Female Electoral Success in Taiwan Using sntv with Reserved Female Seats under Authoritarianism and Democracy

Abstract

There is a debate over whether democracy is beneficial to female representation. Taiwan’s experience supports Krook’s (2013) contention that democracy may be necessary for gender quotas to produce sustainable female representation. Taiwan has employed gender quotas in single non-transferable vote (sntv) elections since the early 1950s, but this same system has had markedly different effects when embedded in different contexts. During the authoritarian era, female representation stagnated and the women who won often needed to invoke the reserved seat rule. After democratisation, women won larger seat shares and needed to invoke the reserved seat rule far less frequently. Parties were the critical actors, since with multiparty competition parties had an incentive to cultivate female political talent in order to prevent competing parties from winning seats at a discount. This paper analyses sntv electoral results in Taiwan from 1954 to 2014 in six different types of national and local elected assemblies.