Women’s Representation in the Parliament: From Rhetoric to Reality (1)

The Convention on the Political Rights of Women 1952 is one of the international documents which stand as a universal political statement of women’s political rights.[1] However, women have made little significant progress with respect to their representation in national politics despite the fact that they generally construct half of the population of a nation. The number of women’s representation in the parliament are varying across countries, ranging from 0% in the United Arab Emirates to 43% in Sweden (Paxton and Kunovich: 2003). On average, women composed 14% of national worldwide (January 2002).

The Beijing Declaration 1995, the most updated international law instrument on women’s rights, emphasizes the importance of women's empowerment and their full participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society, including participation in the decision-making process and access to power as a basis for the achievement of equality, development and peace.[1] It also elaborates the prerequisites and necessary conditions to ensure women’s political rights.

The problem of under representation of women in politics leads to the importance of women’s access into the political positions and to ensure that women are not isolated in political life. An affirmative action is needed to balance the level playing field for women in politics which previously have been reserved mostly for men. Nowadays, the quota system is introduced as a fast track, specifically in countries where women only constitute a small minority in parliament. However, the implementation of quota systems also depends on the norms and values embedded within the social, economic and political structures of the society.

The purpose of the essay is to elaborate; (i) the implementation of the quota system in the Parliament; (ii) the constraints faced by women and the strategy that has been used to advocate women’s interests in politics in general, and in the parliament in particular. The paper would explains the WID and GAD as the two mainstream approaches in development policy-making, the introduction and the implementation of the quota systems and the role of women’s movement in creating political space for women by comparing two study cases, the Scandinavian Countries[2] and Indonesia.

The Scandinavia countries are known for their highest number of women’s representation in the world, while Indonesia has just applied the 30% quota in 2004 election for the first time[3] and followed by the promotion of gender-mainstreaming program by the Indonesian Government and the Parliament in 2005. The two case studies show the different process in increasing women’s representation and also different tradition and strategy of women’s movement in advocating their interests in the Parliament. Therefore, it would be interesting to compare those two case studies, between developed and developing countries.

The paper argues that creating a political space in the parliament for women by accelerating the number of women’s representation is necessary but not sufficient. The efforts to have a meaningful women’s participation in politics, should not only focus on the numbers of women’s representation, but also to recognize that there are many factors (i.e. social, economical and ideological factors) that construct the power relations in creating the political space for women in particular. The essay would elaborate the parliament as a gendered institution in identifying the barriers to women’s representation with emphasizing on the ideological factor. Moreover, it also brings the issue of the role of women’s movement in advocating their interests and the importance of having gender perspective in the legislation-making process. Therefore, to ensure that women are not isolated from the political life in the Parliament, is to reconstruct the gendered level playing field, including to have a gender perspective embedded in the system within the Parliament (Nurbayanti: 2004) and to build a strong women’s movement.

1. WID and GAD Approach

Inequality, exclusion and under representation in politics are the main problems faced by women in general. Thus, the main objective of the development programs is to create a political space for women who have been isolated from politics. Hence, the objectives of the development programs have been: to increase women’s representation in terms of to move from political exclusion to inclusion and to empower women in order to achieve gender equality. In order to achieve those objectives, there are two critical approaches to development policy-making from the feminist perspectives, which are the Women in Development (WID) approach and the Gender and Development (GAD) approach.

The WID approach was promoted by the feminist policy entrepreneurs within the development agencies in the early 1970s (Goetz: 1997). It is based on the liberal neo-classic economics and the modernization theory and aims at improving women’s educational and employment opportunities, physical and social welfare and also political representation. Modernization status would reflect through individual choice and achievements where women were not necessarily disadvantaged within this system. The problem was to ensure that benefits of modernization reached women, since these benefits were generated in the modern sector and the cash economy, via the market, the solution laid in improving women’s access to the market and the public sphere (Kabeer: 1994, p. 11-39).

Therefore, the key to WID is integrating women into the system so that they could participate and get the benefits from the development and modernization process. This women-centric approach focuses on women’s access in all public spheres and women’s empowerment, which includes integrating women into the political arena by increasing their representation in the political positions so that they are politically empowered. However, as women became more empowered and had more access into the public sphere, still there have not been significant changes for them. Thus, the slow progress in equalizing power in gender relations has led to the shifting from the WID approach to the GAD approach.

Basically, the GAD approach adds new elements to WID approach, which recognizes the importance of redistributing power in social relations. It criticizes the WID approach for not taken into account the power relations existed in the system which is dominated by the male-norms and gender biases. The playing field itself is not gender neutral. Thus, women would enter into the social, economic and political structures which already maintained and even preserved inequality (Rai: 2002). The key to GAD is challenging the power relation within the system or the society and leveling the playing field by changing institutional rules. In the process, it aims at reconstructing the social relations between men and women and thus, involving not only women, but also men (Goetz: 1997).

According to Pedersen and Webster, political space is linked to democratization and the broad range of structural and institutional reforms. Political space is also being contested and challenged constantly where the social actors would seek to change institutional channels, to modify discourses and to reconstruct social and political practices. Moreover, it demands a focus upon not just the institutional structures in place, but also the possession of political agency with respect to these institutions (Pedersen & Webster: 2002, p. 1-12). Therefore, to open a political space for women is both to have a political will from above and also to articulate the women’s political agency from below. Thus, the introduction of quota systems is considered as an intervention from above (as a form of political will) and also the women’s movement as a form of articulating their political agency, in which both of them are affected by the norms and values embedded in social, economic and political structures of the society. The quota in this essay refers to women’s representation in the Parliament which has the legislative powers and representative features. It is also a forum in which policies and political issues can be openly discussed and scrutinized (Heywood: 2002, p. 313).

2. The Quota System: Necessary but Not Sufficient

There are two tracks to increase women’s representation, which are the incremental track --also known as the Scandinavian model and a quota system as a fast track. The Scandinavian model based on the perception that equal representation may take many decades, but will be achieved in due course as a country develops. Thus, it requires that women have already gained some power or capabilities in order to be able to exercise the political power, once they enter the system (Dahlerup and Freidenvall: 2005, p. 27-29).

Interestingly, the Scandinavian countries do not have constitutional clause or regulation that demands a high representation of women in politics. Instead, it is achieved through the sustained pressure from the women’s groups within the political parties as well as the women’s movement in general. There were also resistances as well as positive responses from the political parties. During the 1970s and 1980s, while most centre and right wing parties considered quota as “un-liberal”, some political parties started to apply quota system. Therefore, quota system in the Scandinavian countries was introduced based on decisions made by the political parties themselves (Doserup: 1998).

However, the Scandinavian model is no longer considered as the best model to increase women’s representation especially in the developing countries. The trend now is to apply the fast track quota system through law (constitution or national legislation) and quotas through political parties. The objective is to constitute at least a “critical minority” of 30 or 40 per cent of women’s representation in the political positions (Dahlerup: 1998. p. 1). It is hoped that it would accelerate the number of women’s representation, for example in Costa Rica, in comparison to what happens in the Scandinavian countries.[4]

However, having legal basis for 30-40% of the seat for women is not enough to ensure women’s representation in the Parliament. According to Dahlerup, there are three conditions for such legal basis which are: (i) a clear regulations; (ii) pressure from women’s organizations and other groups; (iii) sanctions for non-compliance with the quota requirements. Moreover, quota must also be embedded in the selection and the nomination processes from the very start.

The case of Indonesia is an example of vague regulation and lack sanction for non-compliance with the quota requirements. The Law No. 12 Year 2003 regarding the General Election only used the word “can” instead of “to oblige” each political party to have 30% quota for women. Moreover, it does not have sanction for those political parties who do not comply with the 30% quota requirements for women. Hence, according to Commission on General Election in Indonesia, the political parties could comply with 30% quota only in 40 election districts out of 89 (2004). In addition, they usually put the women’s candidates in “the shoes number” or on the bottom of the list of candidates. Considering that Indonesia has the proportional with open list system in which the number on the list becomes very important, thus the women were not in good position to be elected and women candidates were used only for a vote getter.

However, the implementation of the quota does not operate out of the vacuum. In practice, the implementations of the quotas as an affirmative action do not work effectively. It differs from one country to another. Integrating women into politics would not automatically balances the level playing field or brings benefits for women. It also raises question on what are the impacts of the increasing women’s representation to the benefits of women themselves. According to GAD approach, the level-playing is not gender neutral. Women enter into a gendered playing field which embedded in the norms, structures and practices of institutions and already preserved gender inequality. Therefore, it is important to analyze the Parliament itself as a gendered institution in order to identify what are the factors which constraint women’s participation in politics.

Three explanations for differences in women’s political representation in national legislature (Kenworthy & Malami 1999; Paxton 1997; Reynolds 1999 as cited in Paxton and Kunovich: 2003) are social-structural, political and ideological. Social-structural explanation focus on the pool of available women, related to human resources, intra-relationship within households and organization of civil society. Political explanation focuses on the openness of the political system to women, related to the political institutions and leadership support. Ideological explanation focuses on general impressions of women in politics and how viable women are as candidates and leaders. This essay argues that the ideological factor plays an important role which has impacts to other factors. Therefore, for the purpose of the essay, the discussion would focuses on the importance of ideological factor and its impacts to other factors.

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[1] Article 13 of Beijing Declaration, 1995.

[2] The Scandinavian Countries in general would be used related to the quota system, while in the analysis of the parliament as a battle field, the essay would using Norway as a comparative study case.

[3] Between 2002-2003, Indonesian have a major change in its political system through the enactment of Law No. 31 Year 2002 regarding the Political Parties, Law No. 12 Year 2003 regarding the General Election (DPR, DPD and DPRD), Law No. 22 Year 2003 regarding structure and organization of MPR, DPR, DPD and DPRD, Law No 23 Year 2003 regarding The President and Vice Presidents Election and, Law No 32 Year 2004 regarding Local Governments.

[4] In Costa Rica, the women’s representation in parliament jumped overnight from 19 to 35 per cent (2002), while in Scandinavian countries would take longer, for example it took sixty years for Denmark, Norway and Sweden to cross the 20% and seventy years to reach 30%.