Chapter 6 compares evidence from qualitative case studies of similar countries that did and did not adopt a quota law, shedding light on the mechanisms linking quotas to policy change and the conditions under which they hold. One of the unique features of quota laws compared to increases in the number of women in parliaments without quotas is that quotas tend to increase the share of women on the right in particular. Quotas thus lead to more women from across the political spectrum entering parliament and, over time, taking on leadership roles. I find that the mechanism of factions (women’s increased leverage within parties and parliament) played an important role in both Belgium and Portugal, as women pushed for greater gender equality in government and formed the majority of a new working group on parenting and gender equality. However, the importance of women as ministers depends on the institutional context: even when quotas increase women in parliaments, they might not increase women in governments. In the counterfactual (non-quota) cases of Austria and Italy, women were often key protagonists in policy reform, but there are fewer of them, especially on the right and far right. This can result in policy stasis or backsliding.

Do gender quotas lead political parties to become more inclusive of women’s preferences? Chapter 4 explores the relationship between quotas and party priorities using manifesto data and qualitative case studies. I focus on the link between quotas and party priorities on three areas : equality, welfare state expansion, and work-family policies. Using matching and regression methods with a panel dataset of parties in OECD democracies, I find that parties in countries that implement a quota law devote more attention to equality than similar parties in countries without a quota. In line with expectations, no change is found to party priorities on welfare state expansion. Using a new dataset of party attention to various work-family policies in four country cases (Belgium, Austria, Portugal, and Italy), I find that quotas are linked to an increase in attention to policies that promote maternal employment (child care, equality-promoting leave) and a reduction in attention to policies that do not (cash transfers that encourage women to stay at home). My qualitative analysis suggests that in countries that have implemented a quota law, parties across the political spectrum jointly promote parental leave and encourage fathers to participate. This is not the case in countries without a quota.

The concluding chapter focuses attention on the book’s main findings and contributions to the literature, which include important theoretical and policy implications. One of the key conclusions is that, while quotas are not a panacea for addressing women’s interests, they are one effective mechanism for facilitating the representation of women’s cross-cutting preferences that are otherwise likely to be ignored -- work-family policies. By providing new insights into when and how quotas matter, the book demonstrates that descriptive representation may be more consequential than is often assumed, even in the context of strong parties and parliamentary democracies. Further, institutions like quota laws can increase the salience of women’s concerns to political elites, and thus have independent effects on the policy-making process. The adoption of quota laws has practical policy implications for work-family and related issues -- policies that affect everyone, not just women. I discuss several promising lines of future inquiry that have potential to advance knowledge in the field, including the effects of gender quotas on informal institutions and outside of advanced democracies. The chapter also explores the extent to which the theoretical framework proposed can apply to other identity groups.

This chapter offers a new theory about the conditions under which gender quotas are most likely to matter for policy outcomes. Building on Mansbridge’s concept of “uncrystallized interests”, I argue that when new policy demands cut across the main left-right (class-based) policy dimension, and the group demanding change faces high barriers to entry in politics, the result is that these issues are often ignored. Parties have little incentive to address issues that cut across the main left-right dimension in politics because they distract from core issues and divide key constituencies. If the groups that support these issues are underrepresented in parties and lack the resources to form a new party, the result is what I call a political market failure -- the issue remains off the agenda. Gender quotas prevent the political dominance of men, and they also signal a new commitment to gender-related concerns. I suggest that quotas are most likely to lead to policy change on those “uncrystallized” issues characterized by: 1) a gender gap in preferences, and; 2) cross-cutting support. The chapter then spells out three main mechanisms through which quotas lead to policy change: factions, ministers, and salience. The final section outlines key assumptions and scope conditions.

This chapter offers an inductive approach to defining women’s interests in politics, mapping gender gaps in preferences and where they fall in the left-right political space. Unlike previous studies, which do not define a priori expectations about quotas and policy change in comparative context, this chapter clearly defines expectations about which policies we can expect quotas to change in rich OECD democracies. Using survey data, the chapter explores the size and direction of gender gaps in preferences for a large number of policy issues across countries and over time. While women prefer more spending than men on issues like unemployment, health care, and poverty, no gender gaps emerge on other issues often perceived to be gendered, like education or military spending. The largest gender gaps exist over the issue of maternal employment, where women are more progressive than men by about ten percentage points, and the gender gap has been growing over time. Gender gaps on maternal employment are not explained by partisan ideology. Gender differences persist within political parties, and attitudes towards maternal employment form a distinct underlying response pattern compared to attitudes towards government intervention. Because of this, subsequent book chapters focus on maternal employment and associated work-family policies as key outcomes of interest.

The first chapter introduces the book’s key puzzle: do gender quota laws affect policy outcomes for women? Quotas are often viewed as a way to promote not only women’s inclusion but their political interests. Yet, we know very little about whether quotas lead to meaningful policy change for women. The question is crucial given how controversial quotas are, and the questions they often raise about tokenism and backlash. After motivating the research question, the chapter organizes current explanations of identity and political decisionmaking to demonstrate the crucial role that quotas can play in bringing not only more women but added salience to gendered issues. It previews the main argument: gender quota laws will lead to policy change on issues that women prioritize which fall off the main left-right (class-based) dimension, like work-family policies. Quota laws add important salience to these cross-cutting issues that parties would otherwise prefer to ignore. Chapter 1 also provides an overview of the data and cases that provide the empirical foundation of the book. Taking a mixed methods approach, the book pairs statistical analysis of party priorities and government reforms with in-depth qualitative case studies from the cases of Belgium and Austria, and Portugal and Italy.

Chapter 7 focuses on political parties as agents of representation that channel citizen interests and values into the policy-making process in contemporary Latin America. It illustrates the flaws of democracy without representative parties through a discussion of Peru, and shows that many Latin American democracies have experienced crises of representation because citizens see many party leaders as cut off from common citizens. To explain the state of parties, it argues that crises of representation persist when neoliberalism is treated as inevitable. It also maintains, through an analysis of parties in Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay, that parties become agents of representation due to the work of skillful political leaders, committed activists, and vigorous social movements. It also highlights that a weak state undermines party building because it limits the possibility that elected officials can deliver public goods and engender popular support. It concludes that, although democracy has become the norm in Latin America, few democracies have parties that act as agents of representation, and that this lack of a deep, substantive sense of representation is a key problem of democracy.

The lines of rigid conflict between political parties noted in Chapter 1 were not always present prior to the New Deal and the post–New Deal era in which the Eisenhower administration functioned. In contrast to their party’s political position from the latter part of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt were hardly hostile to unions and the interests of working people. Quite the contrary.

This chapter looks at the migrants not as objects of the state’s integration measures but as political subjects making claims in demonstrations, migrant associations, the parliament, and media outlets. It discusses how the government defused much of the returnees’ protest, initially perceived as a serious menace, through a pervasive rhetoric of national integration and the framing of migrant mobilization as a form of "apolitical politics." It further asks how migrants built their own associations, to what degree they were bound up with the political right, and why they ultimately proved to be politically weak and short-lived. In short, the chapter looks at how the voices of the returnees, while distinctly present directly after their arrival, were coopted, absorbed, and covered up by the emerging institutions of Portugal’s representative democracy, the kind of concessions the political class was ready to make along the way, and some of the legacies of this process.

In this chapter, I trace the evolution of the influential field of interest group theory from the 1920s to the 1950s. Two consequential things happened in this empirically oriented literature. First, the social ontology introduced by pluralists and theorists of process could be taken as given, accepted as factual descriptions of the political process. Second, community was reconceptualized and relegated to the status of a presupposition, now under the name of "consensus," invoked as a restraint on group conflict and a foundation for modern political life without being a topic of debate in its own right. This provided the discipline of political science with the rudiments of what would become an influential and lasting behavioralist solution to the problem of social order.