Featured Photo: Quota Rules | © Selver Učanbarlić on Pixabay
Recently there have been calls again to finally ensure equality in our parliaments and to drastically increase the proportion of women to 50%. The justification for this demand is the fact that in our society about 50% are women.
I am convinced that you cannot achieve changes of any kind with quotas alone, but play the whole thing through mentally, from the grassroots of our society to our parliaments and governments. First of all, however, it should be noted that I generally consider quotas in democratic processes to be absolutely undemocratic, since they completely thwart the demanded free decision of the citizen.
Basically, you have to belong to a party or group of voters in order to have a real chance of being elected to a parliament. It is therefore the responsibility of parties and electoral groups to nominate suitable candidates.
In order to make the whole thing completely transparent and plausible right from the start, it is only logical that the parties and electoral groups also have a proportion of women of around 50%. Without this 50%, these parties are therefore not allowed to receive approval or lose it again as soon as they fall below this 50% hurdle.
In the parties and electoral groups, all working groups and other meetings must also have a 50% share of women in order to be able to work.
Of course, a committee or assembly may only elect or vote if 50% of all those present are women.
Lists of applicants, board members and presidencies are only valid or workable and quorate if they also have a 50% share of women.
As soon as all parties and groups of voters have actually been “quoted”, whereby it is also possible for each chairperson to be followed by a chairperson and vice versa, and, if feasible, even to work with a “dual leadership”, the parliaments can be filled with quotas without ifs and buts will.
The rationale behind this is that there are now enough male and female candidates available on all sides to enable voters to make the best possible choice.
All lists of candidates are filled alternately male and female and the respective subsequent list for the upcoming ballot is of course alternately female and male.
In order not to have to dictate to voters that they also vote for 50% women or invalidate ballot papers that do not show 50% women, one can certainly use the well-known overhang mandates to ultimately ensure the 50%.
Of course, parliamentary work would then have to be structured in the same way as party work, and the governments would also have to be made up of half of them.
Even after this short and quick thought experiment, I still do not believe that one should intervene in social processes in this way, but I am now even more strongly of the opinion that setting a quota for parliaments alone is absolutely undemocratic and also completely nonsensical.
"Every problem has a solution - even women."
Seth Green as Zack in The Story of Luke (2012)
