How Do Electoral Gender Quotas Impact Government Spending?

Over the past few decades, an increasing number of countries have established gender quotas for elected positions. Typically, these quotas are enacted to address underrepresentation of women in political offices. According to data collected by the United Nations (UN), women represented just “22.8 percent of all national parliamentarians” in June 2016. Gender quotas vary from country to country, but generally require that some percent of elected positions or vacancies on proposed candidate lists are held by women. As global initiatives and individual nations seek to increase the number of women in elected offices, it is worthwhile to study countries that have already implemented quotas to examine whether trends exist in how women utilize their added legislative power. In a recent article, authors Amanda Clayton and Pär Zetterberg consider how electoral gender quotas impact government spending on healthcare, military, education, and beyond.

In the article, Clayton and Zetterberg analyze data collected on 139 quota-enacting countries from 1995-2012 to identify significant trends in spending. Using this dataset, the authors test three hypotheses regarding shifts in government spending priorities. First, they posit that a country could experience changes in spending directly following the adoption of a quota policy. Their next hypothesis asserts that, in addition to or possibly separate from the theory described in their first hypothesis, spending priorities may change following implementation of an electoral gender quota “regardless of the number of women they bring into office.” Finally, the authors hypothesize the alternative: Only if a quota is successful in increasing the number of elected women will a society see its spending priorities change. Women elected through these quotas might have different concerns than their legislative counterparts, but their impact may not bear out if more women do not become involved in policy making.

In testing these hypotheses, Clayton and Zetterberg find little support for the hypothesis that there are no significant changes in spending priorities after quota implementation. The authors suggest that this could be because the progressive sentiments underlying quota policies may have diminished to some extent by the time the quota is implemented. However, the data do provide support for the first hypothesis, as the article reports an increase in health spending by countries that established quotas relative to those that did not. The authors also find that the resulting expenditures tend to be more significant when quotas successfully increase the number of elected women, supporting hypothesis three. The data show that for every one percent of representation women gain, the coinciding increase in health spending is 0.056 percent compared to countries not implementing quotas. In countries whose increase in women’s representation was greater than the mean (higher than 9.9 percent), the increase in health spending was higher than one percent compared to countries not implementing quotas.

In instances where health spending rises along with the adoption and implementation of quotas, there is no significant decrease in education spending relative to health spending. However, there is a significant decrease in military spending relative to health spending, and the authors note that these decreases appear to be a compensating factor toward increasing health spending. Despite this, the data do not show statistically significant decreases in military spending relative to total government spending.

With these findings in mind, Clayton and Zetterberg suggest that gender quotas may cause shifts in budgetary priorities from defense to public health. Health, a policy area they say “has been historically prioritized by women,” is emphasized as more women gain representation in these governments. They argue further that as legislatures work to include historically marginalized groups, we should expect to see shifts in political priorities towards areas favored by those groups that might today be undervalued by less representative governments. As this research shows some success in incorporating women’s priorities into political decision-making and priority-setting, governing bodies of the future may look to quotas as a way to ensure elected officials are more characteristic of the populations they serve.

Article source: Clayton, Amanda and Pär Zetterberg. “Quota Shocks: Electoral Gender Quotas and Government Spending Priorities Worldwide.” The Journal of Politics 80, (July 2018).

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