Is Higher Enough? The Impacts of Indonesia’s Gender Quota on Female Candidates Ranking on Ballots Open Access

Abstract

Indonesia has attempted to correct the under-representation of female politicians in regional and national legislatures using a gender quota, which has been found to have mixed results when implemented against open-list election systems. Furthermore, previous studies on Indonesian elections has shown that being first on party lists is critical to winning seats, regardless of gender. In this study, I construct a novel panel dataset which follows all Indonesian candidates for election between 2004 and 2019. The dataset captures data that is yet to be digitized or tabulated and captures the placement of candidates on Indonesian ballots. Using the dataset, I use a PooledOLS model which isolates the effects of Indonesia's gender quota being strengthened in 2009. This paper finds that the gender quota did help female candidates reach higher ranking on party lists, but not high enough to significantly increase the number of women getting elected. Furthermore, this paper also finds that Islamic parties do not significantly hinder or help female candidates attain higher rankings on party lists, in agreement with previous studies.

Table of Contents

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Explaining the Indonesian Election System 4

3 Literature Review 7

3.1 Literature Regarding Quotas in Elections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3.2 Literature Regarding Indonesian Elections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

4 Data 10

5 Analysis of Female Candidate Positioning on Ballots 13

6 Methodology 16

7 Results 18

7.1 Average percentile of female candidates on party list results . . . . . . . . . 18

7.2 Highest ranking of female candidates on party list results . . . . . . . . . . . 20

7.3 Number of female candidates on party list results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

8 Conclusion 23

9 Tables 26

10 Figures 29

11 Appendix 36

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Economics and Mathematics
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Political Science, General Economics, General
Keyword	Zipper Indonesia Elections Gender Quota Dataset
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Dr. Paloma Lopez de Mesa Moyano, Emory University
Committee Members	Dr. Stephen D. O'Connell, Emory University Dr. Michael Carr, Emory University

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