Do electoral systems influence women's representation in politics?

It is a fact that women are generally less represented in politics, and discussions around Mary Robinson are just one result of this deficit.

The Council of Europe has been dealing with questions of electoral systems at this year's Forum for the Future of Democracy (ending today), and one of the issues was the effect of electoral systems on women's representation in politics.

In a now declassified document from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe titled "Impact of electoral systems on women’s representation in politics" the rapporteur Lydie Err comes to the following conclusions:

• women are still grievously underrepresented in politics in most Council of Europe member states;

• the lack of equal representation of women and men in political and public decision-making is a threat to the legitimacy of democracies and a violation of the human right of gender equality which must be rectified as a priority;

• the most important factor leading to the current underrepresentation of women in politics is linked to attitudes, customs and behaviours widespread in society which disempower women, discriminate against them, and hold them hostage to prescribed role-models and stereotypes according to which women are “not suited” to decision-making and politics;

• these attitudes, customs and behaviours also influence a country’s institutional, party and electoral landscape; but conversely, a change in that landscape can also impact on society’s attitudes;

• changing the electoral system to one more favourable to women’s representation in politics, including by introducing gender quotas, can lead to more gender balanced, and thus more legitimate, political and public decision-making;

• in theory, the following electoral system should be most favourable to women’s representation in parliament: a proportional representation list system in a large constituency and/or a nation-wide district, with legal threshold, closed lists and a mandatory quota which provides not only for a high portion of female candidates, but also for strict rank-order rule (e.g. a zipper system), and effective sanctions (preferably not financial, but rather the non-acceptance of candidatures/ candidate lists) for non-compliance.

I think I agree with the conclusions, but I am not sure whether this is of any value...

I suppose that the study itself will not have a big impact, because all it does is to reflect the complexity with which general attitudes and institutional design are intertwined. I don't see any good argumentation on how one could put the measures proposed into practice, and I don't see the actors willing to do this.

What we have here is thus yet another account of inequalities in our societies - but what we learn again leaves us at loss how to actually change the situation.

But why not repeating it, here and elsewhere, as long as the situation is as it is?

The European Citizens' Consultations: Proxy democracy

The European Citizens' Consultations are finding their end this weekend at the European Citizens Summit in Brussels, and I am following some of the activities through La Oreja de Europa, but I am not glad that there is no live stream of the event nor a journalistic audiovisual coverage available online.

In addition, I don't think that these consultations are of much value for anyone besides the participants and public relations of EU institutions and some of the organisers. There doesn't seem room for a critical analysis - as the what others think section on its website shows - of the format.

I am a big fan of citizens' involvement in policy-making and agenda-setting. And I am convinced that elements of the representative democracy have to be supplemented with other tools to make it fit a modern democracy of the 21st century.

But why should selecting a number of citizens from different countries to discuss European issues be more relevant, representative, or creative than what is already happening in political and non-partisan organisations, within the European Parliament, within public and semi-public online fora etc.?

What makes sure that in the discussions on national and European levels the agendas and recommendations are not shaped by a small number of charismatic, better-informed, or ideologically deadlocked participants who are able to convince the rest while the final result will be presented as "representative"?

Where are the criteria for the choice of participants? Who has set up the agenda of these meetings and hasn't the temporal arrangement of these events already pre-structured the outcome?

I am asking these questions, as I am asking them to any other political event, to any other "consultation", "conference", or however it is called. The participants have been chosen by organisations with a particular interest, and they have not been voted for this task by anyone.

The point I would like to make is that for me this event is not more or less important than any other political meeting, that its outcome does not stand for "the citizens" but for the participants of the event, which in the next weeks will be disguised by those who can take advantage of the outcomes, whatever political or social group this might be.

This kind of consultations is proxy democracy, it is a simulation of a much more complex process (as many of the Model European Union/United Nations/etc. events are), and the results depend very much on the set-up of the simulation and the individual agents chosen. Neither the participants nor the organisations that organised will have to take responsibility for what is said and recommended, so they are playing democracy in an open space, which is nice and can be creative, but which is hardly reproducible outside these conditions.

Pluralist democracy cannot be replaced by proxy democracy, and although I know that this might not be the aim of the European Citizens' Consultations, there is the danger of seeing those events as an easy-to-organise replacement of the much more difficult involvement of the general public in concrete decision- and law-making within the European Union that is often intransparent, overly complicated, and citizen-unfriendly at best.

PS.: After criticism to my post raised by a commentator, I have tried to clarify some of points in the comments. So have a look and tell me whether you feel that I am wrong or overly critical with what I say.