Are Quotas a Good Idea? The Indian Experience with Reserved Seats for Women

@article{Nanivadekar2006AreQA,
  title={Are Quotas a Good Idea? The Indian Experience with Reserved Seats for Women},
  author={Medha Nanivadekar},
  journal={Politics \& Gender},
  year={2006},
  volume={2},
  pages={119 - 128}
}
The most important feature of a quota system is that it ensures representation of the target group in a much more definitive manner than does any other method. Quotas are a form of compensation for historical injustice suffered by identifiable groups and represent evidence of society's commitment to redress that injustice. Quotas offer greater legitimacy to a political system by ensuring greater representation and by integrating marginalized groups into the mainstream. Utilitarian… 
View on Cambridge Press
56 Citations
Background Citations
18

56 Citations

The Women's Quota in Jordan's Municipal Councils: International and Domestic Dimensions
Quotas are products of interactions between international and local factors and should be analyzed through those interactions. This article examines the processes of passage and implementation of a…
Quota Laws for Women in Politics: Implications for Feminist Practice
More than fifty countries have adopted quota laws to regulate the selection or election of women to political office. This suggests that states have begun to identify quotas as a new state-led…
“The Quota Encouraged Me to Run”: Evaluating Jordan’s Municipal Quota for Women
Gender quotas are a means to improve women’s political representation. This article examines the impact of Jordan’s municipal quota enacted in 2007. The quota drew into the political arena women who…
The Global Impact of Quotas
Quotas have become an important mechanism through which women today are entering legislatures worldwide. This study shows that the introduction of quotas has helped overcome constraints on women's…
Gender Quotas and Women's Political Leadership
Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the effects of these reforms on women's political leadership are largely unknown. We exploit a natural experiment—a 50–50 quota imposed by…
The substantive representation of women in the Tanzanian parliament
The thesis investigates if the use of a reserve seat system of parliamentary quotas that has produced a substantial descriptive increase in the number of women in the Tanzanian parliament has…
Gender quotas in single-member district electoral systems
Conventional knowledge on the effectiveness of gender quotas for enhancing women's political participation has, to date, been unanimous on the superiority of quotas in proportional representation…
Presence into Participation and Representation
Over the last two decades, women’s ‘political participation’ has emerged as a major marker of democracy around the world. This is frequently operationalized through the policy of ‘gender quotas’ that…
The impact of gender quotas : a research agenda
Political parties and national legislatures in more than 100 countries have established quotas for the selection of female candidates to political office, almost all within the last 15 years. To…
The Uneven Representation of Women in Asian Parliaments: Explaining Variation across the Region*
AbstractAlthough home to the majority of the world’s women, Asia is the continent with the smallest proportion of women in Parliament. Rarely studied from a comparative perspective, this article…
...
...