Do Gender Quotas Change Politics? Evidence from the Namibian Parliament

media release: Every Wednesday at noon — since 1973! — African Studies Program faculty, students, and community members have gathered for AFRICA AT NOON, a one-hour weekly lecture series bringing diverse African research from scholars around the world to a campus and community audience.

You can view available recordings of past Africa at Noon speakers here and on the event page as well.

The event is free and open to the public.

This in-person event will be livestreamed (Click here to Zoom in)

Talk Description

Gender quotas have been one of the most popular legislative reforms of the 21st Century. How do they change parliamentary behavior? We examine this question with the case of the Namibian Parliament. In Namibia, the ruling party abruptly adopted a gender parity quota, increasing women’s representation by 16 percentage points in one electoral cycle and dramatically changing the chamber’s composition. Using the complete parliamentary transcripts from 2004 to 2023, we examine how this leap in women’s presence changed both the tone and substance of legislative debates. Preliminary results indicate that the quota had little effect on gender differences in parliamentary power: men continue to dominate legislative debates in the post-quota period. In substance, the quota was followed by a relative decline in women’s propensity to mention women’s rights topics. Our results highlight how institutional reforms can transform the composition of the legislature while still leaving preexisting power structures intact.

Speaker’s Bio

Amanda Clayton is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies representation, with a focus on gender and politics and a regional concentration in southern Africa.  Her work has appeared in top political science and international relations journals and has been funded by the NSF, the Swedish Research Council, and USAID, among other groups. She is the co-founder and director of the Empirical Study of Gender (EGEN) Research Network.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, UW-Madison.