Achieving a National Legislative Gender Quota in Kyrgyzstan: A Dahlerup Critical Act

This article analyzes the politics surrounding the adoption of a national legislative gender quota in Kyrgyzstan, one of the five post-Soviet Central Asian states. Though women comprise half of Kyrgyzstan’s population, at one point there were no women in the Kyrgyz parliament. I argue that the emergence of a one-gender parliament catalyzed a robust civil society lobbying campaign for a gender quota that was a necessary but insufficient cause of policy change, as it owed its success to sympathetic domestic politics and support from the international community. The article, which is based on 38 semi-structured interviews I conducted in Bishkek with people who convinced the authorities and population of the need for a national gender quota, concludes with a summary of gender quota adoption in Poland that contextualizes theoretical implications of the Kyrgyz case.