From 30 percent to gender parity in everything: the steady route to raising women’s political representation in Mexico

ABSTRACT

This article assesses 30 years of gender quota adoption and reform in Latin America through the lens of earlier theorizing about the incremental and fast tracks. Focusing on women political actors’ ongoing efforts to transform weak quota laws into comprehensive parity requirements, we argue that most fast-track countries follow a steady route. This route builds on Drude Dahlerup and Lenita Freidenvall’s landmark conceptualization of the fast track, introducing countries’ reliance on iterative quota reforms and demonstrating how innovation in quota design continuously raises the bar for what constitutes a “good” quota or parity law. We demonstrate this route using a case study from Mexico, focusing on the 2014 adoption of gender parity for the federal and state legislatures and the 2019 adoption of “parity in everything,” meaning parity for the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

RESUMEN

Este artículo evalúa la experiencia de los últimos 30 años de reformas de cuotas de género en América Latina desde el marco teórico clásico de las dos rutas: la incremental y la vía rápida. Al enfocarnos en los continuos esfuerzos de las mujeres políticas para transformar leyes de cuotas de género relativamente débiles en criterios para aplicar la paridad plenamente, argumentamos que la mayoría de los países que siguieron la “vía rápida” evolucionaron en una ruta constante. La ruta constante se desarrolla a partir de la conceptualización de la vía rápida de Drude Dahlerup y Lenita Freidenvall. Plantea que los países dependen de reformas constantes a la legislación sobre cuotas de género y muestra cómo la innovación en el diseño de las cuotas de género eleva continuamente el nivel de lo que constituye un diseño de cuota “fuerte,” o bien, leyes paritarias. Como evidencia de esta ruta analizamos el caso de México, enfocándonos en la reforma de 2014 de paridad en candidaturas legislativas federales y locales y, en 2019, la “paridad en todo,” es decir, la paridad en cargos ejecutivos, legislativos y judiciales.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• political representation
• gender quotas
• Mexico
• Latin America

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Mujeres
• representación política
• cuotas de género
• México
• América Latina

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Authors’ calculation based on IPU (2021).

2 For a discussion of why Brazil remains an outlier, see Wylie, Santos, and Marcelino (2019).

3 Some countries consider 40:60 to be parity, such as Spain (Verge 2012), but Latin America understands parity as 50:50 (Archenti and Tula 2017). Consequently, we do not count countries’ adoption of 40 percent quotas as achieving gender parity.

4 Mariana Caminotti and Flavia Freidenberg (2016, 131–132) count fewer states, since some adopted gender parity for the proportional representation tier or the single-member districts, but not both.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer M. Piscopo

Jennifer M. Piscopo is Associate Professor of Politics at Occidental College, USA, and Professor of Gender and Politics at Royal Holloway University of London, UK. Her research focuses on women’s political representation and gender and elections in Latin America, the United States, and around the globe. She has published in over 30 peer-reviewed journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Social Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the Latin American Research Review, Latin American Politics and Society, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. With Susan Franceschet and Mona Lena Krook, she is editor of The Impact of Gender Quotas (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her work has also appeared in multiple edited volumes and as review essays in noted journals. She is co-editor of the European Journal of Politics and Gender.

Lorena Vázquez Correa

Lorena Vázquez Correa is a legislative researcher at the Belisario Domínguez Institute of the Senate of the Republic, Mexico. She holds a PhD in Law from the Legal Research Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IIJ-UNAM) and is certified as a Specialist in Electoral Justice from the Electoral Judicial School of the Electoral Tribunal of the Mexican Federal Judiciary. Her research focuses on women’s political representation, political violence, and affirmative action. She has published widely on these topics, co-authoring with Magda Hinojosa, Jennifer M. Piscopo, and Esperanza Palma. She has participated in the research project “The Quality of Political Representation in Mexico’s State Legislatures” led by Khemvirg Puente and the research group “The Empirical Study of Law” based at the Legal Research Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her public writing on women and politics has appeared in outlets such as Nexos and Animal Político.