No Quotas, Just Circles: Institutional and Electoral Dynamics Behind the Rise of Women in the 2025 Czech Elections

The 2025 Czech parliamentary elections produced the highest share of women in the history of the Chamber of Deputies, despite the absence of legislated gender quotas. This article investigates the institutional and electoral mechanisms behind this increase, focusing on the interaction between candidate supply and preference voting. Using a counterfactual decomposition and candidate-level data, the study demonstrates that the rise in women’s representation was driven by both changes in party nomination strategies and voter-induced reordering of candidate lists. While improvements in candidate supply account for part of the increase, preference voting played a substantial and causally identifiable role. Importantly, the effects of preference voting were not uniform across parties or regions, but highly concentrated within specific political contexts. A comparison with the 2021 elections reveals that the 2025 outcome represents not merely a continuation of earlier trends but a structural shift in how preference voting translates into gendered representation. The findings contribute to the broader literature on open-list systems and gender representation by showing that preference voting can function as a selective and context-dependent mechanism of gender redistribution.