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While previous investigations have demonstrated that legislative gender quotas can disrupt traditional recruitment networks to level women's and men's political experience, little is known about the impact of party quotas. Using the Australian Candidate Survey, we find that gender party quotas can help close the experience gap between male and female candidates, but also between women. Before the adoption of party quotas, Coalition female candidates had more experience than Labor female candidates. This party gap disappears along with gender gaps amongst Labor candidates after the Labor Party adopted gender quotas. We find that party quotas made little impact on the experience levels of male Labor candidates or Coalition candidates' of both sexes. We identify the professionalisation of politics and women-centric networks as factors shaping how quotas impact candidate selection processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on support for gender quotas focuses on attitudes toward gender equality and government intervention as explanations. We argue the role of attitudes toward women in understanding support for policies aiming to increase the presence of women in politics is ambivalent—both hostile and benevolent forms of sexism contribute in understanding support, albeit in different ways. Using original data from a survey conducted on a probability‐based sample of Australian respondents, our findings demonstrate that hostile sexists are more likely to oppose increasing of women's presence in politics through the adoption of gender quotas. Benevolent sexists, on the other hand, are more likely to support these policies than respondents exhibiting low levels of benevolent sexism. We argue this is because benevolent sexism holds that women are pure and need protection; they do not have what it takes to succeed in politics without the assistance of quotas. Finally, we show that while women are more likely to support quotas, ambivalent sexism has the same relationship with support among both women and men. These findings suggest that aggregate levels of public support for gender quotas do not necessarily represent greater acceptance of gender equality generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates whether the smaller gender gaps in political engagement, found in more proportional electoral systems, translate into smaller gender differences in political participation. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, it presents the argument that more proportional systems may send signals that multiple interests are included in the policy-making process, which may increase women's levels of political participation and thereby reduce gender gaps. Additionally, the article tests for the possibility that a greater number of political parties and the elected representatives they provide act as barriers to political participation that have a greater impact on women's levels of participation than men's. It is argued that women's lower levels of political resources and engagement might create more difficult barriers for them than for men. Results lend little support for the first hypothesis, but a greater confirmation for the second. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]