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I gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (SES-0703418 and SES-0549973) and P.E.O. International. I thank Lisa Brush, Sarah Deren, Julia Gray, J. Craig Jenkins, George Krause, John Markoff, Pamela Paxton, Vincent Roscigno, and Wendy Smooth, as well as Ron Rogowski, the co-editors, and the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Over the past 150 years, democratic regimes have dismantled legal barriers to the political participation of women and minorities. Yet women, minorities, and minority women remain substantially underrepresented in high-level political positions worldwide (Bird, Saalfeld, and Wüst 2011; Cederman, Min, and Wimmer 2009; Paxton and Hughes 2007).1 To rectify persisting inequalities, most countries in the world have adopted quotas--laws or policies requiring candidate lists or representative bodies to include women; racial, ethnic, or religious minorities; or members of other targeted groups (Dahlerup 2006; Htun 2004; Krook 2009). To date, however, researchers have not empirically evaluated how quotas affect minority women.
Liberal political theorists who advocate group-based representation suggest two different views regarding the effects of quotas on minority women. On one hand, by addressing only one dimension of inequality at a time, e.g., sex or ethnicity, quotas may reinforce within-group inequalities (e.g., Young 1997).2 On the other hand, because women and minorities are significantly underrepresented in politics, any policy that increases their presence may boost the chance that a more heterogeneous group of women or minorities will be elected (e.g., Mansbridge 1999).
Intersectionality scholarship also produces competing expectations. Grounded in black and multiracial feminist thought, theories of intersectionality conceptualize sexism, racism, and other forms of bigotry as interrelated systems that create "multiple barriersâ[euro] to power (Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1989; 1994; Glenn 1999; McCall 2005; Weber 2001). Thus, although minority women could theoretically benefit from either gender or minority quotas, they may, in fact, benefit from neither (Hancock 2007). But intersectionality research also finds that minority women's dual identities can sometimes provide them with strategic opportunities (Fraga et al. 2008). Minority women may be able to emphasize their gender or minority status in different institutional contexts to enhance electability.
In this article, I suggest that support for one or the other of these competing perspectives depends on the structure of...