When Electoral Quotas for Women Go Awry: Mobilizing Women’s Movement’s Partnership with Gender Equality Machineries. Evidence from an Underperformer

Women’s movement actors’ (WMAs) domestic and international activism has been one of the critical factors behind the worldwide diffusion of electoral (and party) quotas for women. Yet there is a set of countries in which this institutional innovation has underperformed for decades. How do WMAs gauge and react to this situation of underachievement? More importantly, do they mobilize a critical state actor – their country’s gender equality machinery (GEM), if one exists – to address the deficiencies of the quota policy? Using primarily qualitative evidence (interviews, participatory observation, and document analysis) from a puzzling case, Brazil, the analysis uncovers underexplored aspects of quota underperformance. In keeping with the social movement literature, as WMAs perceive the introduction of this institutional change as a policy success, they turn their attention to other demands. However, since the policy outcomes of implementing electoral quotas for women might take several election cycles to materialize, there is a delay in understanding the innovation’s shortcomings and formulating responses to address its increasingly evident weaknesses. As a result, even in countries with a robust women’s movement, as in the case at hand, the decline in issue prioritization can obfuscate the pursuit of implementable, effective alternatives in subsequent rounds of quota policy reform.