The Politics of Gender and Party Regulation: Official Quota and Beyond

Authors: Ingrid van Biezen and Ekaterina R. Rashkova | Published in: Special issue of Representation, vol. 49, no.4 | Date of publication: 2013

Abstract

The subject of party regulation has begun to occupy important place within the field of party politics. To date, however, few studies have analysed the legal regulation of party activity and behaviour from a gender perspective. At the same time, in the gender literature quotas remain the institutional instrument that have drawn the largest amount of scholarly attention, but the impact of the broader regulatory framework for parties on gender representation have remained largely outside the scope of extant studies. With this special section Symposium on Gender Politics and Party Regulation, our aim is to bridge the literatures on party politics and gender through the lens of party regulation, thereby shedding light on the question how the legal rules on the establishment, activities and competition of political parties affect gender parity, within political parties and the broader political arena. Our main objective is to highlight the potentially gendered nature of party regulation on the one hand, and to move the scholarly debate on gender equality beyond the issue of quotas by examining how other institutional settings may affect the inclusion or exclusion of women in politics.

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