The Importance of Being First

Twenty years ago, Wilma Rule (1987) published one of the first pieces that tested statistically a series of variables that might explain women's representation in national legislatures. Since its publication, "Electoral Systems, Contextual Factors and Women's Opportunity for Election to Parliament in Twenty-Three Democracies" has been widely cited, extensively built upon, and at times criticized. Despite the criticism, the core ideas of Rule's piece have stood up quite well and have been consistently confirmed by a wide range of authors using a wide range of techniques. While her 1987 piece is her most widely cited work, it is only one of a corpus of literature dealing with representation and electoral systems. These were issues that interested Rule throughout her career and to which she made several contributions. The question that animated Rule's interest in this particular case was what explains variations in women's representation in legislative bodies. Her 1987 article looking at women's representation in twenty-three democracies was a follow-up and an extension of her earlier Western Political Quarterly article (Rule 1981) looking at women's representation across U.S. state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, and nineteen countries. In her 1981 piece, using data from 1972, she had confirmed Duverger's (1955) assertion that women were advantaged by proportional representation electoral systems. In the 1987 piece, using data from a decade later, Rule was interested in retesting her previous findings, considering more extensively the role electoral systems play, and identifying countries that were likely to lead in increasing women's representation. In retesting her findings, Rule found significant effects for electoral systems, women's labor force participation, percentage women college graduates, percentage unemployed, percentage right-wing Members of Parliament (MPs), and percentage Catholic. In further analysis, she factor analyzed her independent variables and identified three separate factors: a political-system component, a socioeconomic component, and an educational component. All had significant effects on representation across countries. In addition to testing for the effects of these variables, Rule took a particular interest in electoral systems. This interest had a twofold source. First was a belief that electoral systems were an important factor in determining the likelihood that women get elected. second, as a political institution established in drawing up the rules of the political game, it was possible to engage in social engineering and design institutions so that women's representation might increase. She followed up the statistically significant results of her regressions by showing that for four different democracies where both single-member district and some type of proportional representation were used, women were better represented in all cases under the proportional representation conditions. In further analysis, Rule identified clusters of nations in terms of the likelihood that women would have significant political opportunities for improved representation. She argued for an interaction between the political-systems component and the socioeconomic component, both being important to women's political opportunities but with the political factor having primacy. Using her categorization of political opportunity, we can compare her predictions of twenty years ago with present-day levels of representation. When we do, we see a strong degree of predictive power, the predictions from 1987 largely hold today. Rule identified a political-opportunity cluster consisting of four Nordic countries where conditions were optimal for significant women's representation; looking at those countries today, they all have representation levels above 35% and are among the top ten countries in the world in terms of women's representation.1 On the other end, Rule identified a limited political-opportunity cluster consisting of five countries with single-member-district electoral systems (Australia, Canada, France, United Kingdom, and United States). …