Gender Bias in Party Gatekeeping: Evidence from Polish Parliamentary Elections, 2005–2023

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This paper, which is ongoing work, examines how Poland's 2011 candidate quota law affected the gender composition of candidates and elected MPs.

Gender quota laws are widely adopted to increase women's legislative representation, yet their effects depend critically on design and enforcement. This paper, which is ongoing work, examines how Poland's 2011 candidate quota law affected the gender composition of candidates and elected MPs. I integrate several data sources: electoral commission data, parliamentary activity records, and biographical data on MPs drawn from Wikipedia. The findings show that while the quota increased the number of women candidates on electoral lists, it did not translate into rapid growth in the number of elected women MPs. Voter-level analysis reveals that list position is the strongest predictor of vote share, yet women are consistently placed in lower list positions. Women incumbents have better placement odds than male incumbents, but a stable penalty has emerged for women newcomers since 2011. Analysis of MPs' qualifications and activity shows that women are consistently better educated and more active in parliament. Taken together, these results suggest that the main bottleneck lies not in voter preferences or candidate quality, but in how parties place candidates on their lists. They also imply that quotas that regulate only the composition of lists, and not the ranking of candidates, may fall short of delivering equal representation.