of left leaning legislators increases, also increases
the presence of women’s issues on Congress bill proposals.
In 2007, Dilma Rousseﬀ, from Worker’s Party (PT), was the first female president
elected in Brazil. In 2014, she was reelect for more 4 years in Brazilian presidency. It
is reasonable to believe that the figure of a female president in the country’s highest
political post may impact the Congress’ bill initiatives. Therefore,
• Hypothesis 3. With the presence of a woman president in Brazil, we expect an
increase in the presence of women’s issues on Congress bill proposals
4
Analyzing Substantive Representation in the
Brazilian Congress
As it was mentioned earlier, Brazil adopted a gender quota law in 1995 (subsequently
revised in 1997), however, despite the existence of this quota law there was little increase
of women’s descriptive representation with a mere 3% increase in 20 years. As such,
Brazil provides an interesting opportunity to explore whether or not “substantive” and
“descriptive” representations are linked to each other, or if on the contrary what matters
is the institutional norm change to provide a venue for the discussion of women’s issues.
In Brazil, a bill may be initiated by any member or committee of the Chamber of
Deputies (Câmara dos Deputados), the Senate or the Congress (deputies and senators
11
presenting the bill together). May also propose new laws the President, the Supreme
Court, the High Courts, the Attorney General’s Oﬃce, and citizens through popular
initiative (requires up 1% of the total subscriptions of the electorate of the country).
In our analysis, we included as bill initiatives all bill proposals initiated by legislators
in the Chamber of Deputies (the House to which the gender quotas are intended).
All Congress bill initiatives, from 1990 to 2013, were gathered from the Brazilian
Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP). Bill initiatives provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the preferences and issues introduced by legislators.
4.1
Classifying Bill Initiatives
Each bill introduced gets assigned a group of key words (Indexação) to describe the
content of the bill initiative. These words, on average 8 per bill initiative, are standard
and are assigned by the Legislative Advisory Boy (CONLE) a non-partisan oﬃce in
charge of advising members of Congress, comitees, etc of technical and legislative rules.
In order to classify the bills we took hold of these key words and via Quantitative Text
Analyisis we classified each bill as being a women’s issue bill or not.
Quantitative Text Analysis allows researchers to analyze large quantities of data
in a simple, reliable, and replicable way (Grimmer and King 2009; Hopkins and King
2010; Benoit and Lowe 2012), eﬀectively reducing both the costs and likelihood of
human error associated with hand coding texts (Neuendorf 2001). Specifically, in this
study we use a dictionary approach. A dictionary allows the definition of categories
through the classification of specific words into these. These categories can be issue
areas (Pardos-Prado and Sagarzazu 2015), policy positions (Laver and Garry 2000), or
budgetary policy decisions (Langer and Sagarzazu 2015).
We built our dictionary by taking all the unique key words used by the (name
of Congressional oﬃce) in classifying the bill initiatives introduced in the Brazilian
Congress. Each of these keywords was classified as pertaining (1) or not (0) to “women’s
issues”. This categorization was done after consulting specialists on gender studies, and
can be found in the appendix. Overall from the initial list of 534 tokens we classified
12
Figure 2: Percentage of Gender Bill Initiatives introduced per Legislature
13 as women’s issues keywords.
Once our dictionary was defined we proceeded to classify the bills. Each bill was
classified using the percentage of keywords which belonged to women’s issues. If a
bill had more than 10% of keywords within our women’s rights keywords dictionary it
was classified as a female issues bill. It is still important to be careful about diﬀerent
dimensions in the same topic discussed by the representatives (this can be a problem
for the dictionary). It might be that in some issues, for example a health care bill,
women emphasize aspects related to a specific women problem (for example breast
cancer research) while men emphasize how much the bill will cost (economic dimension).
These keywords are seen as women’s issues because, as stated by Swers (2002, p. 10;
and Swers and Larson 2005, p.113-114), “they seek to achieve equality for women; they
address women’s special needs, such as women’s health concerns or child care; or they
confront issues with which women have traditionally been concerned in their role as
caregivers, as education or the protection of children".
Figure 2 shows the percentage of bills classified as gender bills per legislature. As it
can be seen the percentage of gender bills remains around 10% to 12%; however, in the
last legislature this number increased to 15% which is already higher than the 9.9% of
13
women representatives in Congress.
4.2
Data, Sources and Variables
Having defined the criteria for classification of bills as gender legislation we can
proceed to test our hypotheses. We test the eﬀects of four main independent variables
(“Quota Law 1995,” “Quota Law 1997,” “Female,” “Dilma,” and “Ideology”) on our
dependent variable, “Gender Bill.” Our dependent variable is a dichotomous variable
assigned with a value of 1 when the bill proposal is related to women’s issues and 0,
otherwise.
Gender quota 1997 is a dichotomous variable for the gender quota law. Although
the Brazilian gender quota law was adopted in 1995, the law was applied for the first
time in the 1998 Brazilian national elections (already with a quota of 30%, according
to the amendment to the law in 1997). Female is a dichotomous variable assigned with
a value of 1 if the legislator that initiated the bill is a woman (0 if a man). Dilma
Rousseﬀ, from the Workers’ Party (PT), was elected president of Brazil in 2010 and
reelected in 2014; thus this variable receives a value of 1 from 2011 onwards. Ideology
is a measure for the party ideology of the legislators; if the legislator is a member of a
left-of-center party (1) otherwise (0).3
We included in the analysis diﬀerent control variables data (political, economic and
socio-demographic). We created dummy variables for the presidents before President
Roussef, these are: Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002), from the Brazilian Social
Democracy Party (PSDB); and Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva (2003-2010), from the Workers’ Party (PT); the base category (where all three president dummies are zero is for
President’s Collor de Mello and Franco (1990-1992 and 1992-1995 respectively). We
furthermore control for whether the legislator is member of the governing coalition (1)
or not (0). Because the first year of a legislature can be it’s most active we include a
control for it.4
3
This binary variable for ideology was created based on information gathered from Zucco and Power
(2009), a reliable and well accept ideology classification for Brazilian political parties.
4
The list of variables and descriptive statistics can be seen in Appendix B.
14
Using roll-call data we estimated the ideological position of the legislators for a given
congress by using Poole and Rosenthals’s W-NOMINATE (Poole and Rosenthal 1985;
Poole 2005), with this ideological positions we estimated each legislator’s distance to
the median ideological position of the congress to control for whether legislators who
are closer to the chamber’s mean propose more gender legislation as it will have a higher
likelihood of being approved (as shown is the case in the Argentinian Congress, Calvo
and Sagarzazu 2011).
Finally, we introduced controls for the geographical area where the legislator is a representative of North, Northeast, Southeast, South, or the West-Central (base category)
region. Geographical areas in Brazil are good proxies for development and education
of a representative’s constituency.
5
Results and Discussion
Because our dependent variable, whether a proposed bill is a ‘gender bill’ or not, we
use a logistic regression model. The full econometric model to be estimated is presented
by the following equation,
GenderBill = f (QuotaLaw + F emale + Dilma + Ideology
(1)
+IdeologicalDistancetoChamberM edian + Controls + ϵ)
Where the change in our dependent variable, “gender bill,” is expected to be a
function of the independent variables “quota law,” “female,” “Dilma,” “Ideology,” control
variables, and a disturbance term, ϵ.
Table 3, presents the results for the eﬀects of gender quota law (“Gender Law 1997”)
and controls in three diﬀerent logit models. In Model 1, all membems of congress (MC)
are included; In Model 2, only female legislators are included, and; In Model 3, only
male legislators are included.
According to the results presented in Table 3, Brazilian gender quota law had positive and significant (at level .05) eﬀects on bill initiatives, increasing the likelihood of
15
Table 3: The impact of gender quota law on bill initiatives
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
All MC’s Female MC’s Male MC’s
Gender Law 1997
0.216***
0.610**
0.168**
(0.07)
(0.24)
(0.08)
Female
Ideological Distance to Chamber Mean
Ideology
Lula
Dilma
FHC
Coalition
First Year
North
Northeast
Southeast
South
Constant
N
LogLik
AIC
0.471***
(0.06)
-0.227**
(0.09)
0.002
(0.04)
-0.298***
(0.10)
-0.236**
(0.11)
-0.052
(0.08)
0.026
(0.05)
0.160***
(0.05)
0.164*
(0.09)
0.081
(0.08)
-0.054
(0.07)
-0.096
(0.08)
-2.114***
24357
-8527
17081.5
0.297
(0.24)
0.027
(0.11)
-1.026***
(0.32)
-0.998***
(0.33)
-0.516**
(0.25)
0.141
(0.11)
0.327**
(0.13)
0.463**
(0.20)
0.704***
(0.21)
0.181
(0.14)
0.219
(0.23)
-1.886***
3759
-1613
3251.0
-0.223**
(0.10)
-0.002
(0.05)
-0.246**
(0.11)
-0.175
(0.12)
-0.017
(0.09)
0.020
(0.05)
0.137***
(0.05)
0.107
(0.10)
-0.006
(0.08)
-0.118
(0.07)
-0.166**
(0.08)
-2.043***
22285
-7609
15244.0
Dependent Variable: Gender Law (1 = bill proposal is related to women’s issues; 0 otherwise).
Standard errors in parenthesis. Significance levels: * p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01. Two-tailed test.
bill proposals related to women’s issues in Brazilian Congress. This finding supports our
hypothesis 1a. According to this hypothesis, after the enactment of gender quotas law,
we expected that the number of bill proposals related to women’s issues increased in
the Congress, regardless of the gender of the representatives. This finding is consistent
in all our models.
16
According to our hypothesis 1b, we expected a higher presence of bill proposals
related to women issues in the bills proposed by women legislators. In order to test
this hypothesis, we divided our sample between women members of congres (MC) and
male members of congress. The results can be see in Model 2 and Model 3 of Table 3.
The coeﬃcients of these models reveal that Brazilian gender quota law increases the
likelihood of bill proposals related to women’s issues in Brazilian Congress, and this
likelihood is higher for female members of congress (Model 2, coeﬃcient positive and
significant at level 0.05), supporting our hypothesis 1b.
We found no eﬀect of ideology on gender bills (hypothesis 2), the results are not
statistically significant. Our estimation for each legislator’s distance to the median
ideological position of the congress reveals an opposite direction from what we expected.
According to our expectation, legislators who are closer to the chamber’s mean propose
more gender legislation as it will have a higher likelihood of being approved, wr found
this to be true. The negative sign of the coeﬃcient indicates that legislators who are
further away from the chamber mean will be less likely to propose legislation than those
legislators who are closer to the chamber mean. It is interesting to notice, however, that
once we split the model for men and women legislators this eﬀect is diﬀerent. While it
remains similar for male-MC’s (Model 3), it is not statistically significant for womenMC’s (Model 2), this indicates that ideological location doesn’t seem to influence the
likelihood with which women propose gender bills.
Unexpectedly, the coeﬃcient for President Dilma Roussef is in the opposite direction
from our hypothesis 3, and statistically significant in Model 1 and 2. We expected that
a women in the position of president would increase the number of bills related to
women interests, but our results show a diﬀerent scenario.
Figure 3 shows the predicted probabilities of introducing a Gender Bill by both
Men (left) and Women (right). The hollow circles represent the probabilities before
the enactment the Quota Law, while the filled circles are for after the enactment of
the law. The x-axis is the distance of the legislator to the chamber’s mean ideological
position. This figure clearly shows the eﬀect, on substantive representation, of the
17
Figure 3: Predicted probabilities of initiating Gender Legislation
quota law. As it can be seen on the left hand side graph, the probability that men
introduce legislation actually goes down after the enactment of the quota law, while
that of women increases significantly. This divergent eﬀect is probably due to the fact
that men MC’s change their priorities after the enactment of quota laws, while before
they thought they were representing everyone afterwards they might feel that women
are getting true representatives in female MC’s, and as such leave those issues to them.
18
6
Conclusions
Studies on women in legislatures have often argued about the eﬀect of gender quota
laws in increasing the number of women legislators. This increase in descriptive representation has been directly linked to an increase in women’s issues being addressed and
introduced into the agendas of parliaments worldwide. The argument of the current
literature is that as descriptive representation increases, so does substantive representation. This link between descriptive and substantive representation suggests that once
women reach parliament, they become the strongest supporters for women’s, family, and
children’s issues, whether it is by speaking on these issues or by introducing legislation
on the matter.
In light of this direct relationship, countries worldwide (including Brazil) have
adopted gender quota laws to increase descriptive representation, and its positive outcome of enhancing womens’ substantive representation. In 1995 Brazil enacted its
gender quota law which mandated the presence of women in congress. After 20 years,
however, women representation in the Brazilian Congress has increased a mere 3% going from 7 to 10 percent. This small increase in descriptive representation has been
linked to the absense of punishment for parties that don’t increase the number of female candidates, and also to the proportional representation open list electoral system
in Brazil.
In light of the failure of Brazil’s gender quota law to significantly increase the presence of female legislators, we questioned whether the increase in substantive representation is due to the increase in descriptive representation, or if it could be due to the
institutional adoption of a quota law, which could change members of congress’ (MC)
behavior. As such, this paper analyzed whether the gender quota law approved in Brazil
is directly aﬀecting the level of substantive representation. Specifically, we aimed to
understand whether this law eﬀectively transformed the bill initiatives introduced in
Congress by influencing the issues of the bills proposed by Brazilian legislators.
In order to evaluate whether the Brazilian Congress saw more bill initiatives favoring
19
women’s issues after the enactment of the quota law, we analyzed over 50,000 bill
initiatives introduced from 1990 to 2013. Each of these proposals was coded—by means
of a dictionary—as addressing or not addressing women’s issue. In our analysis we found
that, even though the Brazilian gender quota did not fully reach its goal of increasing
descriptive representation, it is not necessarily a failure, as we found evidence that
political representation in the Brazilian Congress has been influenced by the adoption
of quotas for women. Specifically we find that after the quota law’s enactment there was
an increase in the number of legislative initiatives favoring women. We found, however,
that the dynamics of initiating a piece of women’s issue legislation changed with the
1997 quota law, with men less likely to propose legislation dealing with women’s issues,
while women are more likely to do so.
20
Appendix A
Figure 4: The evolution of the percentage of women representation in Brazilian Lower House
(1987-2015)
Source: Elaborated by the authors. Information from Brazilian Chamber of Deputies Portal (Câmara dos Deputados do Brasil
2014).
Note: In 1995 (vertical red line) was approved a law providing 20% (in 1997, 30%) quota for women seats in the Brazilian
legislature.
* The composition of the Chamber of Federal Deputies for the legislature from 1991 to 1994 increased from 495 to 503 members
due to the inclusion of Amapá and Roraima territories as states; increasing their seats from four to eight seats.
** A Complementary Law increased the legislative seats of São Paulo from 60 to 70 members. The composition of the Chamber
of Federal Deputies for the legislature from 1995 to 1998 increased from 503 to 513 members; remaining with the same size
until today.
21
Appendix B
Table 4: Variables Names and Descriptive Statistics
Variable
Mean Std. Dev. Min.
Dependent Variables
Gender Bills
0.133
0.339
0
Independent Variables
Gender Quota 1997
Ideological Distance to Chamber Median
Ideology
Lula
FHC
Dilma
Coalition
Female
First Year
North
Northeast
West-central
Southeast
South
0.701
0.22
0.312
0.371
0.291
0.134
0.544
0.081
0.288
0.093
0.179
0.093
0.363
0.152
0.458
0.244
0.463
0.483
0.454
0.341
0.498
0.273
0.453
0.291
0.383
0.291
0.481
0.359
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Max.
N
1
50584
1
1.408
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
50584
28500
42845
50026
50026
50026
46276
44603
50584
50584
50584
50584
50584
50584
22
Appendix C
Table 5: Keywords associated with Gendered Legislation
Portuguese
English
criança(s)
kid(s)
discriminação
discrimination
domestico
domestic household
domiciliar or domicílio
household
equiparação
pay equity
exam
exam
filh
kid(s)
gestante
pregnant/pregnancy
gratuidad
free
guarda
custody, child custody
licencia
maternal license
sexual
sexual
victim
victim
23
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