OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Join Zoom Meeting: zoom.us/j/95465830050?pwd=C9bVWTjW7y8dWqi4qED0MgCvVkCrZG.1 (Meeting ID: 954 6583 0050, Passcode: 867678)
Gender quotas are used to elect most of the world’s legislatures. Still, critics contend that quotas are undemocratic, eroding institutional legitimacy. We examine whether quotas diminish citizens’ faith in political institutions. Conducting survey experiments in twelve democracies with 17,000 respondents, we compare the legitimacy-conferring effects of both quota-elected and non-quota-elected local legislative councils relative to all-male councils. We find that women confer legitimacy to political decisions and decision-making processes, including when elected through quotas. Though we observe a quota penalty, wherein citizens prefer gender balance attained without a quota relative to gender balance attained with one, this penalty is often small (and sometimes non-significant), especially in countries with higher-threshold quotas. Quota debates are thus better framed around the most relevant counterfactual: the comparison is not between women’s descriptive representation with and without quotas, but between men’s political dominance and women’s inclusion.
