Competing for women : Female Legislative Recruitment in Italy and Spain (1976-2006)

Although the presence of women in the parliaments is still far from parity, it has increased over time, especially in the last twenty years. International surveys suggest that this is a global phenomenon that, however, has developed with different speed and intensity also in countries that are usually considered homogeneous from socio-economic and cultural point of view. How may these differences be explained? In this paper we focus on women’s legislative recruitment in two Southern European countries, Italy and Spain, where in the period comprised between 1976 and 2001 the presence of women in the parliament has followed a very different pathway: in Italy women’s inclusion in the parliamentary elite has been a difficult and hard-fought process, while in Spain it has been a fast and stable phenomenon, which has led Spain to rank among the first ten countries with the highest rates of women MPs in the world. Following the theoretical framework of “contagion theory” put forward by Matland and Studlar (1996), and focusing on the role played by institutional and political variables, I hypothesize that some features of each country’s party system, interacting with the electoral rules and some characteristics of parties organizations, have favoured the steady increment of women legislators in Spain, and hindered a similar development in Italy.