East Asian Parliamentary Members' Attitudes Toward Gender Quotas

Gender quotas for candidate selection or elected seats have been an international trend since the 1990s. Though much research has been published on quota politics, few discuss elite attitudes toward gender quotas with the support of survey evidence. This article contributes the survey results measuring the attitudes of parliamentarians (hereafter MPs) in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, analyzed for potential impacts by age, gender, party affiliation, and district type. Among the aforementioned factors, gender and party affiliation have been cited as important factors in previous studies, but there are three major findings in this study. First, in Japan and South Korea, we find a marked impact of gender and party affiliation as distinct variables that help explain the difference in MP attitudes towards quotas. Women show stronger support for gender quotas than men, and MPs affiliated with more socially progressive parties likewise show stronger support for gender quotas than their more ideologically conservative counterparts. By contrast, Taiwanese MPs show a convergence of support for gender quotas, a likely product of the historical use of quotas in Taiwan's electoral competition. Second, when asked about the proper percentage of women's representation in parliament, our results show an intriguing normative effect that points to the rhetorical, if not practical effects of quota laws. Among these three East Asian democracies, Japan has the lowest percentage of women and is internationally known for its unusually low levels of women MPs in the lower house. Nonetheless, Japanese parliamentarians' attitudes were not so different from their South Korean and Taiwanese counterparts, suggesting a normative effect of societal and parliamentary debates on the appropriate balance of women and men in parliament. Third, when evaluating elite attitudes toward gender quotas and the appropriate level of women's representation against the actual practical performance of parties at election time, we have an opportunity to assess the intentions of elites in choosing a specific gender quota design by virtue of its loopholes for bad performance. Those iterations point to the desire for merely a rhetorical/symbolic gender quota, such as in Japan, rather than an efficient enforcing mechanism, as we see in part successful in South Korea and truly effective in Taiwan, where there has been a democratization of the rules of the game, and power-sharing between men and women in parli