Primaries vs. Quotas: Gender and Candidate Nominations in Mexico, 2003

Latin American Politics and Society, Fall 2007 by Baldez, Lisa

ABSTRACT

Parties throughout Latin America have recently addressed two distinct kinds of electoral reforms: primary elections and national-level gender quota laws. This study examines how these reforms interact, their mutual compatibility, and their effect on the nomination of men compared to that of women. It develops a series of hypotheses about this relationship by analyzing the 2003 legislative elections in Mexico, a case in which the three main parties relied on both gender quotas and primaries to select their candidates. Although the percentage of women elected to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies rose, the Federal Electoral Institute interpreted the gender quota law in a way that weakened its effect on women and limited the degree of openness in the primaries that were held.

Legislative office is the key to power in many democratic political systems. The rules for determining who gets the chance to hold that key therefore matter a great deal. Historically, candidate selection for many political parties in Latin America was a process that took place behind closed doors. Party leaders chose their preferred candidates in order to reward political loyalty and to satisfy formal and informal cuotas de poder among their supporters. In the past couple of decades, however, political parties have faced various pressures to make the process of candidate nomination more transparent and more democratic (Cárdenas García 1992). They have responded to demands for greater internal democracy by considering and, in many cases, adopting two distinct kinds of reforms: primary elections and national-level gender quota laws. Both reforms aim to increase the quality of political representation, in the sense of how much candidates for political office represent voters.

Primary elections generally mean the process of holding a vote to determine which candidate(s) will represent a given party in a general election. Primaries vary in terms of how much control party leaders wield over the election. Open primaries allow all registered voters to participate, while closed primaries are restricted to members of a particular party or designated delegates of a party (De Luca et al. 2002, 29). What "counts" as a legitimate primary election (that is, open or closed) may differ from country to country.

Using primaries to select legislative candidates has become an increasingly common practice in Latin America. Scholars and policy-makers alike see them as the sine qua non of internal democratization for political parties. As one specialist in electoral law put it, "For many analysts, primary elections are the only reform available to parties if they really want to try to democratize. Defenders of primaries argue, moreover, that primaries are an indispensable instrument for strengthening the links between parties and society" (Lara Rivera 2006, 16). Parties have held primary elections to select some or all of their legislative candidates in Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Uruguay, and Venezuela (Barreda 2004), as well as in Iceland, Israel, and Taiwan (De Luca et al. 2002).

Gender quota laws require all political parties in a given system to ensure that women fill a certain percentage of candidate slots. Gender quota laws apply to all parties in a given system, which distinguishes them from voluntary quotas adopted by individual parties; and they apply to candidates, which distinguishes them from reserved seats.1 The effectiveness of gender quota laws depends on various factors, but on average, they generate a 10 percent increase in the number of women elected to office (Htun and Jones 2002). Quota advocates see such laws as the most efficient means of increasing women's representation and thus enhancing democracy. Of the nearly 40 countries that have adopted such laws since 1991, 12 are in Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela (International IDEA 2006).

This article examines two issues. First, how do primaries and gender quota laws interact? Specifically, the question is how compatible primaries and quotas are with one another in terms of the effect they have on the nomination and election of men and women to legislative office. Theoretically, they are incompatible: in countries that adopt both reforms, political parties may have to manipulate the results of primary elections in order to conform with gender quotas defined by the law.2 The second issue is how primaries and gender quota laws compare in terms of the nomination of male versus female candidates. How does the percentage of women appointed to candidate slots compare with the percentage that win primary elections? Do women do better in primaries than men, or do men do better than women? In posing and addressing these questions, this article makes two main theoretical contributions. First, it adds gender to the list of considerations to take into account when assessing the adoption and implementation of primary elections. Second, it adds primary elections to the list of factors to consider in determining the impact of gender quotas, thus contributing to a large and growing literature.