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I would like to thank Jennifer Lawless and the three anonymous reviewers who provided very helpful feedback and commentary that improved this article. The research reported here was supported by grants from the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research, the College of Arts & Sciences, the Department of Anthropology, and the Commission on the Status of Women at the University of Louisville; by grants from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; by a Democracy Traineeship from the National Science Foundation; by grants from the United States Institute of Peace; and by a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Award from the U.S. Department of Education.
Gender quota policies aimed at increasing the proportion of women in political office now exist in more than a hundred countries. While gender quota policies tend to emphasize the number of women in government, in many countries they "have led to a shift not only in the political agenda but also in the gender consciousness of female representatives and the political engagement of female constituentsâ[euro] (Krook 2006, 111). The use of gender quotas to increase women's representation rests on political theory about representation. Pitkin's (1967) seminal work on political representation conceived of representation as multifaceted, comprised of formal, descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. Using Pitkin's theoretical model, Schwindt-Bayer and Mishler (2005, 424) tested an integrated model of women's representation in 31 countries. Their results confirmed the interconnectedness of these dimensions of representation and suggested that increased formal and descriptive representation of women increases legislatures' responsiveness to women's concerns. Yet they also found that "women's policy responsiveness has little or no influence on women's perceptions of the legitimacy of the legislatureâ[euro] (Schwindt-Bayer and Mishler 2005, 424). Since their analysis only included representative democracies, it is unclear whether the same interconnectedness holds for nondemocratic governments that implement gender quotas.
In this article, I examine the impact of gender quotas on the symbolic representation of women and girls in Rwandan society. Building on my previous study of women's formal, descriptive, and substantive representation in Rwanda (Burnet 2008a), I have as my main purpose here to examine the cultural meanings of national, local, and party gender quotas in the Rwandan political system. Rwandan women have reaped little...