HOW TO JUSTIFY MANDATORY ELECTORAL QUOTAS: A POLITICAL EGALITARIAN APPROACH

ABSTRACTThis paper offers a novel substantive justification for mandatory electoral quotas—e.g., gender or racial quotas—and a new methodological approach to their justification. Substantively, I argue for a political egalitarian account of electoral quotas. Methodologically, based on this account and a political egalitarian grounding of political participatory rights, I offer an alternative to the External Restriction Approach to the justification of electoral quotas. The External Restriction Approach sees electoral quotas as at best justified restrictions on political participatory rights. I argue for the Internal Restriction Approach instead, which can justify electoral quotas by specifying the pro tanto scope of political participatory rights rather than by justifying restrictions on the pro tanto scope of these rights. On this approach, adequately set electoral quotas do not even conflict with and are not balanced against political participatory rights, while electoral quotas—when justified—are pro tanto required rather than merely permitted.

The Motives and Obstacles in Iranian Women’s Participation in Political Life of the Country

The article deals with the overview of the main obstacles in the Iranian women’s participation in the country’s political life originating from the national, cultural, social and economic aspects of Iranian society. Much attention is paid to the factors that motivate both Iranian women and men to participate in politics, as well as the problems that Iranian women face while struggling for their place in the parliament. The peculiarities of the political parties’ activities, the financial aspect of the candidates allowing them to take part in election campaigns, distrust of women in Iranian society (in terms of their public role), the lack of electoral quotas for women are defined as the main factors of their non-participation in the elections. However, Iranian women’s motivation, on the one hand, and the country’s political system, on the other hand, play a significant role, because they are key internal and external factors to be taken into account. After the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978, the situation with women’s rights in the country improved supported by the Government’s constitutional establishment of equal rights of men and women in political life of Iran. However, other spheres remained unchanged due to strong religious influence. Only in the 1990s the rights of Iranian women to participate in the country’s politics were addressed by domestic and foreign scholars, though their studies do not provide an in-depth analysis of the problems of Iranian women concerned about the participation in political life of the present-day Iran and their solution.

Women’s election right in Ukraine in the aspect of protecting their political rights

Democratic societies must enable men and women to participate equally in all spheres of life, including politics, in particular at the highest levels of socially important decision-making. For almost 30 years of Ukraine’s independence, issues of gender equality have still not been resolved. The Constitution of Ukraine guarantees equality in rights and responsibilities regardless of race, color, age, property status, place of residence, religious, political, ideological be¬liefs, ethnic and social origin, language and other characteristics. Ukrainian legislation guarantees equality between men and women. Equality of rights in politics regardless of gender is defined at the international level by the Univer¬sal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimi¬nation, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the Convention on the Political Rights of Women. Today, gender equality is one of the fundamental areas of legislative and political activity in the modern world. The goals set by our state to ensure gender equality are to overcome the limitations of their rights and opportunities for self-realization in the private and public spheres, both at the legislative level and in real life. In order to find possible solutions to this problem, the article illustrates the main international and regional regu¬lations governing gender equality in Ukraine, analyzes the state of equality in relation to future women politicians de facto, formed possible measures to influence to ensure the observance of women’s political rights, protection of their violated rights, preventive measures and increase the influx of women into politics in Ukraine. Monitoring of existing programs for the protection of women’s suffrage has become the subject of this work, as well as an assessment of the current state of this reality in our country. The focus was on the relationship between policy officials and women who are being expelled, violated their rights, disregarded gender equality and improperly enforced electoral quotas.

Representation and Forest Conservation: Evidence from India’s Scheduled Areas

Can representative institutions improve environmental conservation? We study the impact of a 1996 law that created local government with electoral quotas for Scheduled Tribes, a historically marginalized and impoverished community of 100 million in India. Using difference-in-differences designs paired with remote sensing data on deforestation, we find that formal representation reduces the rate of deforestation by thirty percent. These effects are larger in villages close to mines, where representation likely lowered commercial extraction. Combining these findings with research that the same institutions improved economic outcomes, our results challenge the commonly held assumption that there must be a trade-off between development and protecting the environment. While conservation policy tends to comprise environmentally focused institutions, we suggest more attention be given to umbrella institutions, such as political representation, which can address conservation and development in tandem.

Electoral Engineering in New Democracies: Strong Quotas and Weak Parties in Tunisia

Bridging the literature on gender and politics, democratization, and political parties, this article investigates the causes of parties’ varying compliance with electoral quotas. Whereas research has so far focused on parties’ willingness to comply, this article sheds light on their ability to do so. It suggests that the more quotas parties have to comply with, and the more complex the quotas’ designs, the more difficult implementation becomes for the organizationally weak parties that we often encounter in new democracies. The argument is developed and substantiated in a comparative analysis of parties’ quota compliance in the 2018 Tunisian local elections. Although the Islamist party was able to comply fully with all quotas (for women, youth and people with disabilities), small secular parties lost a number of lists and state funding due to non-compliance. While the quotas were highly effective in securing group representation, they had repercussions on party and party system consolidation.

The Right of Political Participation of Indigenous Peoples and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

This article explains the obligations the international legal framework on the rights of indigenous peoples imposes on States regarding the right to political participation, in particular, the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Because of the historical exclusion and marginalization of these groups, mere recognition of the right of participation in domestic legal systems is insufficient to ensure the full enjoyment of the right by indigenous communities. Instead, States are obliged to adopt active measures to overcome the systemic discrimination indigenous peoples have been subject to. This article focuses on one of the many aspects of political participation, i.e., electoral participation. It provides both a typology and a critical account of different mechanisms States use to increase and promote the participation of indigenous peoples in electoral processes, specifically in elections for legislative bodies and in constitution-making processes. These mechanisms include the provision for reserved seats in parliament, the creation of special indigenous electoral districts, and the establishment of special electoral quotas for candidacies presented by political parties. The article argues that the effectiveness of each approach cannot be evaluated in abstracto, but must be assessed against the particular context in which a specific approach is adopted. Most importantly, the success of any specific approach should be measured by the extent to which they allow indigenous communities to have an actual chance at influencing political decision-making, particularly in situations that affect them.