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Ensuring Parliamentary Gender Equality Through a New Zipper Method: An Application to Finland

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Abstract

Gender equality constitutes a crucial objective for a successful societal development. Although research has found that the differences are shrinking, parliamentary composition is not gender balanced in most areas of the world. Henceforth, recent literature has undertaken important efforts aimed at developing different initiatives to promote parity in democratic parliaments, especially through the use of quota systems. Prior initiatives, although leading to an improvement of gender parity, do not manage to ensure an optimal gender-egalitarian parliamentary composition. Thus, this paper presents a method to organize closed and blocked lists of candidates that guarantees the achievement of gender-balanced representation in parliamentary elections. Specifically, parity is sought globally, in each party and also in each electoral constituency. Furthermore, the method is applied to the elections held over the last two decades in Finland. Results reveal that parity in gender representation increases at global, party, and constituency levels throughout all the parliamentary elections in Finland, even approaching optimal numerical parity (i.e. 50 % for each gender) in most of the cases.

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Acknowledgments

Authors are thankful for the valuable anonymous comments received to improve prior versions of this paper as well as for the financial support provided by the Regional Government of Andalusia (project SEJ-8044).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of International and Spanish Economics, University of Granada, Campus de Cartuja, s/n, 18071, Granada, Spain

    Blanca L. Delgado-Márquez

  2. Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Granada, Campus de Fuentenueva s/n, 18071, Granada, Spain

    Victoriano Ramírez-González

  3. Department of Sociology, University of Granada, Campus de Fuentenueva s/n, 18071, Granada, Spain

    Adolfo López-Carmona

Authors
  1. Blanca L. Delgado-Márquez
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  2. Victoriano Ramírez-González
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  3. Adolfo López-Carmona
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Correspondence to Blanca L. Delgado-Márquez.

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Delgado-Márquez, B.L., Ramírez-González, V. & López-Carmona, A. Ensuring Parliamentary Gender Equality Through a New Zipper Method: An Application to Finland. Soc Indic Res 116, 475–492 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-013-0301-3

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