Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Johanna Rickne and Olle Folke gratefully acknowledge support from the Swedish Research Council and the Torsten Söderberg Foundation. Lenita Freidenvall gratefully acknowledges support from FEMCIT, Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe, financed by the European Union 6th Framework Program (Project number 028746).
Political exclusion of historically disadvantaged groups has been conceptualized as a democratic problem that violates the legitimacy of the democratic system and contributes to a negative impact on policy outcomes (i.e., Beaman et al. 2009; Krook and O'Brien 2010). In order to address this problem, the most common remedy taken by either countries or political parties has been to use affirmative action, such as gender quotas and ethnic quotas that target specific political minorities. Quotas for women now exist in more than 100 countries and political parties (Dahlerup 2006; Krook 2009; Tremblay 2008; Tripp and Kang 2007). Quotas for ethnic, language, or religious minority groups are less common but exist in more than 40 countries (Bird 2014; Krook and O'Brien 2010; Tan 2014).
In recent years, the joint barriers faced by different political minorities have increasingly come into focus in the scholarly literature (Htun 2004; Htun and Ossa 2013; Hughes 2011; Krook and O'Brien 2010; Lépinard 2013; Tan 2014; Williams 1998). Given the rapid expansion of affirmative action policies that target one specific minority at a time, increasing attention has been paid to how quotas for one minority impact on the political representation of other minorities. In broad strokes, the scholarly literature has taken a step from the question of quota impacts on the representation of women as a group to the question of which women, and indeed which men, are supported or disadvantaged by gender quotas. In this article, we provide a highly contextualized case study of how a quota policy--the zipper system--adopted by Sweden's largest political party, the Social Democratic Party, impacted on intersectional representation in 285 municipal assemblies in 1993-2010. We subdivide both women and men by polyethnic minority status and use both quantitative and qualitative methods to study the impact of gender quota on the intersectional representation of each sex.
Recent work has increasingly used institutional feminist theory...