Bolivia introduced a series of progressive reforms and laws aimed at included political participation of women. The constitutional reform of 1995 included a series of quotas, one of which requires that at least 30 percent of candidates on the party lists be women.
With this, Bolivia, which still struggles with politically harmful legacies such as personality cult, clientelism, patrimonialism, caudillismo, is a step ahead of many Western nations. In the US for example, women still hold less than 20% of all congressional seats. In Bolivia, it is almost 50/50. In the US women’s share of political power is way below their share of education and economic power. But due to the majority electoral system it is very hard to impose quotas, since they work best in systems that incorporate lists (not that there is the political momentum for this anyway.) In many Western countries, there has been internal struggle over quotas. The German government, after seeing how small the amount of women at the head of DAX-listed companies was, struggled over attempts to introduce a quota. Unfortunately, it failed and resulted in an ineffective “voluntary” quota that enabled companies to set their own.
The most important organ of the Electoral Court in Bolivia, the Sala Plena, has seven members; four women and three men. It too has quotas, at least three of the spots have to be filled by women and two of the sports by someone who is indigenous. Some people criticize such affirmative action programs by saying positions should be earned by merit. However, we should all acknowledge that we live in a patriarchal society that makes it un-proportionally harder for women than for men. I wish things would just naturally work out in a way where we had gender equality, but reality is different. Sometimes you have to force things along, good on you Bolivia.
However, this does not mean that Bolivia deserves a gold star on all women’s issues. At the Gregoriana Apaza, an NGO dedicated to women’s issues, I learned that the entire country only has eight women’s shelter, a number entirely too low.
The Bolivian electoral quota was 30% (or 1/3, actually) at first. Now it's 50/50 (every other name on the list must be male/female and if a candidate is male, his suplente must be female, and vice versa). That's the highest "quota" in the world. Gender quotas in list proportional systems work fairly well. But remember that Germany has a mixed-member system. So quotas couldn't be applied to the SMD legislators.
ReplyDelete