Reserved Seats and Parliamentary Debate Participation in Uganda and Kenya

• In Event: Women, Gender, and Democracy in Africa

Abstract

This paper investigates legislative debate participation in Uganda and Kenya, two African countries with reserved seats for women in parliament. Previous research on reserved seats shows that these policies are effective at increasing the proportion of women in public office. Less is known about what women do -- how they behave -- once they have a guaranteed seat at the table. Does access result in participation? Once in the house, do women take the floor? In other words, to what extent are women lawmakers active participants in the everyday politics of the regime? Uganda and Kenya offer important variation in regime type. Both countries adopted reserved seats under authoritarian rule. Although routinely dismissed as “rubber stamp” institutions, a growing literature suggests that authoritarian legislatures engage in vigorous debates with real substance that affect regime policy. Because women make up an increasingly large share of positions in authoritarian legislatures, largely due to the implementation of gender quotas, incorporating evidence from authoritarian settings expands our understanding of how women engage in the legislative process. This paper uses quantitative text analysis to assess whether gender and seat type affect the apportionment of floor time and the number of interruptions experienced by MPs in Uganda and Kenya. It draws on official plenary transcripts from the Ugandan and Kenyan parliaments, spanning nearly 200,000 unique contributions. Using multilevel models that also account for background characteristics of MPs, the results suggest that gender and seat type are not significant predictors of floor participation in Uganda and Kenya. Women and men participate at similar levels (in terms of total speaking time) and experience a similar number of interruptions. Reserved seats are also not significantly associated with speaking time or interruptions. These findings have important implications for our understanding of women and authoritarian politics, particularly the use of gender quotas to coopt women into regime-compatible institutions as a form of autocratic “gender washing”.

Author

• Amanda B. Edgell, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa