{"id":59469,"date":"2026-10-01T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/?p=59469"},"modified":"2026-10-01T07:09:51","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T10:09:51","slug":"the-law-is-not-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/the-law-is-not-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"The law is not enough"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Why do women face so many difficulties in accessing political power? Especially when we consider that, over the past twenty years, Latin America has legislated extensively on gender parity, with quota and parity laws, zipper systems on electoral lists, and penalties for noncompliance. And yet, when the results are compared, the picture is uneven. While Bolivia and Mexico hover around or exceed 50% women in their congresses, Brazil, with a 30% quota in place for more than two decades, barely reaches 18%, while Guatemala and Panama, whose legal frameworks on paper are not so different from those of the more successful cases, remain well below actual parity. This is because the law is necessary, but it is not sufficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The contradiction becomes clear when we stop looking only at the wording of the law and examine the context in which it is implemented. Thus, reforms announced under the same heading\u2014\u201cgender parity in candidacies\u201d\u2014can, in practice, amount to entirely different measures. An index such as IFREG, which breaks down the gender electoral regime into measurable variables, makes it possible to see this \u201ctrap of similarity.\u201d It is not enough to ask whether parity exists on paper; we must ask whether there is a placement mandate (whether women are alternated on the lists or relegated to substitute positions), whether there are real sanctions for noncompliance (rejection of lists, fines, loss of registration), and what the scope of the formula is\u2014that is, whether it applies to closed, open, single-member or multi-member lists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Thus, Mexico, with a strict placement mandate and sanctions that include refusing to register incomplete lists, is not comparable to countries that require 50% representation without specifying where female candidates must be placed. This opens the door to all women ending up at the bottom of the lists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Added to this is the proliferation of reforms, which is also no guarantee of stronger gender equality. Ecuador and Peru, for example, have amended their electoral legislation on gender several times in little more than a decade. Yet when this hyperactivity in reform is not accompanied by robust evaluation and implementation, it can produce the opposite effect from the one intended. This happens, among other reasons, because instability in the rules of the game, distrust among citizens and candidates themselves regarding the strength of the rules, and the persistence of informal practices\u2014internal party agreements, territorial pressures, and discretionary control over lists\u2014continue to operate beneath the written law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another relevant actor in this evolution is the state. For a long time, the ideal of state neutrality translated into formal equality, based on the idea that the state should neither discriminate nor intervene. That conception, however, overlooks the fact that gender inequality is structural and predates any election. When inequality is systemic, equal treatment perpetuates disadvantage rather than correcting it. That is why the state cannot limit itself to acting as an arbiter; it must go further and act proactively, through affirmative measures that compensate for this systemic disadvantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where electoral justice becomes decisive. Mexico\u2019s Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary, for example, has been a key actor in this regard because its rulings have explicitly sanctioned the practice of sending women to districts where the party has historically lost\u2014the so-called \u201cparity in fraud of the law\u201d or simulation\u2014even when no rule explicitly prohibited such a maneuver. This is an example of rights-protective electoral justice because it does not settle for counting female candidates; rather, it interprets the spirit of the rule and acts when it detects that the text is being complied with while its underlying purpose is being emptied of meaning. Without courts willing to engage in this kind of interpretation, parity risks being ineffective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another issue, and perhaps the most important, is that the number of women does not guarantee change. The old \u201ccritical mass\u201d hypothesis, which suggests that simply reaching a certain threshold of female representation would be enough to transform the system through inertia, is not supported empirically. What matters is the existence of critical actors with a genuine capacity for strategic influence, such as women legislators willing to use their position to litigate, negotiate and advance the agenda, even when they are in the minority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The relative success of Mexico and Bolivia cannot be explained by their laws alone, but also by a \u201cgender-friendly coalition\u201d that brings together electoral authorities, academia, civil society organizations and the media, all willing to expose instances of noncompliance. In countries where such a network does not exist or is fragmented, as in Guatemala, the law is far more vulnerable to resistance from party elites, who remain the main obstacle. In this context, parties rarely adopt parity out of conviction; rather, they do so when the cost of failing to do so outweighs the benefit of maintaining male control over the lists. This is why external oversight becomes a real counterweight to the strategic calculations of elites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, none of these mechanisms will work without normative learning. Parity is a process in which parties, judges, officials and citizens learn through practice how to operate under these new rules. This learning process helps explain why political harassment of elected women persists in Bolivia despite the country having one of the region\u2019s most advanced legal frameworks, or why in Costa Rica, with horizontal and vertical parity, women remain underrepresented on legislative committees with the greatest budgetary weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The law does not, by itself, dissolve traditional ways of exercising power; such change requires a transformation of political culture. That is something no electoral reform can legislate directly. For this reason, parity should not be understood merely as a procedure for allocating seats, but as a transformative principle that redefines what we mean by democratic quality in the 21st century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the future agenda, it is important to extend parity beyond Congress, reaching both executive bodies (Mexico included it in law; Chile, under Bachelet and later Boric, experimented with ministerial parity, but on a voluntary rather than legal basis) and the judiciary, among others. In most Latin American countries, these spheres are virtually exempt from any parity requirement. And it should not be forgotten that the design of the next gender electoral regimes in Latin America must also be accompanied by an intersectional perspective that incorporates issues such as ethnicity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Legal parity does not guarantee political equality: without sanctions and changes to the culture of power, women continue to face barriers to accessing decision-making spaces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":953,"featured_media":59457,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16998,17047],"tags":[15635],"gps":[],"class_list":["post-59469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-genero-en","category-lideres-politicos-en","tag-debates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/953"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59469"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59471,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59469\/revisions\/59471"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59469"},{"taxonomy":"gps","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gps?post=59469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}