Gender Quotas and Electoral Innovation in Mexico
Alexandra Williams, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University Miki Caul Kittilson, School of Politics and Global Studies and College of Global Futures, Arizona State University
This week, “Constitutional Conversations” introduces our first essay considering a comparative perspective on constitutional and legal design. Miki Kittilson and Alexandra Williams present the case of Mexico as one of the countries leading the way on the implementation of gender quotas as the most effective electoral design feature for achieving gender balance and inclusion in the democratic process and, ultimately, representation.
Gender quotas for elected office are one of the most successful and recent innovations for democratic inclusion in constitutional and electoral design. Not only can gender quotas prove effective with the right design, they can also serve as powerful symbols of new standards of gender balance and inclusion in the democratic process.
Gender quotas continue to rapidly spread across the world, with over seventy-five countries currently utilizing gender quotas in their elections (IDEA). Latin America in particular has seen enormous shifts, with every Latin American country adopting legislated gender quota, barring only Guatemala and Venezuela. Just because a country enacts a quota, it does not necessarily guarantee automatic success. As we argue in previous research with Dr. Magda Hinojosa, for a quota to be successful in achieving gender balance in office, both the design of the quota and the formal and informal institutions surrounding it, must set the new rules and processes for successful implementation (Hinojosa, Kittilson, and Williams 2021).
Although Mexico is one of the countries that has seen the most remarkable success with its quota, that achievement has by no means been easy, nor instantaneous. It has resulted from a concerted effort on Mexico’s part to continuously revise and improve their quota, thus ensuring the gender parity in the Chamber of Deputies that Mexico sees today. Prior to 2002 and the official passage of Mexico’s gender quota, only 16 percent of Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies were women. Today, that number has climbed to perfect parity (IPU).
Mexico has had a comparatively long history with gender quotas. Even before officially legislating quotas in 2002, some of Mexico’s political parties had adopted voluntary, party-level quotas during the early 1990s. Important research by Dr. Jennifer Piscopo points to the work of women in and outside of elected office, who collaborated to find meaningful ways to enable women’s election (Piscopo 2016). And Dr. Lisa Baldez’s research traces this process, showing that in 1996, the Mexican Congress even passed a “recommendation” that neither gender hold more than 70% of candidate slots for parliamentary office, though this was quite weak in comparison to the more legitimate quota that would follow a few years later, in particular.
Mexico first passed serious legislation on gender quotas in 2002 and implemented them for the first time in the 2003 midterm elections. This law stated that the candidate lists “in no case will include more than 70% of the same sex.” Specifically for the seats elected via proportional representation in Mexico, it stipulated that a woman must hold at least one of every three spots, implementing sanctions for non-compliance. Importantly, placement mandates are often utilized in closed list PR electoral systems. Without mandates, parties are able to place women anywhere they choose on the list, sometimes purposefully placing women at the bottom, where women are unlikely to be elected. In a system like this, Hinojosa and Piscopo demonstrate that quotas are less likely to positively impact women’s representation.
In the early days of the quota, Mexico, like many countries, initially struggled with political parties exploiting loopholes found in the quota law, namely manipulating the alternate position. In Mexico, as well as other countries, parties can nominate both a titleholder for a seat, as well as an alternate (in case the titleholder needs to step down). To meet quotas, which required that women be placed in titleholder positions, parties would nominate women to the titleholder position, only for them to renounce their seats, allowing a male alternate to take their place. These women became known as the Juanitas. Despite some initial setbacks, Mexico worked to reform its quota law. For instance, Mexico now requires that electoral tribunals must approve a party’s candidate list, which they can return for revisions or even reject if the party does not comply with the quota’s placement mandates. In the case of the issue of alternates, this led to a 2011 court case, brought by women fighting against parties’ exploitations of quota loopholes, where the Federal Electoral Judicial Court decreed that titleholders and their corresponding alternates would now need to be of the same gender (Hinojosa 2017).
In the 2008 electoral reforms, Mexico returned to edit its quota laws. As part of these reforms, Mexico raised its quota threshold from 30 percent to 40 percent. Importantly, in the 2014 reforms, Mexico altered its constitution, surpassing the 30 and 40 percent thresholds in exchange for gender parity, both in federal and state legislatures.
It was this reform that led to Mexico’s groundbreaking 2018 election. In 2018, women officially won 49 percent of the lower house and 51 percent of the senate. At that time, Mexico ranked 4th in the world for women’s legislative representation.
Most recently, Mexico has enacted a constitutional mandate for “gender parity in everything.” This includes all candidates, but also the top posts in both the executive and judicial branch. This ruling passed through Congress unanimously and was officially implemented in 2021 (IDEA). As of January 2023, Mexico still ranks 4th in the world for women’s representation in the legislature. Women in Mexico have achieved perfect parity in the lower house (50.00%), and even lead men in the upper house (50.4%). Women currently hold 250 of the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Today, Mexico is a leader in the use of gender quotas to achieve gender parity in elected office, standing as an exemplar for inclusion in the democratic process in this respect.
References
Gender Quotas Database. IDEA. https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/gender-quotas/country-view/220/35.
Hinojosa, Magda. 2017. “An ‘Alternate’ Story of Formal Rules and Informal Institutions: Quota Laws
and Candidate Selection in Latin America.” In Gender and Informal Institutions, edited by Georgian
Waylen, 183-202. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Hinojosa, Magda and Jennifer M. Piscopo. 2013. “Promoting Women’s Right to Be Elected: Twenty-Five
Years of Quotas in Latin America” in Luna Ramos, José Alejandro (ed). Cuotas de género: visión
comparada. Mexico City: Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judicial Power of Mexico. Pages XX-XX.
Hinojosa, Magda and Jennifer M. Piscopo. “Women on big in Mexico’s elections–taking nearly half the
legislature’s seats. Here’s why.” Washington Post, 11th July 2018.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/07/11/women-won-big-in-mexicos-
elections-taking-nearly-half-the-legislatures-seats-heres-why/.
Hinojosa, Magda, Miki Caul Kittilson, and Alexandra M. Williams. 2021. “Gender Quotas and Beyond:
Policy Solutions to Women’s Under-Representation in Politics.” In Women, Power, and Political
Representation: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives Roosmarijn de Geus, Erin Tolley, Elizabeth
Goodyear-Grant, and Peter John Loewen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 101-107.
“Monthly Ranking of Women in National Parliaments.” IPU. https://data.ipu.org/women-
ranking?month=2&year=2023.
Piscopo, Jennifer M. 2016. “When Informality Advantages Women: Quota Networks, Electoral Rules,
and Candidate Selection in Mexico.” Government and Opposition 51(3): 487-512.