Women in the South African Parliament: From Resistance to Governance
Contents:
Britton documents the political learning that prompted South African women exiles to rely upon high levels of associational autonomy during the political transition in order to ensure their demands for political representation p. Britton recounts many challenges stemming from the genderedness of the legislature and bureaucracy that the new cohort of female MPs in encountered—challenges including a double workload and resistance from male MPs and the invisible structures of sexism and the double workday.
As others have done recently, Britton challenges the concept of "critical mass" as loosely applied in the women-and-politics literature, contending instead that deeply important case-specific factors often limit women's success in political office, regardless of their seemingly high numbers p. Britton presents a typology of female MPs in South Africa's first National Assembly and finds that those who most closely resembled the majority of If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'.
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Although the international press closely chronicled the dismantling of South Africa's Women in the South African Parliament: From Resistance to Governance. Women in the South African Parliament: From Resistance to Governance. By Hannah E. Britton. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois.
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: With the elections, South Africa jumped from st in the world to seventh in the world in terms of women occupying seats in the national government. During an eight-month research project in ending in May , I interviewed thirty percent of the women and a handful of men from each party in the national parliament about their experiences in the nation's transition to democracy. The findings of this study reveal that, despite the increase in the numerical representation, women in the South African parliament continue to face disproportionate challenges which may hinder their full participation.
Because of these challenges, over one-half the women I interviewed do not plan to return to parliament because they feel the institution does not have a place for their voice and that they have been and can be more effective on the ground.
Women in the South African Parliament: FROM RESISTANCE TO - download pdf or read online
While the institution has shifted to reflect some of the needs of women, the capacities required to be an MP or Delegate remain fundamentally unchanged. Several women have adapted well to the institution; however, these are not necessarily the most representative women in terms of socio-economic, educational, or ethnic background. Despite these obstacles, women have created national governmental institutions and implemented key pieces of legislation intended to promote gender equity.
ON average, women constitute only Increasing the number of women in parliament is often justified on the basis that it is simply more just to have equal proportions of men and women in a representative body. However, this is not the only basis for the promotion of women in politics. There is a now a considerable body of work on women's representation in parliament. This literature has two main characteristics.
Consequently, our knowledge about women in parliament is weighted towards the causes of under-representation, with a relative scarcity of knowledge about the consequences of women's parliamentary presence. This article will try to address both of these weaknesses by focusing, first, on the consequences of increased women's parliamentary representation and, secondly, on a developing country rather than a Western case study. Here, we focus on the parliament of Rwanda, which has now not only the highest proportion of women representatives in the world, but is also the only parliament to possess a functionally even gender split— The case of Rwanda offers an unprecedented opportunity to gauge the effects that a large percentage of women may have on a country's parliament.
It is also a good example to use for exploring whether the existing findings about the effects of increased women's representation in Western parliaments are relevant in a very different context altogether. There are three sections to the article. We begin by reviewing the literature about the impact of women's representation on parliament.
We follow by justifying the choice of Rwanda as a case study. Finally, we present our findings. We examine the impact of women's representation in three areas: There is a brief conclusion. There is now a considerable body of work on the impact of increased women's representation in parliaments.
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The majority of this work has been based on case studies of individual Western countries. For example, Squires and Wickham-Jones have reviewed the studies of the increased female presence in the British House of Commons, and they categorise the effects under the headings of policy style, agenda and outcomes.
As regards the policy agenda, it is suggested that women were likely to raise issues of equality, education, women's relatively poor economic position, childcare, violence against women and integration of gender into the issues of employment and pay. However, in terms of policy outcomes, the few initiatives that were considered successes for the women such as the development of the National Childcare Strategy were in areas that dovetailed with existing government policy. The evidence from the UK shows mixed results of greater women's representation in parliament with few distinct women's-oriented policy-related outcomes.
The situation in Scandinavia is similar. In her recent historical overview of the climbing proportions of women in the Swedish parliament, Sainsbury concluded that the presence of greater numbers of women was decisive in two respects.
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Secondly, they converted the demand for women's representation into a demand for a more complete democracy. Sainsbury's findings imply that a greater presence for women moved the debate from one about women to one about gender. In her review of Nordic parliaments, Drude Dahlerup revealed that changes in the political culture did occur as a consequence of increased female presence. This article focuses on the impact of increased women's representation in one sub-Saharan country—Rwanda. In this region, there is now a considerable literature on gender and development and, in particular, on the reasons why women's parliamentary representation has been traditionally low and how it might be increased.
More specifically, in South Africa, the parliamentary calendar was matched with the school calendar and earlier ending times for debates were introduced. For example, Meintjes details how alliances between activists outside parliament and women deputies was crucial in passing the Domestic Violence Bill. At the same time, though, the evidence from other case studies is more mixed. The quota system is usually controlled by political parties, and this often means that women feel they must be loyal to the party line, even at the expense of promoting gender-centred legislative reforms.
This reason was cited as being particularly important in the case of both Mozambique 23 and Uganda, 24 both of which have systems where one party is dominant. There is very little literature on the impact of greater women's representation in the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies, but what there is provides contrasting pictures of the impact of increased women's representation. In her work, Elizabeth Powley points to the early legislative achievements of women deputies, including the revoking of laws that prohibited women from inheriting land. To sum up, there is a considerable body of work on women and parliaments.
When we examine the literature that deals with the effect of increased women's representation in parliament, the findings from the Western-based studies are mixed. We discover that women have been found to work differently to men, being more inclined to focus on grassroots activity. Moreover, women have added new dimensions to the policy agenda, raising issues of equality, violence against women and others. However, there is little evidence that increased women's representation has changed policy outputs. What little work that has been conducted in the sub-Saharan Africa context seems to corroborate these findings.
However, we have little evidence so far to suggest that increased women's representation has altered policy outcomes to any significant degree. In the rest of this article, we focus on the example of Rwanda.
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To what extent are the findings of the existing studies consistent with the recent Rwandan experience? Rwanda is probably best known for the genocide that took place between April and July , when ethnic Hutu militias and government forces murdered approximately , Tutsi Rwandans. The transitional period of recovery from the genocide ended with the elections of The elections saw the RPF win 33 of 53 seats, and in coalition with several smaller parties, they actually control 40 seats. The smaller parties have little influence over policy, and the two non-coalition parties cooperate with rather than criticise the RPF.
However, we argue that Rwanda is a useful case to examine and that conclusions can reliably be drawn. There are two reasons why Rwanda is a useful case. First, although women were victims of murder, rape, sexual torture and assault during the genocide, it was men and boys who were the primary targets for extermination. However, contrary to what the standard model of the post-conflict literature predicts, 37 women did not relinquish these roles after the conflict ended.
Of particular relevance to us here is the fact that women's interest in politics did not wane but grew in the post-conflict period. The first parliament in contained 70 seats with eight or Under this system, two seats per province and two seats for Kigali city are reserved for women a total of 24 seats. These women are elected by a joint committee of the members of the relevant local authority and the members of the executive committee of women's organisations at the relevant level Art.
All in all, given the activism of Rwandan women's groups and the high level of women's representation in the Chamber of Deputies, Rwanda provides an excellent case for examining the effect of women's parliamentary representation. In order to assess the effects that women representatives have had on the Rwandan parliament, face-to-face interviews were considered the most useful method.
The women selected for the interviews were those who were in parliament both prior to the elections—entering at various points between and —and who were also elected to parliament after These people have experience of the functioning of the parliament both before and after the attainment of the Interviews were conducted with nine of the 12 women deputies who were in parliament both prior to and following the elections. Of the nine interviewees, six belonged to the RPF, two were elected in fulfilment of the quota, and one was a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.
The dominance of RPF members in this group roughly corresponds to the size of the RPF majority in parliament as a whole. This case selection allows us to appreciate better whether the increase in the proportion of women deputies made a difference. It also allows us to gain some insight into whether there are differences between quota and non-quota deputies, as well as between RPF and non-RPF deputies.
The purpose of this review is to get a picture of how the greater presence of women may have influenced the output of parliament or public policy, as well as act as a check of the stated priorities of the deputies in the interviews against the policies that were actually approved.