Contagious Representation? How Regime Type Conditions the Effect of Legislative Gender Quotas on Equal Access to State Jobs

This study examines the “contagious” effect of legislative gender quotas on gender-equal access to jobs in state institutions, and how this effect varies across regime types. Combining theories on contagious representation with prior work on gender and regime types, we analyse a panel dataset of 160 countries from 1981 to 2020 using a generalized difference-in-differences model. We find that quotas significantly increase gender-equal access to state jobs in democracies, but not in autocracies. This effect is robust to accounting for women's representation in elected office and persists regardless of the magnitude of the increase in women's legislative representation after quotas are implemented. The effect emerges only after democratization and becomes significant 3 years after a transition, which increases our confidence that the contagious effect is contingent on the democratic context.