Political leaders take our money, lead us to war, and write the laws
that govern our lives. Must their ranks include men and women, rich and
poor, masters and slaves? For most of world history, the answer was no.
Men ruled; women worked at home. Female interests were represented by
husbands and fathers. The same was true for members of subordinate ethnic
groups: conquerors would care for colonial subjects, the rich for the poor,
whites for browns, and so on.
As the twentieth century progressed, however, a consensus emerged in
international society and within democratic polities that one social
segment should not monopolize political power. Special efforts were
made to include previously excluded groups—generally defined in
terms of gender and ethnicity. Today, some 50 countries officially
allocate access to political power along the lines of gender,
ethnicity,1
Ethnicity is used here as an
all-encompassing term referring to social groups differentiated by
kinship, tribe, skin color, religion, caste, language, race and other
markers of communal identity. This broad definition of ethnicity,
though somewhat at odds with the popular use of the term, is becoming
more common in social science as scholars seek explanations for the
causes—and consequences—of political phenomena motivated by
ethnic identities. See Chandra 2004; Varshney 2001; Horowitz
1985.
or both: they have laws on the books
reserving a fixed number of electoral candidacies or legislative seats.
Narrowing the focus to electoral democracies reveals a fascinating
pattern: institutional remedies for the underrepresentation of women
and ethnic minorities (or majorities) assume distinct forms. Women tend
to receive candidate quotas in political parties, whereas ethnic groups
are granted reserved seats in legislatures.
How does gender differ from ethnicity? Why do democracies apply
distinct policies to different previously excluded groups? What does
this imply about the normative status of various claims to
representation and the appropriate response of liberal states?
This article argues that different remedies for underrepresentation
are logically appropriate for different groups. Quotas, which make
space within existing parties, suit groups whose boundaries crosscut
partisan divisions. Reservations, which create incentives for the
formation of group-specific parties and permit them direct legislative
representation, suit groups whose boundaries coincide with political
cleavages. Whereas gender tends to be crosscutting, ethnicity tends to
be coinciding. Women and men belong to all political parties; members
of ethnic groups, by contrast, frequently belong to one only. In
countries where it is mobilized, ethnicity is a central, if not
the central principle of political behavior; gender, though
occasionally a consideration, almost never defines how individuals vote
and what parties they affiliate with.
Of course, actual politics do not always conform to functional
requirements. Historical legacies may get in the way of matching group
characteristics with suitable policies. Thus countries with traditions
of ethnic reservations have given reserved seats to women; one with a
gender candidate quota applied similar quotas to ethnic minorities. Yet
when it applies the “wrong” remedy, the state neglects the
true causes of underrepresentation and fails to grant group members
real access to power. As we see in the Indian and Peruvian cases
discussed below, supposed beneficiaries of these unwelcome remedies may
protest them and demand alternative policies.
Though the divergence between the modes of gender and ethnic
representation cuts across many countries, it has received no scholarly
attention. We know a great deal about women's movements and women
in politics, and a growing number of works focus on gender quotas.
Hundreds of scholars have studied ethnic identity formation and
mobilization; the causes and consequences of conflict; and
institutional solutions for divided societies. Few works analyze
representational politics across identities.2
An exception is Anne Phillips's The Politics of
Presence, which at several points compares the pursuit of gender
parity and ethnic minority representation. See Phillips
1995.
Such a comparison is needed, however, if we are to
understand why policy solutions to women's underrepresentation diverge
so dramatically from those applied to ethnic groups. Comparing gender and
ethnicity also reveals that claims made on these differing bases have
different implications for the liberal state.
Group Representation Policies
Table 1 identifies countries with statutory
gender quotas or reservations, ethnic quotas or reservations, or both.
(For descriptions of these policies, see tables 1a
and 1b.)3
Most of the data come from IDEA
2003; Reynolds n.d.; Parline 2003; Electionworld
2003. I attempted to confirm each case in the country-specific
scholarly literature and in government websites, and made adjustments
accordingly. Some of these sources are mentioned in footnotes.
As
table 1 shows, about 50 countries use such
mechanisms, including old and new democracies; rich and poor countries;
Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, Confucian, and Hindu societies; federal
and unitary systems; and presidential and parliamentary regimes.
Dozens of other countries without statutory measures uphold effective
political arrangements to guarantee group representation, such as quotas used
voluntarily by political parties in over 30 countries; the race-conscious
districting practiced in the United States; and the application of lower
electoral thresholds for minority political organizations in Denmark, Germany,
Poland, and Romania. Notwithstanding the importance of these voluntary
arrangements, this paper is concerned exclusively with statutory mechanisms.
Reliable cross-national data on party statutes, their interpretation, and
their enforcement were not available. This is a fertile area for future
research, since additional data have the potential to change the findings
reported here.
4 The availability of more data
on formal and informal practices within parties could reveal more widespread
use of ethnic candidate quotas. Parties in India, for instance, regularly
apply ethnic quotas for leadership posts. See Chandra
2004. For more information about gender quotas in
parties, see IDEA 2003.
Statutory group representation policies
Gender quotas and reservations
Policies to guarantee group representation generally assume one of
two forms: candidate nomination quotas in political parties or
legislative reservations. Quotas require that a minimum number of
candidates fielded by political parties for general election have
certain demographic characteristics. The Argentine Ley de
Cupos (or Quota Law of 1991), for example, requires that women
comprise a minimum of 30 percent of political party lists. Reservations
or reserved seats set aside a fixed percentage of legislative seats for
members of a certain group. These may be filled through competitive
election in specially created districts (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes in India), through election by voters registered on separate
rolls (Maoris in New Zealand), by the group member receiving the most
votes in general elections (constitutionally recognized ethnic groups
in Mauritius), or through designation by political parties (minorities
in Pakistan).
States adopted these policies at different historical moments. In
some countries, collective representational rights constitute part of
the bargain struck to ensure the viability of democracy in a plural
society. In such “consociational” or
“consensus” polities, each group is guaranteed a share of
power to preclude secession and civil war. Other countries introduced
collective rights rather recently in response to the growth of
identity-based social movements and their demands for the recognition
of cultural diversity. These claims have mobilized concern for the
question of whether elites in power resemble, in their personal
characteristics and life experiences, the people they represent, thus
transforming group representation from a matter of state survival into
a question of democratic legitimacy and social justice.
Considerable debate surrounds these policies. Liberal critics argue
that granting rights to identity groups treats them as essential
givens, failing to acknowledge their dynamism and fluidity, as well as
internal injustices suffered by some members. Existing liberal
institutions, moreover, can resolve the domination and oppression
inflicted on social groups since these wrongs are ultimately suffered
by individuals.5
Civic
republicans claim that group-differentiated rights undermine common
citizenship and render suspect a public good toward which society could be
oriented,
6 while libertarians allege that collective rights
benefit the already privileged, increase in-group inequality, and aggravate
social divisions.
7 Finally, social scientists have found that policies
promoting the descriptive representation of minorities may actually end up
harming their substantive representation: for example, the creation of
so-called majority-minority districts helps to put more blacks and Latinos
in the U.S. House of Representatives, but it may also facilitate the
election of legislators elsewhere who are ideologically hostile to their
interests.
8 Defenders of quotas and reservations point out that group rights do
not constitute a major departure from existing democratic practices.
After all, some form of collective representation is inherent to the
political process. As Justice Lewis F. Powell put it in a 1968 voting
rights opinion, “The concept of representation necessarily
applies to groups; groups of voters elect representatives; individuals
do not.”9
Quoted in Phillips 1995, 92.
Single-member district systems
define such groups by territory; other electoral regimes, such as
national-list proportional representation, accommodate
non-geographically based constituencies. Liberal polities such as the
United States and Canada have traditionally drawn geographical district
boundaries around “communities of interest,” be they
regional, economic, environmental, or historical; by granting an equal
number of seats to states regardless of population, the U.S. and
Australian Senates offer privileges to residents of smaller,
potentially disadvantaged states.
10 The point is that political institutions
inevitably make decisions about the types of groups that gain
representation. Quotas and reserved seats differ in degree, but not in
kind, from the everyday work states already perform on
politically-relevant social identities.
Gender Quotas and Ethnic Reservations in
Electoral Democracies
When we consider only electoral democracies, the following pattern
emerges: states give candidate quotas in political parties to women and
reserved seats in legislatures to members of ethnic groups. As table 2 demonstrates, there are only four exceptions
to this rule. The probability that a democracy with group rights for women
will have candidate quotas is 0.86; in countries with measures guaranteeing
ethnic representation, the probability is 0.94 that these take the form
of legislative reservations.
Group representation rights in electoral
democraciesa
What accounts for this divergence in modalities of gender and ethnic
representation? My argument can be summarized in the following
syllogism: (1) candidate quotas are more appropriate for groups that
crosscut partisan cleavages, while reservations suit groups that
coincide with them; (2) gender identities tend to cut across parties,
whereas ethnic identities often overlap with partisan affiliations; (3)
consequently, disadvantaged groups that are defined by gender demand,
and are granted, candidate quotas; ethnic groups prefer, and receive,
legislative reservations.
Quotas for crosscutting groups; reservations for
coinciding ones
To understand the different uses of the two types of policies, we
must first explore the distinct means they use to improve the
representation of identity groups. Quotas intervene in party nomination
procedures by requiring that a certain percentage of the candidates
fielded by a party be of a certain group. For example, the quota may
demand that around one-third of positions on party lists be occupied by
women and that they alternate with men in the rank ordering of
candidates, as is the case in Argentina, Costa Rica, Belgium, and
Guyana.11
A quota policy may therefore provoke some
changes in the ways parties go about nominating candidates, formulating
lists, and deciding who runs in what district. However, it does not alter
the overall structure of incentives governing the political system.
Specifically, quotas do not affect issues such as counting rules, timing,
the circumscription of electoral districts, the structure of the ballot,
and so on that have been shown to exert the most powerful effects on voter
behavior, the party system, and internal party structure.
12 Reservations take a different approach. They introduce group-specific
avenues of representation that circumvent the existing party system and
create new electoral incentives. These include the creation of:
separate electoral rolls, special electoral districts that limit
competition to group members, exceptions to counting rules, and
provisions for direct appointment to the legislature.
Candidate quotas thus presume a different sort of problem from that
addressed by reservations. The goal of quotas is to take a category of
people who belong to, but suffer from discrimination in, mainstream
parties and propel them to positions wherein they stand a chance of
popular election. Quotas therefore provide a means of assimilation and
integration into already existing political institutions. Reservations,
by contrast, guarantee group members a share of power independently, if
need be, of existing parties. Their objective is to facilitate autonomy
of political communities and electoral success of group-specific
parties.
Figure 1 depicts the location of
crosscutting and coinciding groups in the party system. We see that
members of a crosscutting group belong to all parties, whereas those of
a coinciding group tend to belong to a single party, a set of political
organizations, or no party. Figure 2
illustrates the “work” done by a well-designed candidate
quota. The policy attacks the discrimination suffered by group members
in the party but permits them to continue militating in it. Meanwhile,
the party gains representation in legislatures through regular
electoral procedures. The demographic characteristics of its
delegations may change, but the rules of interparty competition remain
the same.
Cross-cutting versus coinciding groups
Figure 1 helps us see why a candidate quota
would make little sense for a coinciding group. What is gained by
making space for group members within all parties when they tend to
cluster at one end of the political spectrum? In fact, a candidate
quota might undermine a minority group's political organizations
as its partisan opponents snatch up group leaders in order to comply
with the quota. Finally, figure 3 clarifies the
mechanics of legislative reservations. They permit a group's party,
organizations, or independent representatives to gain power on their
own and may furnish additional incentives for formation of minority
parties.
In theory, a proportional representation (PR) electoral system,
particularly one with low thresholds, would facilitate the
representation of group-specific parties and organizations. PR also
avoids a situation in which the state is compelled to assign
individuals to specific groups (as required by the maintenance of
ethnic voter rolls or the reservation of certain districts for group
members), a practice that contradicts the fluidity and contextual
nature of many ethnic identities. In addition, PR is flexible,
permitting the automatic adjustment of representational relationships
to changing demographics and political interests. Divided legislatures
and reserved seat ratios, by contrast, often contain no provision for
periodic updating based on new census data.13
PR thus permits “self-determination” rather
than the “pre-determination” of ethnic groups. See Lijphart 1995. Lani Guinier also endorses PR to allow
for the representation of “voluntary interest constituencies,”
ethnic and otherwise. See Guinier 1994.
Some countries, however, may opt for reserved seats in order to preserve an
existing two-party system (unlikely to be maintained under PR), to
overrepresent a minority, to offer privileged access to power
as compensation for historical disadvantage, or to name a particular
group as deserving unique status.
14Crosscutting gender versus coinciding ethnicity
The next step is to examine variation in the extent to which gender
and ethnic identities actually correspond to partisan cleavages. For
much of world history, politics has been the exclusive domain of men.
Women gained the right to vote and stand for office only in the
twentieth century. Since the early days of gender integration in
politics, however, political parties have counted on both men and women
as supporters. There are few instances of parties defined by gender,
and none have consistently won elections. To be sure, different parties
send men and women to office to varying degrees: women comprise a
larger portion of legislative delegations of the Left than those of the
Right. One reason is that the former have been more likely to adopt
voluntary candidate quotas than the latter.15
To reduce the electoral advantage
such policies may provide to their opponents, parties of the Right in
several countries have responded by introducing, if not always explicit
quotas, other forms of affirmative action to improve women's
opportunities.
16
Party positions may differ on women's rights issues such as abortion,
but are converging—at least in theory—on the goal of gender
parity in representational politics.
What about the gender gap? In advanced democracies, women tend to
vote for leftist parties in greater numbers than men. A few decades ago
(and in many parts of the developing world today) the opposite
transpired: support for the Right was greater among women.17
Though analyses of these phenomena
tend to center on women's views, there is evidence that men are
the ones changing: in the United States at least, transposition of the
gender gap is due to major shifts in men's partisan
preferences.
18 The gap peaked in the U.S.
presidential elections of 1996, when 54 percent of women voted for
Democrat Bill Clinton, as opposed to 43 percent of men.
19 While significant for party strategy,
these percentage point differences are small compared to the overall volume
of female and male support for various parties and candidates.
The size of gender differences in party support contrasts vividly
with the ethnically inflected political divisions characterizing many
plural societies. In patronage democracies such as India, politics is
driven by ethnic head counting.20
Linguistic divisions in
heterogeneous European countries such as Belgium and Switzerland map
onto party—and party system—divisions.
21 A large number of postcolonial societies in Africa
and Asia are dominated by parties whose reliance on the support of exclusive
ethnic groups lends a “census-like quality” to elections.
22 In these contexts and in the post-communist world, progress
toward democratization often exacerbated the ethnic character of politics,
sometimes with violent consequences.
23 Nine Israeli parties representing
distinct ethnic and religious groups came to occupy nearly half of the
Knesset seats in the 1990s.
24 African Americans in the
United States identify overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party and
evidence of the salience of race in predicting voting behavior lies
behind U.S. federal courts' validation of districting arrangements
designed to permit all citizens to “elect a candidate of their
choice.”
25 Even Latin America is witnessing the
growth of ethnic parties: in the 1990s, those mobilizing indigenous
voters successfully contested national elections in Bolivia, Colombia,
Ecuador, Guyana, and Venezuela and local contests in Argentina and
Nicaragua.
26 Ethnic boundaries are not always politically loaded, however, and not
everyone has a communal experience of ethnicity. Its coincidence with
partisan and ideological cleavages and geographic concentration is the
effect of historical construction as well as political manipulation.
Ethnic groups in some countries, such as Afro-descendents in Brazil,
have features usually associated with gender identity, such as low
geographic segregation and little correlation with voting behavior or
party affiliation. Consequently, the affirmative action bill under
consideration in the Brazilian Congress calls for racial quotas in
parties, not for reserved seats in the legislature.27
The stacking of ethnicity on salient social divisions is the product, not
the premise, of a political process, an outcome to which the allocation of
specific representational rights surely contributes.
For these reasons, there is an active debate among political
scientists about which types of institutions can best mold ethnicity to
promote democratic stability. Arend Lijphart has long advocated
proportional representation and power sharing, policies that preserve
group identity but encourage cooperation among ethnic elites. Donald
Horowitz favors electoral rules that encourage politicians to make
appeals across ethnic lines. And Kanchan Chandra has found that when
state institutions create incentives for politicians to mobilize
different dimensions of ethnic identity—by authorizing positive
discrimination by caste, granting access to government jobs by
language, or recognition of statehood by tribe—ethnic parties
will compete to occupy the center, thus averting the centrifugal spiral
that undermines democracy.28
Depending on these institutional configurations and
other factors, ethnicity is manifest in varied ways in different societies.
Often enough, ethnic boundaries correspond to other salient cleavages.
Gender identities, however, almost always cut across them.
Women receive quotas; ethnic groups receive reserved
seats
Finally, we must establish that gender-based demands center on quotas
and that this is related to the fact that women are spread throughout
the party system. We also need to show that the preference of ethnic
groups for reserved seats flows from their tendency to cluster in a
single party or organization.
Let us begin by analyzing candidate quotas. Their diffusion is a
relatively recent phenomenon resulting from several trends. The first
is the growth of the second-wave feminist movement, which identified
male dominance in political life as a problem and questioned the
legitimacy of polities that tolerate it. Feminist activism helped forge
new international norms of gender equality. Major agreements, such as
the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women (CEDAW) and the Platform for Action adopted by
governments at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing,
endorse affirmative action. International and regional organizations,
such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Southern African
Development Community, the Summit of the Americas, and the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations, have declared that growth in women's
leadership contributes to democratic consolidation and economic and
social progress.
Another factor was the development of normative arguments that
identified the gender composition of legislatures as an indicator of
justice and the quality of democracy. Quota advocates reconceptualized
political equality to include not just the right to vote and stand for
office, but to be present in office. A homogeneous legislature
of men, they argued, violates this fundamental right. Meanwhile,
partisans of deliberative democracy stressed the need for
representatives to share experiences with their constituents in order
to adequately communicate citizen views in open-ended political
deliberation. Finally, feminists maintained that having more women in
power would introduce additional perspectives to decision making and
tailor policy outcomes to suit a broader variety of citizen interests.
Ann Phillips sums up these various developments as a reorientation of
democratic theory and practice from a “politics of ideas”
to a “politics of presence.”29
Argentina pioneered a candidate quota law in 1991. Influenced by the
success of candidate quotas in the Spanish Socialist Party, Argentine
female politicians from different parties united behind the proposal.
Though it was initially ridiculed by men, last-minute persuasion by
President Carlos Menem and his interior minister helped to overcome
this resistance. Subsequently, the policy snowballed across the region.
By the end of the decade, ten other Latin American countries had
adopted legislative quotas, and an eleventh, Colombia, introduced them
for senior executive appointments. Belgium introduced a law in 1994
that states that a maximum of two-thirds of all candidates could be of
the same sex; in 1999 France modified its constitution to call for
gender parity in political office and enacted legislation requiring
parties to field an equal number of men and women candidates.
Meanwhile, under the influence of the United Nations, the Organization
for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the Stability Pact
for South-Central Europe, quota rules were inserted into the electoral
laws of most countries of the former Yugoslavia, including Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Serbia, including Kosovo.30
Three aspects of women's mobilization for gender quotas stand
out. First, multipartisan and ideologically diverse coalitions have
backed the new policies. Women from the Peronist and Radical parties in
Argentina; the Party of the Democratic Revolution and National Action
Party in Mexico; and the socialists, Rally for the Republic, and the
Union for French Democracy in France joined together to defeat the
arguments of male colleagues that quotas were undemocratic and
unconstitutional. “Although all women may not agree on the
substance of specific policy outcomes, they do have a common interest
in being present when policy is being made.”31
These politicians did not
seek to form a separate women's party. Rather, they united in
temporary alliances to maximize their leverage in demanding greater
power within their respective parties.
Second, most politicians regard quotas as a temporary measure. As
more women gain power, they will break down the obstacles holding
others back. Over time, the quota will become obsolete.
Finally, women's activism around quotas has been episodic. After
the adoption of quota laws, women's coalitions have disbanded as
their members returned to their prior commitments and became reabsorbed
into their parties. In some countries—notably Argentina, Costa
Rica, Belgium, and Guyana—women's presence in power
increased significantly as a result of the quota. Yet the feminization
of legislative delegations has not produced major changes in what
parties actually do. Though some women politicians have introduced
fresh items to political agendas, their collective presence has thus
far failed to produce major shifts in policy and practice.32
Ethnic demands for reservations have followed a quite different
political logic. Rather than improving the legitimacy of already
existing democracies, the granting of reserved seats has tended to
occur as part of a founding compromise in consociational or consensus
polities. In these countries, split legislatures, the allocation of
ministerial portfolios by ethnicity, or fixed ratios of parliamentary
seats form part of the elite bargains necessary to make democracy
possible. Each group has a constitutional share of power, giving it an
incentive not to defect from the existing political regime and
undermine the survival of the state. As opposed to quotas, which
improve the leadership prospects of group members within existing
parties, reservations presume the existence of group-specific parties
or organizations. Groups demanding reservations do not want to be
integrated into mainstream parties. They want access to political power
in their own right.
In Belgium, the constitution requires that there be an equal number
of French- and Dutch-speaking ministers in the federal government and
in the government of the Brussels region, with the parliament divided
between these two language communities and their respective party
systems. In Switzerland, language group quotas are used not only in the
federal council,33
The council is
generally comprised of four German-speakers, two French-speakers, and
one Italian-speaker.
but in other areas of government (such as
the armed forces) and in society as a whole (such as the executive
committee of the Swiss soccer association).
34 Lebanon is another
classic story of how ethnic reservations helped forge the state. The
National Pact of 1943 reserved all major offices—the president
was to be a Maronite; the prime minister a Sunni; the speaker of the
house a Shiite; and so on—and fixed the ethnic composition of the
parliament at a 6:5 ratio of Christians to Muslims.
35 Elsewhere, the ethnic allocation of political power was codified in
peace agreements following civil wars. International mediators, with an
eye toward establishing pluralist polities, helped install forms of
power sharing in virtually all of the new states formed after the
breakup of Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Herzegovina has a three-member
presidency comprised of a Bosniak, Serb, and Croat, as well as a
bicameral legislative assembly divided between these three communities.
In Serbia and Montenegro, the bicameral federal legislature is divided
between Serbians and Montenegrans. In Kosovo, seats are reserved in
parliament for Serbs, Roma, and other ethnic groups. (In less polarized
Croatia and Slovenia, a smaller number of seats are reserved for
minorities.)36
Other countries inherited power-sharing from former
colonial rulers. In Fiji, the ethnic reservation of parliamentary seats
dates from colonial times, when the British authorities sought to separate
indigenous Fijians from Indo-Fijians and install themselves as mediators.
After the country's independence, the vast majority of parliamentary
seats continued to be reserved by ethnicity.
37 Some reservations policies reflect attempts to compensate victims of
slavery, colonialism, or a caste system for past oppression.
India's reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are
intended to ameliorate the historic discrimination suffered by those at
the lowest rungs of the caste system. New Zealand's white rulers
made a similar attempt to compensate oppressed minorities: the Maori
Representation Act of 1867 installed four representatives in a
legislature of over 70 members. The number of seats later increased to
seven (representatives are elected by voters who voluntarily register
for a separate Maori roll).38
In the late twentieth century, some disadvantaged ethnic groups
demanded rights during constitutional reforms. Responding to indigenous
mobilization, the Colombian Constitution (1991) created a two-seat
senatorial district for Indians and permitted the reservation of up to
five seats in the lower house for ethnic groups and other political
minorities. Venezuela had a similar experience: the 1999 constitutional
reform established three reserved seats for “indigenous
communities” in the national assembly and permitted social
movement organizations to contest them, thus eliminating the party
registration barrier. In both countries, these seats granted resources
and visibility to indigenous parties and movements; as a result, they
successfully contested general elections and gained power in local
governance.39
With the exception of Peru, democratic states have
always conferred ethnic group rights in the form of reservations.
The Argument in Action
France, India, and Peru illustrate the theoretical propositions I
have advanced. France and India show us political actors engaged in
pragmatic debates, pondering the difference between gender and
ethnicity, though to opposite ends. Both honed in on the crosscutting
nature of gender. In France, this supported women's claims to
representation; in India, it undermined it. Comparing India and Peru
emphasizes a different point. Though the countries seem like exceptions
to my argument (see their location in table 2),
in fact they support it. India initially granted reservations to ethnic
minorities, and Peru introduced quotas for women. Both governments later
tried to apply the same policy to a different type of group: Indian women
got reservations and Peruvian indigenous peoples received quotas. The two
policies were subsequently criticized by their alleged beneficiaries. By
mismatching groups and remedies, the Indian and Peruvian states not only
failed to address the underlying causes of disadvantage, but arguably
jeopardized women's and indigenous people's quest for political
equality.
Parité in France
In June 2000 the French parliament approved a law requiring that
parties field an equal number of male and female candidates in
legislative elections. This turn of events is surprising in a country
that has prided itself on a republican tradition of an indivisible body
politic and has long forbidden official distinctions among citizens in
terms of sex, race, ethnicity, and religion. In fact, these
nondiscrimination principles were invoked by the Supreme Court in a
1982 decision that struck down a quota law passed by Congress (the law
would have banned one sex from occupying more than 75 percent of the
places on lists of candidates for municipal elections). The French
court claimed that gender preferences contradicted republican
principles of equality and unity, which dictate that citizens represent
the nation as a whole, not discrete groups or categories.40
Advocates of women's representation thus had to make a case that
their preferred policies were compatible with republican universalism.
This required demonstrating that the existing model was flawed for
failing to incorporate sex differences and that gender parity would not
legitimize representational rights for other social groups. Gender,
they argued, is a unique form of social difference.
Unlike ethnicity, race, and religion, which are socially constructed
and changeable categories, sex is universal and permanent:
Women do not constitute a category analogous to minorities,
but half of humanity, and their status is immutable. The young grow
older, one can change one's religion, people of color can intermix
with others—miscegenation is widespread—, workers may
switch professions, and so on. But once one is born a man or woman, one
does not change (save in the extremely rare case of transsexuals).41
Both traditional French “universalism,” which stresses
the unity of men and women, and contemporary American
“particularism,” which collapses sex into other forms of
difference, are therefore misguided. Philosopher Sylvia Agacinski, wife
of former Socialist Premier Lionel Jospin, argues that both political
traditions have denied the real nature of sex:
The “French” effacement proceeds by engulfing
both sexes in an abstract humanism, from which only the singular model
of a sexually neutral human being can surface…. The
“American” effacement proceeds by drowning women in a
systematic particularism in which minorities of all sorts (ethnic,
religious, cultural, etc.) are grouped together, and both sexes end up
being considered pure “constructions.” … Today, the
new French feminism simultaneously challenges both these types of
sexual neutralization in affirming sexual duality as the only
universal difference within humanity. This is why it was able
to conceive of the parité ideal in politics.42
The fact of sexual difference divides humanity in two. As a result, a
republican polity that claims to include all citizens, but in which
only men hold power, unjustly privileges one half over the other.
Parity feminists did not want their arguments to be leveled against a
legislature of white Catholics, however. Since sex is the only
universal category, women are not like any other social group.
With this stance, parity advocates were able to anchor their movement
within republican discourse and find allies from the mainstream of
French politics. By denying that parity would or should lead to a
cascade of demands for other representational rights, they made their
case more palatable. What is more, they focused on the narrow objective
of getting the parity bill passed, and not broader considerations, such
as socioeconomic equality and policy change. By avoiding questions
about the substantive representation of women's interests, French
feminists of diverse political and ideological stripes were able to
smooth over their differences and unite in a nonpartisan movement. This
also helped defray fears that right-wing and conservative women would
be attacked or disqualified, and by the mid-1990s, most politicians had
jumped on the parity bandwagon. When it came to a vote in the national
assembly, the parity proposals—both the constitutional amendment
and the implementing legislation—were approved unanimously.
Following promulgation of the law, however, the large and diverse
movement began to disperse. What had held participants together was
support for parity, not a more comprehensive policy agenda or a shared
history of activism.43
The parity law worked well in the 2001 municipal elections, since
municipal councilors are elected under a semiproportional closed-list
system and parties were required to include three women for every three
men on the list. In cities of more than 3,500 inhabitants where the
parity law was applied, women's presence on municipal councils
rose to 48 percent. Yet at the national level, where deputies are
elected by the first-past-the-post system in single-member districts,
the results were disappointing. Preferring to suffer financial
penalties rather than comply with the quota, the center Right UMP
nominated women to less than 20 percent of the districts where it ran a
candidate, and even the Socialist Party nominated women to only 36
percent of districts. Most of these were losing districts and the
number of women in the assembly barely increased (from 62 to 71 out of
576, or to 12 percent of the total).44
Reservations policy in India
Whereas the French state acknowledged social difference in the law
only at the end of the twentieth century, in India such recognition has
a long tradition. Legislative reservations for minorities were
introduced during British rule. First Muslims (in 1909), then
Christians and Sikhs (in 1919) were granted separate electorates; at
the same time, nominated seats were granted to
“untouchables” or dalits to offset inequities of the caste
system. The British had originally proposed that these lower castes
vote on separate rolls; a 21-day hunger strike by Mohandas Gandhi,
however, led to compromise. The 1932 agreement, known as the Poona
Pact, reserved seats for dalit candidates to be elected by everyone.
The British also reserved a number for women within these communal seat
allocations in provincial and national legislatures. Although favored
by British feminist Eleanor Rathbone, such reservations were opposed by
the largest national Indian women's associations as well as the
Indian National Congress, which contested the introduction of any
distinctions (whether by gender, religion, or caste) among Indians.
Both groups viewed British policy as part of a divide-and-rule strategy
against the nationalist movement.45
The constitution promulgated in 1950 rejected communal quotas as an
organizing principle in favor of formal equality and individual rights,
with two exceptions. Recognizing that equal treatment would be
insufficient to ameliorate historic discrimination suffered by the
lowest social groups, the constitution upheld the British legacy of
legislative reservations for untouchables (Scheduled Castes) and
introduced them for indigenous groups (Scheduled Tribes). Similar
consideration, however, was not extended to Muslims or women.
Delimitation commissions in each state designated single-member
constituencies in which only members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes could stand for office, even though the electorate as a whole
would vote for them (the number was proportional to their share of the
population). The text authorized a range of other policies to advance
“backward classes” of citizens, including: reserved posts
in government service and university admissions; scholarships, meals,
supplies, and special schools; and preference for economic development
assistance.46
The debate over women's representation died down for several
decades, but it was revived in the 1970s when the government of India
formed the Committee on the Status of Women to propose recommendations
for improving their rights and opportunities. Its report was to be
launched in time for International Women's Year in 1975. One of
the thorniest issues considered by the committee was gender
reservations. After weighing arguments for and against, it declined to
recommend such policies at the national or state level, though it
recognized women's political underrepresentation as a serious
problem.
To justify its position, the committee drew a distinction between
women, who are a “category,” and minority
“communities,” including those based on caste and religion.
“There can be no rational basis for reservations for
women,” since “the minority argument cannot be applied to
women. Women are not a community, they are a category. Though they have
some real problems of their own, they share with men the problems of
their groups, locality and community. Women are not concentrated in
certain areas [or] confined to particular fields of
activity.”47
Government of India
1974, 304.
“Women's
interests as such,” the committee wrote, “cannot be
isolated from the economic, social, and political interests of groups,
strata and classes in the society.”
48 Anticipating arguments made by French feminists in the 1990s, Indian
experts stressed the difference between women and ethnic minority
communities, but as an argument against women's representation,
not in favor of it. The Committee on the Status of Women did, however,
borrow the institutional model the state had used for Scheduled Castes
and Tribes and endorsed reserved seats for women in local governments.
This appears to have been a compromise between those who rejected
women's representation altogether and those who wanted to
recommend reservations at all levels.49
The annex to the official report contains three notes of
dissent written by four committee members. Two of the notes oppose
reservations altogether; the other, signed by two members and running
eleven paragraphs, supports reservations at the national and state
levels. See Government of India 1974.
Indeed, many features of the official report are contradictory, seemingly
reflecting the amount of dissent over the issue. For example, though it
declares that “the minority argument cannot be applied to
women,” the report also states that “though women do not
numerically constitute a minority, they are beginning to acquire features
of a minority community” because of continued gender inequalities in
class, status, and power.
50
The local-level recommendations were adopted in 1992 as the 73rd and
74th amendments to the Indian Constitution, reserving for women
one-third of the seats at the three tiers of the Panchayati Raj
institutions of rural self-governance, as well as in elected urban
councils.
51 The debate was revived in 1996 when MP and former Minister for Women
Margaret Alva proposed to amend the constitution to extend the
women's reservations system to the national and state
legislatures. A lottery system would determine the single-member
districts in which only women could run, and these would rotate every
two elections. The bill would also reserve one-third of the seats
allocated to Scheduled Castes and Tribes for women of those
communities. Though virtually every political party supported the bill
in their 1996 electoral platforms, the parliamentary debates over it
were ferocious, with some MPs almost coming to blows and others rushing
to the podium to tear up copies of the text.52
One of the main parliamentary concerns was the relationship between
women's reservations and rights for members of “other
backward classes” (OBCs, a group the 1950 constitution had
recognized as entitled to special protections). In a 1990 decision that
provoked massive controversy, the government had granted OBCs
reservations in its central bureaucracy, but not in national and state
legislatures. Entrepreneurial MPs from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) demanded that the women's bill include
subreservations for lower castes, a move that allowed them to appear as
champions of the OBCs, but which mired the gender proposal in polemics
surrounding caste rights. In addition, some legislators called for
special provisions in the bill for Muslims. As Laura Dudley Jenkins
notes, “by endorsing the bill in party platforms and then failing
to pass it out of a sudden concern for backward citizens or Muslims,
politicians court the women's vote, the backwards vote, and the
Muslim vote and simultaneously protect their own hopes of
reelection.”53
Popular views of the elitist nature of the women's movement also
did not help the cause of the bill. Middle-class women had assumed
visible roles in protests against the decision to grant OBCs central
government reservations and most feminist organizations had failed to
build ties to lower caste groups. During the debate, a prominent OBC
politician declared that the reservation bill was for “balkati
auraten” or short-haired women, a reference to upper class urban
feminists.54
The comment tapped an
underlying fear that, without subreservations, the women's bill
would end up benefiting only high-caste Hindus.
As in France, political actors in India highlighted the crosscutting
nature of gender. Unlike ethnic groups, women transcend geographic,
occupational, language, and religious categories. In France, this meant
that, in theory, women's representation would not threaten the
republican universalist tradition. In India, by contrast, women's
crosscutting status made it less likely that they would represent the
caste and socioeconomic interests the reservations system was supposed
to advance.
Meanwhile, a group of dissidents argued that rather than reserved
seats, the bill should introduce a candidate quota within political
parties. The Forum for Democratic Reforms argued that the reservations
proposal was seriously and inherently flawed. By mechanically providing
for the entrance of women into one-third of the seats in the national
and state legislatures, the bill failed to address the main problem
impeding women's effective participation in politics: gender
discrimination in political parties.55
This is the case not just in India but more generally.
Data from the United States show that when they run, women have as good
a chance as men to get elected. Their low numbers in power owe to the
unwillingness of parties to nominate women as candidates, not
discrimination in the electorate. See Darcy, Welch, and
Clark 1994.
These activists viewed as disingenuous those
Indian politicians who endorsed the bill while doing nothing for women
within their respective parties:
The very same male party leaders who compete with each other
in announcing their support of special reservations for women have
shown little willingness to include women in party decision making, or
even to help create a conducive atmosphere for women's
participation in their own organizations. In fact, women's
marginalization is even more pronounced in the day-to-day functioning
of almost all political parties than in the Lok Sabha. Therefore, it is
urgently required that we make special measures to enhance women's
political participation in ways that will help them influence decision
making at all levels of our society and polity. Our democracy will
remain seriously flawed if it fails to yield adequate space to
women.56
Furthermore, the Forum argued, a system of women's reservations
would enable patriarchal leaders to solidify their positions. At the
local level, political bosses regularly compel their wives, sisters,
and daughters to contest reserved seats. National politicians would
duplicate this strategy and the women entering politics would be mere
fronts for male power.57
Pointing out that those countries with the highest levels of
women's representation use candidate quotas, not reserved seats,
these critics proposed an alternative bill. It would require that
one-third of candidates nominated by political parties for general
elections be women, though each party would be free to choose the
constituencies where these women would run. Rather than contesting
women's seats, female candidates would compete against men and
other women in general elections. To ensure their success, parties
would need to nurture these candidates. Women might therefore become
legitimate leaders and have a greater political base from which to
advance women's interests in parliament.58
The Indian government has not resolved these
issues, so it is not yet clear whether quotas or reservations will
emerge as the preferred remedy.
Quotas in Peru
While some Indian authorities have sought to apply to women the same
system they had used for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, Peruvian
officials have employed a women's policy for indigenous peoples.
In 1997 the Congress approved an electoral law requiring that female
candidates make up no less than 25 percent of the slots on party lists
contesting national legislative elections (the quota was later
increased to 30 percent). Several years later, Peruvian leaders
introduced the same remedy—party candidate quotas—for
indigenous communities of the Amazon region. Though intended as a
response to their demands for representation, the policy was criticized
by indigenous leaders for undermining their political organizations.
Like their ethnic counterparts elsewhere in the world, Peru's
Amazonian and highland Indians wanted reserved seats in parliament, not
quotas.
In a process of coalition building similar to what occurred in
France, Peruvian women politicians—representing both the
governing and opposition parties—initially joined forces in the
mid-90s to lobby for a quota law. Five congresswomen had attended the
1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, where they debated the policy
with delegates from other countries. Upon their return, a special
commission on women was installed in parliament and quotas were the
first item on its agenda. Although the proposal initially met with
overwhelming skepticism from other legislators, it eventually received
a boost from an unexpected ally: the President. Alberto Fujimori, the
only head of state to have attended the 1995 conference, declared his
support for quotas and the majority in Congress immediately fell in
line. As in France, the proposal was approved unanimously.59
Its effects on women's presence in power, however, were more dramatic:
in the first national election held after the quota, the percentage of
congressional seats held by women jumped from 11 to 20 percent.
Meanwhile, the 1990s witnessed the growing ethnic politicization of
indigenous peoples in various Andean countries, including Peru.
Previously, a “peasant” or “poor” consciousness
had tended to prevail over an indigenous one, and ethnic prejudice was
perceived—and disguised—as class discrimination. The
decreasing viability of class affiliations like peasant in the
neoliberal era, combined with opportunities offered by global
discourses of multiculturalism, helped spawn mobilization along ethnic
lines.60
In
1998, organizations from the Amazon and highland regions formed the
Permanent Conference of Peruvian Indigenous Peoples, uniting previously
disparate organizations to forge a common political platform and lobby
congress to recognize Indian rights.
61 After the 2001 election of President Alejandro Toledo, the state
became increasingly receptive to indigenous claims. Though he
frequently donned a poncho and espoused a populist discourse, former
President Fujimori had undermined indigenous land rights, and his
efforts to centralize power—he canceled regional
elections—reduced Indian opportunities to participate in
politics. Toledo pledged to expand the rights of indigenous peoples and
created a high-level commission presided over by his wife, Belgian
anthropologist Elaine Karp, to represent their interests in the state.
Fulfilling a campaign promise, he also reinstated regional
elections.62
The law regulating these elections, approved by Congress in early
2002, declared that lists of candidates for regional and local councils
comprise no less than 30 percent women and a minimum of 15 percent of
representatives of “native communities” or “original
peoples” in those regions where they lived. According to the
national election tribunal, the indigenous quota would be applied in 11
(of a total of 25) regions.63
The
groups targeted by the law include some 350,000 people speaking over 40
languages, mostly residents of the lowland Amazon region.
Peru's ethnic quotas apply only to those Indians considered
members of “native communities.” What is the origin of this
term? In 1969 military ruler General Juan Velasco declared that,
“as an act of liberation,” the words indigenous and Indian
be purged from official discourse and all peoples incorporated into a
“modern” class-based society.64
A
1974 law then reclassified the entire indigenous population into two
groups: “native communities” and “peasant
communities.” The former benefit from the 2002 quota law, but the
latter, who are far more numerous, do not. “Peasant
communities,” or those indigenous peoples inhabiting the
country's highland regions, comprise over 40 percent of
Peru's 28 million people.
Although it was designed to help them, several Amazonian Indian
organizations criticized the way the 2002 electoral law channeled their
representation through existing political parties. These indigenous
movements preferred instead to form their own autonomous organizations
and political platforms. Emulating the success of similar organizations
in Bolivia and Ecuador, where ethnic parties had made major electoral
gains in the 1990s, representatives of various Peruvian native
communities formed the Indigenous Movement of the Peruvian Amazon
(MIAP) and attempted to field candidates for several elections in the
late 1990s and early 2000s. The quota posed a threat to this group,
however, since its leaders were being recruited by mainstream parties
seeking to comply with the law.65
One activist complained that,
though the intention behind the quota was good, the result was bad, for
it would only cause Indians to become more divided.
66 Wrays Perez of the Inter-Ethnic Development Association of
the Peruvian Forest (AIDESEP); interviewed by Donna Lee Van Cott, July
11, 2002.
Indians from both the Amazon and the highlands want the Peruvian
state to guarantee their representation through legislative
reservations, not candidate quotas. The program for constitutional
reform advanced by indigenous organizations in 2003 calls for the
creation of special electoral districts, from which Indians would
directly elect 30 percent of seats in the national congress and
regional and municipal councils.67
The reservation of seats conforms to the notions held by many indigenous
organizations that political participation is not just an individual but a
collective right.
68 As mentioned earlier,
Colombia and Venezuela had granted them legislative reservations in the
early 1990s.
Reservations are but one element in the broader agenda advanced by
indigenous peoples in Peru. Indians want collective property rights,
territorial and cultural autonomy, deference to customary law, and
bilingual education. These goals contradict the model of the
homogeneous, mestizo nation and comprehensive legal order installed in
the American republics after their independence from Spain in the early
nineteenth century. They challenge the liberal state and its traditions
of individual rights, since completing the indigenous agenda would
require the state to recognize multiple, collective forms of
citizenship as well as tolerate a plurality of legal regimes.69
The Peruvian case helps show how legislative reservations advance
group rights and reinforce differences in a way that candidate quotas
do not. Quotas attack the discrimination suffered by individuals within
parties to give them a better chance of getting elected. A regime of
reserved seats more directly empowers the whole group. When legislators
are chosen from separate electorates and specially created districts,
the policy confers on group members the right to be represented not
just by one of their kind, but by a candidate of their choice. This
mechanism strengthens the links between representatives and their
ethnic kin constituents while distancing them from others. Reservations
thus bestow a distinctive status on the group as a political community.
Quotas, by contrast, collapse the group into the rest of political
society.
Authoritarian Exceptions
The stories of France, India, and Peru illuminate another aspect of
quotas and reservations. Their purpose is not merely to insert
differently configured, colored, or cultured bodies into legislatures.
Rather, advocates of these measures aim to promote the substantive
representation of the interests of a disadvantaged or excluded group.
The agents of such representation should therefore exercise not just
symbolic but effective power. Part of the motive for choosing the right
remedy is to reinforce connections between leaders and the base that
nourishes them politically. Quotas improve the position of women within
those parties that get them elected and advance their agendas;
reservations strengthen those groups whose very existence is crucial
for the promotion of the rights and interests of their members.
Regimes that lack a commitment to substantive representation have
little incentive to promote the right remedy. In states with military
governments, one-party states, no-party states, and other countries
that fail to respect civil liberties, legislative powers are subject to
arbitrary dictatorial will. Such polities lack competitive party
politics and the links of accountability that they provide.
Consequently, representation patterns in authoritarian polities differ
from those observed in democracies. Women get reserved seats in
legislatures, not candidate quotas (see table 3),
as do ethnic groups. Toleration of democratic parties—which the quota
remedy presumes—would undermine the survival of these regimes.
Forms of gender representation in democracies and
nondemocracies
We could also speculate that in extremely oppressive
societies—which correlate, albeit imperfectly, to those without
democratic governance—gender is not crosscutting enough for
candidate quotas. With their roles limited exclusively to biological
functions, women have not spread out into the economy, society, and
party system in ways characteristic of wealthy democratic states. Their
common experiences and interests cause them to resemble a coinciding
group more than a cross-cutting category. This suggests there may be an
inverse relationship between the collective identity of women and their
degree of liberation: the greater the success of the feminist movement
in pushing women in to the public sphere, the less they have in
common.
In any event, the introduction of women's reservations in some
nondemocracies shows that even these states are not immune to arguments
connecting regime legitimacy with gender diversity. In Morocco, parties
decided to reserve the 30-seat national list for women after a
three-year process of mobilization and consultation in which
international organizations—particularly the United Nations
Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)—played important roles.70
Subsequently, hundreds of delegates attending the Arab Women's Summit
in late 2002 approved a declaration calling on Arab states to follow
Morocco's lead. In Pakistan, feminist mobilization and international
benchmarks helped provoke an expansion of the reservations system inherited
from the colonial period. (Unlike in India, where women's seats were
abolished after independence, Pakistan upheld reservations of between 5
and 10 percent in national and provincial assemblies in various
constitutions adopted into the 1980s.) In 2000 the military government
of General Pervez Musharraf expanded the reservations system to 17
percent at the national and provincial levels and one-third at the
local level.
71 Pakistan also reserves 7
percent of seats for technocrats. Various national plans for women had
endorsed a 30 percent reservations scheme, as did representatives of
eleven political parties. See Reyes 2002;
Weiss and Bari 2002.
Granting reserved seats to women allows nondemocracies to respond to
popular pressure and conform to international norms without ceding
ground to the competitive party politics presumed by candidate quotas.
Yet the very nature of such regimes prevents female—and
male—legislators from representing citizen interests and wielding
effective power.
Conclusion
Advocates and critics of group representation frequently fail to
distinguish between types of policies and the groups they apply to. Yet
these distinctions are consequential for normative debates about social
difference in a liberal polity. Gender- and ethnic-based demands
present unique challenges to the liberal tradition. Because they are
self canceling, quotas produce the opposite effect on group difference
than the self-reinforcing remedy of reservations.
As a first cut at disaggregating group claims to representation, I
suggest that gender quotas be seen as analogous to a class action and
ethnic reservations as a group right.72
I
am grateful to John Comaroff for helping me with this
formulation.
A class action is a legal suit initiated by some
plaintiffs on behalf of a larger collective of people in order to
vindicate a particular set of rights. The class is constituted by
virtue of having suffered a similar wrong. The objective of the suit is
to identify this wrong and put the plaintiffs in a position to recover
for the individual harms they have suffered. That is, a class action
aims at the erasure of an externally imposed disability. A class action
is self-canceling: achievement of the claim extinguishes the legal
identity of the class.
The logic of a class action corresponds closely to that of
women's mobilization for gender quotas. They unite to contest
common experiences of political exclusion and discrimination. The quota
remedy aims to transcend these gender-based disabilities, thereby
erasing the conditions giving rise to the claim in the first place.
Once women enter political office, the reasons motivating the quota
movement disappear. The logic of the quota is “to put the group
out of business as a group.”73
Fraser argues that this logic characterizes redistributive
remedies for class-based social injustice. See Fraser 1997, 18.
As the French case shows, women from all parties and ideologies
united in the struggle for quotas, but reverted to their prior
ideological and political commitments once this goal was achieved. This
trajectory parallels the cyclical patterns observed in women's
movements more generally: they emerge to oppose problems (denial of
voting rights, military rule, discriminatory legislation) but dissipate
once the situation has been resolved. Women may act like a group in
order to get something, but realign themselves as a category once they
have it. Being excluded from power makes women conscious of belonging
to a group; once they have power, this group identity tends to weaken
and dissipate.74
According to David
Miller, a category consists of all those persons fitting a proper
description, while a group is “a set of people who by virtue of
their shared characteristics think of themselves as forming a
group.” See David Miller 2002,
178.
Ethnic reservations, by contrast, are a group right. Claimed in order
to guarantee the continued existence of the group, they are exercised
collectively by group members. Such rights are self-reinforcing rather
than self-canceling. Organizations of Chinese in Mauritius, Croats in
Bosnia, and Italian-speakers in Switzerland will not dissipate once
representational rights have been granted. On the contrary, since
legislative reservations create incentives for the development of
group-specific organizations, their boundaries will be strengthened.
Self-canceling claims for political inclusion have the reverse effect
of self-reinforcing group rights. Women seeking quotas aim to have
their different position absorbed by universalistic institutions.
Ethnic minorities demanding reservations want their particularism
recognized and legitimized. These are opposite trajectories: women
suffer from too much difference; ethnic groups, from too little. Claims
for inclusion pose less of a challenge to contemporary liberal
institutions than claims to difference.75
Brian Barry, for example, argues that classical liberalism
is perfectly compatible with special treatment for members of
disadvantaged groups as long as the objective of such treatment is to
make the need for it “disappear as rapidly as possible.” He
contrasts such remedies with the permanent group rights favored by
those he deems multiculturalists: “if the group [no longer
needed] special rights, that would not be regarded as a cause for
celebration, because it would be taken to suggest that the support for
the group's culture had been insufficient to prevent its members
from assimilating to that of some larger or more powerful group.”
See Barry 2002, 13.
The distinction between a class action and a group right is an
analytical one I inferred from this study of representation policies in
contemporary democracies. It does not describe all claims made on
behalf of gender and ethnic identities. In fact, gender claims may on
occasion be self-reinforcing: some women's movements aim at
separatism; others argue that their essential differences from men
require dissimilar treatment over the long term. And ethnic claims may
sometimes be self-canceling: part of the rationale behind reservations
in India is to help break down caste distinctions; likewise,
affirmative action in the United States and Brazil seeks to make race
less determining for political opportunities, occupational status, and
social experience.
Nevertheless, selecting one remedy for underrepresentation over
others will generally shape the future trajectory of a social group. A
candidate quota promotes the integration of group members into existing
political parties. Beneficiaries of the quota may later act to advance
group interests, but they will do so—save at episodic
moments—as individuals, not as a group. A legislative reservation
produces the opposite effect: it strengthens ties among group members
by connecting them through channels of representation distinct from
those used for everyone else. Though more conducive to continued
collective action, reservations have the potential to magnify
intergroup differences and impede development of the overlapping
affiliations that underlie a successful democracy. The choice between
softening or hardening difference inevitably arises in the quest for
political justice. Policymakers designing institutions and the scholars
advising them should take notice lest they unwittingly trade a
legislature of white men for a fragmented, even polarized political
society.
