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29.03.07
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The Fair Sex In An Unfair System
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By Valerie Sperling
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In September 2004, in the aftermath of the devastating terrorist attack in Beslan, President Vladimir Putin proposed changes to Russia’s political system with the intention, according to Putin, of fighting terrorism by “strengthening the political system” and ensuring the “unity of state power.” Eight months later, Putin’s proposals became law, resulting in a significant de-democratization of Russia’s political realm.
The Putin administration’s political reforms focused on changes to Russia’s electoral rules by: eliminating Russia’s single-mandate districts for elections to the State Duma; raising the threshold for political parties’ entry into the Duma from 5 percent to 7 percent of the popular vote; removing the legal possibility for parties to join forces by forming electoral blocs during election campaigns; and eliminating elections for regional governors, who are now appointed rather than popularly elected.
These changes to the political rules have also effected the representation of women in Russian political life and leadership.
Prior to the 2004 reforms, elections were held under a system that split the Duma’s 450 seats into two groups: 225 seats were filled through elections to single-mandate districts, where individuals competed for the plurality of the vote in each district, and 225 seats were filled by proportional representation, where the percentage of votes received by each political party resulted in a roughly proportional number of Duma seats.
Women’s representation in the State Duma has been declining; in the 1993 elections, largely as a result of the victory of the “Women of Russia” electoral bloc, women made up 13.5 percent of the Duma. In 1995, this fell to 9.8 percent, and in 1999, to 7.9 percent. After the 2003 elections, the Duma includes only 44 women, or 9.8 percent of the representatives, a slight increase over the 1999 figure.
Social scientists have determined that women tend to fare better in party list (proportional representation) systems than they do in single-mandate districts. In Russia, however, as political scientist Robert Moser has convincingly shown, the trend is reversed: women have been more successful electorally in Russia’s single-mandate districts than on Russia’s party lists.
In the 1995 elections, for example, 31 women won election to the Duma in single-mandate districts, but only 15 won seats from party lists (in 1999, 20 women won election through single-mandate districts and only 15 from party lists). One of Russia’s more well known parties, Vladimir Zhirinovsky‘s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, produced no female seat-winners at all in 1999, a situation that was nearly repeated in the 2003 election, where the LDPR generated only two seats for women from their party list.
In part, as Moser argues, Russian women’s electoral success on party lists is limited because political party leaders fail to place women in winnable positions, for example, women’s names are rarely found in the upper slots on the party list, and thus, few women on the list make it into actual Duma seats. Should this practice continue, the transformation of Russia’s system to an all party-list system will result in fewer women being elected to the Duma.
It is worth noting that the 2003 election was anomalous with respect to the numbers of single-mandate and party list seats won by women: in 2003, 44 women entered the Duma, 20 from single-mandate districts, and 24 from party lists, reversing the previous situation, where party lists generated fewer Duma seats for women than did the single-mandate districts.
It may be that with the elimination of single-mandate districts in the 2007 elections, political parties will make more of an effort to include women in the top section of their lists, and that women’s representation in the Duma will increase under the new system.
However, the extensive discrimination against women candidates evidenced by party-list formation to date would suggest that an increase in women’s representation is unlikely.
In the 1993 election (where the party lists were not yet divided into regional sublists), for instance, 90 percent of the women candidates on party lists across the political spectrum held slots below 30th place on their parties’ lists. Moser points out that only three of the parties that crossed the barrier into the Duma were entitled to more than 30 seats, suggesting women’s chances of winning election on party lists was slight compared to women’s chances in single-mandate districts due to their disadvantageous placement on the lists.
One reason why some political parties outside Russia have served as a successful route to parliament for women candidates is the adoption of quotas for representation on party lists, either voluntarily by individual parties, or by law in the form of “statutory gender quotas,” yet there is little support for the idea of sex-based quotas for party lists among Russia’s main parties. A proposal in February 2005 to introduce a 30 percent quota for women in the Duma, for instance, provoked the following response from the LDPR’s Zhirinovsky: “We can include wives and lovers in the party lists, but it is the men who will be doing their job for them.” And in April 2005, the Duma defeated legislation that would have established a 30 percent quota for women in the State Duma and regional legislatures, by a vote of 226 to 117. Legislation establishing party list quotas that would have limited the percentage of candidates on party lists to no more than 70 percent of either sex have also been defeated by the Duma.
According to Svetlana Aivazova and Grigory Kertman, in their close, data-driven, analysis of Russia’s recent elections, the origin of candidates on party lists is increasingly skewed toward candidates with extensive experience in politics and economics. Candidates from what is known as the “third sector” (the non-profit sector), where women tend to appear in greater numbers, are decreasing on party lists. In short, eliminating the single-mandate districts will probably further decrease women’s representation in the Duma.
The second major change to Russia’s electoral rules entails raising the Duma entry threshold to 7 percent from 5 percent. This change, which will be in effect for the 2007 elections, will make the resurgence of a women’s party, or the national-level success of something like the new party organized by the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, the United People’s Party of Soldiers’ Mothers founded in November 2004, slim indeed. In general, the 7 percent threshold means that nearly all political parties will be excluded from the Duma; given that in the 2003 elections, only four parties passed even the 5 percent threshold. According to Aivazova and Kertman, it is the “outsider” parties and blocs that have the highest percentages of women on their party lists, and such parties are highly unlikely to clear a 7 percent barrier.
The restriction on small parties jointly forming electoral blocs will be equally detrimental to women’s representation, since the “outsider” parties?as well as the more popular and well-known liberal parties such as Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces (SPS) which enjoyed Duma representation until 2003?will be unable to join forces in electoral blocs from now on. Raising the electoral threshold from 5 to 7 percent and preventing the formation of electoral blocs will therefore limit the numbers of women winning Duma seats.
Finally, there are gendered implications for the elimination of elections for the leaders of Russia’s regions. In December 2004, a system was established by law whereby the leaders of Russia’s regions would no longer be elected officials, but rather would be appointed by President Putin and approved by regional legislatures. Incumbent regional leaders would serve out their terms and either be reappointed by Putin, or removed and replaced. Lists of potential “candidates” for these positions may be generated by Putin’s envoys to the seven federal districts and are composed of powerful officials loyal to Putin. Such high-level decision makers are unlikely to be women, especially in the security services.
At present, there is only one female governor among the leaders of Russia’s 88 regions: Valentina Matviyenko, a close ally of Putin, in charge of the city of St. Petersburg. Since executive power is disproportionately strong when compared to the power of the legislative and judicial branches in Russia, the near exclusion of women from this political realm is significant.
As the regional executives increasingly become a cohort of the Kremlin’s political appointees, the likelihood that there will be many women governors among them is small. Governors and other regional leaders are likely to be appointed from the existing male-dominated ruling economic and political elite, and from the siloviki where women are few and far between. Putin’s reliance on personnel from the military, law enforcement and state security apparatus dictates against the appointment of women, who are rarely found in those areas in positions of power, as regional executives.
The Putin administration’s revised electoral rules will have across-the-board implications for women’s representation in Russia, and for the way that the population participates in politics more generally.
Certainly, some of the reforms are de-democratizing by definition. Making governors appointed, rather than elected, positions larely makes regional leaders accountable to?and reliant on?Russia’s president rather than accountable to their local populations.
Women are already something of a rarity in Russia’s political system. The new electoral rules will further decrease women’s representation. The centralized appointment of governors and other regional leaders is likely to draw on an almost entirely male pool of candidates from among the existing incumbents and potential Putin loyalists within Russia’s military and security institutions. Putin’s political reforms have already resulted in the further masculinization of an already male-dominated political field.
The absence of women in Russian executive politics reflects the results of a growing focus on “security,” narrowly understood. “Security,” from the perspective of the Putin administration, appears to mean the security of Putin’s political loyalists in power. Meanwhile, the security of the Russian population?the kind of security that would stem from state power being increasingly representative, rather than being increasingly narrow?is being cast by the wayside.
The hierarchical centralization and “securitization” of power brings risks; exclusion and marginalization of significant population groups over time will only exacerbate the tensions that result from a lack of democratic participation.
The contraction of the political sphere that becomes evident when examined through the lens of gendered representation is another aspect of Russia’s movement in a generally anti-democratic direction. It is symptomatic of a larger trend whereby Russia’s major political parties increasingly support the Kremlin, rather than endorsing or criticizing specific policies based on the demands of a popular constituency.
Valerie Sperling is an associate professor in the Department of Government and International Relations at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This article was originally published as a policy memo of the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security. |
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