Federalism and Women's Representation: Do Federations have more Women Legislators than Centralized States?

Do national federations foster or inhibit women's representation? In this article, we compare national legislative representation by women in federations and in centralized states. We analyze women's parliamentary representation for all democracies between 1995 and 2010. Descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analyses, in which we control for quotas, a country's type of electoral system, development level, the year the first woman was elected to parliament, the proportion of women in the workforce, and year of election, support the notion that federal states have approximately four percentage points more female legislators than do centralized states. In addition, our results indicate that federations have an indirect positive impact on women's representation: first, they facilitate the adoption of gender quotas; second, they allow women to enter parliament earlier than unitary states.