Moving Beyond Consensus versusMajoritarian: The Impact of Democratic Forms on Women’sRepresentation.

Over the past two decades, the number of women serving as parliamentarians has increased markedly in the established democracies. Despite these gains, however, there is still great variation in women’s representation across this set of countries – currently ranging from a high of 45.3 percent in Sweden to a low of 7.3 percent in Japan (IPU Website 2003). Scholars have investigated the causes of this cross-national gap in women’s representation, and a persuasive amount of evidence has accumulated that suggests that political institutions play a vital role in determining the level of women’s representation in post-industrial democracies (e.g., Bohrer et al. 2002, Siaroff 2000, Lijphart 1999 and 1994 ). In 1994 and 1999, for example, Lijphart reported that consensus democracies – those based on power-sharing institutions such as PR electoral laws, bicameralism and coalition governments – produce higher levels of women’s representation than more power-concentrating majoritarian systems. Lijphart’s classification scheme of consensus versus majoritarian democracy, however, is limited by the fact that it is a dichotomy based on long-term averages. The dichotomous structure of the scheme is arbitrary, artificial, and inappropriate for a continuous concept, and because the scheme is based on long-term averages, it lacks the dynamic capability to keep pace with the shifts in women’s representation levels occurring over the last 20 years. Further, some of the components of the dichotomy have been shown to have substantial effects upon women’s representation independently, PR electoral laws most strongly. In this paper we therefore develop a more sensitive categorization tool – the index of inclusion – and apply it to an examination of the effect of the level of institutional inclusion on women’s representation. Using data from 21 post-industrial systems for the years 1979-2001, we are able to determine if a continuous measure produces the same positive impact for inclusive institutional structures on women’s representation. We are also able to determine if the combination of institutional features as a whole contributes to differences in women’s representation or if other factors alone, such as electoral laws, are driving these different outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]