Quotas Matter : The Impact of Gender Quota Laws on Work-Family Policies ∗

Do gender quotas matter to policy outcomes, or are they just ‘window dressing’? This paper is one of the first to examine the relationship between quota laws and policy outcomes across countries. After a quota law, we should expect to see change for issues on which men and women have different preferences, especially if they are orthogonal to the main left-right dimension in politics. Maternal employment and associated work-family policies fit both of these criteria. Using time-series cross-national data for 22 advanced democracies from 1980 to 2011, I examine spending outcomes on work-family policies. In line with women’s preferences, I find that implementing a quota law increases spending on child care, which encourages maternal employment, and decreases spending on family allowances, which tend to discourage maternal employment. No change is found for spending on issues with no gender gap in preferences, or where there is a gender gap but issues align with the main left-right dimension in politics. ∗Many thanks to Lisa Baldez, Jennifer Hochschild, Nahomi Ichino, Torben Iversen, and workshop participants at Harvard and Dartmouth for helpful comments and suggestions. †Harvard College Fellow, Department of Government. catalan@fas.harvard. edu A longstanding debate in the study of political representation is whether the identity of those who represent us matters for policy outcomes. Normative theorists are skeptical of the idea that descriptive representation is necessary for the substantive representation of group interests. Perhaps the most influential scholar of representation, Hanna Pitkin, rejects the notion that there is a link between representatives’ identity and actions (Pitkin 1967), and even explicit advocates of group representation concur. Iris Marion Young claims, “Having such a relation of identity or similarity with constituents says nothing about what the representative does” (Young 1997, p. 354). Literature from political economy also tends to ignore politician identity. The assumption is that parties will have incentives to incorporate any electorally salient issues into their platforms (Downs 1957; Aldrich 1995; Kitschelt 2000). Yet the argument for diversity often relies upon ‘the politics of presence’, the notion that a group’s physical presence in office will lead to better outcomes for that group. While it is not a guarantee, the idea is that women will be more likely to act for women than will men (Phillips 1995). According to this view politicians are not simply responding to incentives; their lived, gendered, raced, classed (etc.) experiences affect their priorities. Even further, identity conditions how people understand what their incentives are in the first place. The political space is thus constructed in some measure from the parochial points of view that make people who they are. Identity, not just incentives, matters for politics. One of the difficulties of settling this debate is that policy outcomes may arise not from more women in office, but from something else that may cause both women’s representation and female-friendly policy change, such as a cultural shift. To make progress on this question, I examine the impact of political gender quota laws, which require all parties to include a certain percentage of women in their party lists. Quota laws cause major transformations of the composition of those elected unmatched by changes in the electorate. Changes in culture and the preferences of the electorate are glacial, but the effect of quotas on representation has been abrupt. There is very little work of this nature, particularly across countries. A notable exception is Chattopadhyay & Duflo (2004), who use a unique institutional setup in India whereby certain seats are required to be randomly reserved for a woman. They find that quotas have altered policymaking in favor of