The case of Brazil has long presented a puzzle to scholars of women’s political representation. Despite significant social and economic progress, strong women’s movements, and declining voter bias against female leaders, the country still elected less than 10% women to its lower house in 2014. This not only compared unfavorably to the world average at the time of 22%, but also made the country an outlier within Latin America, the region of the world that elected the most female parliamentarians on average. This is despite the fact that Brazil, like other countries in the region, adopted a 30% gender quota law in 1998, and elected its first female president in 2010.
Existing research largely attributes the failure of quotas in Brazil to the country’s open-list proportional representation (PR) electoral system (e.g., Luis F. Miguel, “Political Representation and Gender in Brazil,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 27[2], 2008). As scholars like Melody Ellis Valdini (“Electoral Institutions and the Manifestation of Bias,” Politics & Gender 9[1], 2013) have shown, open-list PR incentivizes intraparty competition, typically enabling those from dominant social groups to gain election over their copartisans. Simply nominating more women, therefore, does not necessarily mean that more women will be elected. Focusing on electoral rules, however, tells only part of the story: Peru, which also uses open-list PR, has made dramatic strides in increasing women’s political representation since introducing its own 30% quota law in 1997.
In Party Institutionalization and Women’s Representation in Democratic Brazil, Kristin N. Wylie provides the most detailed and thorough investigation of this issue to date, proposing an alternative explanation focused on political parties. Against much of the Brazilianist literature, which plays down the theoretical relevance of parties for understanding electoral outcomes, Wylie argues that increasing women’s representation requires that parties have both the capacity and the will to promote women’s candidacies. More institutionalized parties, she proposes, are able to provide crucial psychological, organizational, and material support to women, while those with more women in party leadership positions indicate greater commitment to the inclusion of women.
To explore and develop this argument, Wylie draws on an impressive array of quantitative and qualitative data, including a data set of nearly 28,000 candidates to the Chamber of Deputies and Senate between 1994 and 2014, as well as more than 100 interviews with key actors in seven parties in 11 states across Brazil between 2008 and 2015. Examining the fates of both failed and successful candidates, male and female, she finds no support for traditional explanations in gender and politics research focused on socioeconomic factors and electoral system variables. The analysis instead illuminates the role of weakly institutionalized and male-dominated political parties in undermining women’s electoral opportunities.
In a particularly astute part of the analysis, Wylie unravels why the 30% quota law has largely remained a “law on paper only” (lei que não pega), despite efforts by the legislature to strengthen its requirements in 2009 and a decision by the Supreme Electoral Court to confirm its status as law in 2010. Strikingly, nearly half of all parties did not run a single female candidate in 2010—and nearly a third did the same in 2014 (pp. 75–76). When parties do take steps to nominate women, a very large share (nearly 40% in 2010, according to Wylie’s calculations) appear to be “phantom candidates” (candidatas laranjas), earning less than 1% of the minimum vote required by a winning candidate in their state (p. 42). Lack of party institutionalization has contributed to this state of affairs, as it enables (largely male) party leaders to act with impunity, promoting a wider culture of noncompliance with the gender quota.
Beyond its detailed attention to the mechanics of quota (non)implementation, the book also makes important strides in explaining three other related—and understudied—questions about women’s political representation in Brazil. The first is the puzzle of why women have achieved greater success in being elected to the Senate, the more prestigious of the two chambers and a body where no gender quota applies. The answer, according to Wylie, can again be traced back to political parties, who—due to distinct electoral rules—tend to unify behind individual party candidates, enhancing their electoral prospects, regardless of whether they are male or female.
The second puzzle concerns explaining women who have succeeded in being elected, despite the inhospitable conditions in Brazil. In a highly original contribution, Wylie develops a typology of women-friendly and women-adverse districts and parties, theorizing three ideal types of electorally viable paths to women’s election, illustrated with examples of women who fit each profile. Women elected in women-adverse districts and women-adverse parties tend to be supermadres, strategically deploying feminine, maternalist profiles to mitigate traditional gender norms, often benefiting from familial connections to male elites—thus corroborating, rather than undermining, the patriarchal order.
In women-adverse districts with women-friendly parties, elected women tend to be lutadoras, starting their political careers in a history of party militancy or activism in labor unions or popular social movements. With the help of supportive parties providing important organizational and material resources, these women are able to transform their extensive experience in informal politics into a pathway to election. In the opposite scenario women-friendly districts and women-adverse parties—the predominant profile is the technocrat, a woman with demonstrated professional competence whose expertise can be parlayed into political capital, in turn overcoming unsupportive parties by convincing male party elites of their electability.
The third puzzle explored by Wylie is the intersection of gender and race in explaining electoral opportunities. Since 2010, Brazil has had an Afro-descendent majority population, and in 2014, election data included candidates’ self-declared racial identities for the first time. In a pathbreaking analysis, Wylie finds that progress in Afro-descendent representation has been largely male: In 2015, less than 10% of these deputies were women. Yet among female deputies, the share of Afro-descendants was nearly 20%—and a striking 70% of Afro-descendant women in Congress won election in state parties with a recent history of having a critical mass of female leaders, compared to 20% of white women (p. 185). These findings indicate that increasing women’s representation can also have substantial effects on enhancing racial diversity in national legislatures.
Wylie’s book is a tour de force, presenting a nuanced and detailed account of a perplexing case, with implications for reigning paradigms in the comparative gender and politics literature, as well as the study of Brazilian politics. In a further twist, recent elections in October 2018 returned the highest share of women ever elected to the Brazilian lower house, 15%, a 50% increase over the 2014 results. At the same time, the country elected a well-known misogynist and antifeminist, Jair Bolsonaro, as its next president—following the disputed impeachment of Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016. These surprising and seemingly contradictory developments suggest that Brazil will continue to fascinate the world—and challenge political scientists—making Wylie’s book required reading for all those seeking to better understand the gendered political dynamics at work in Latin America’s largest country.
