Marwa Shalaby, Varieties of Power: Women’s Political Representation in Arab Parliaments (Columbia University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Marwa Shalaby (MS): The idea for this book started as I was finishing my dissertation and preparing my post-doctoral job applications. I was deeply interested in examining women’s roles in autocratic legislatures, mainly in the Middle East and North (MENA) region. While developing the project proposal, I found that research on MENA’s legislatures, let alone women in these legislatures, is almost nonexistent. Logistical issues, such as the inaccessibility of parliamentary records and security concerns, can partially explain this dearth of scholarship. However, this was not the case for other autocratic contexts. Work on MENA’s legislative politics was lacking mostly due to scholars’ views of these legislative bodies as inconsequential, since they do not lead to democratization. These views became even stronger after the Arab Uprising. It was clear that MENA’s persistent authoritarianism has drawn scholars’ attention away from the region and its legislative institutions.
For my postdoctoral project, I decided to study these often-overlooked institutions and was determined to open the “black box” of MENA’s autocratic legislatures. In 2013, I initiated the Governance and Elections in the Middle East Project (GEMEP). I conducted fieldwork and collected legislative data from Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Algeria. For almost a decade, I collected enough data and conducted interviews to answer many unexplored questions relating to the study of gender and legislative institutions in autocracies. Varieties of Power examines the extent to which the growing number of women in authoritarian legislatures has granted them more power and influence. What conditions help or hinder women’s political participation under autocratic regimes? And what does the role of women tell us about the politics of authoritarianism today? These questions are significant, both for theoretical and practical reasons, and my book provides groundbreaking evidence that women’s presence in legislatures matters. However, it also shows that the institutional context under which women operate plays a major factor in conditioning their legislative behavior and policy priorities.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MS: Varieties of Power speaks to, and contributes to, work on gender and authoritarian politics, representation, comparative political parties, autocratic legislatures, and Middle East politics. It integrates diverse strands from many literatures. The book mainly addresses the outcomes of women’s presence in autocratic legislatures and aims to make a coherent case for the role of political parties in shaping women’s political representation in non-democracies.
Since the mid-1990s, women’s representation in national politics has exponentially increased in democracies and autocracies, mainly because of the proliferation of gender quotas. The incremental increase in women’s descriptive representation over the past decades raises two important puzzles. The first puzzle relates to whether the increased number of women in authoritarian legislatures has granted them more power and influence. The second puzzle relates to the role of political parties in conditioning women’s legislative behavior and political power.
Varieties of Power addresses these puzzles by relying on a decade of fieldwork and original data collection across the MENA region. The book focuses on three Arab monarchies, Morocco, Jordan, and Kuwait, which have varying levels of party institutionalization and quota implementation. I argue and show empirical evidence that the degree of institutionalization of individual parties plays a significant role in conditioning women’s political power under authoritarianism.
The analysis reveals significant variations regarding women’s political influence and legislative behavior across the three cases. While the introduction of quota systems has contributed to promoting women's numerical presence in politics, the absence of institutionalized parties has limited women's ability to gain access and represent women’s interests in autocratic legislatures.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MS: My primary research areas are the study of gender and politics in the MENA region and the micro-dynamics of electoral institutions under authoritarianism. My work is unique as it utilizes quantitative, statistical, and experimental methods to study the intersection of gender and authoritarian politics in MENA. I have conducted experiments, collected original surveys, and initiated the GEMEP–the first dataset ever on MENA’s parliaments and legislative processes.
The book builds on my previous work on the correlates of women’s access to political power in non-democracies. I have written extensively on the role of political parties, citizens’ attitudes, and institutional rules in conditioning women’s access to political power. Varieties of Power shifts focus to the outcome of women’s political representation and highlights the role played by female legislators in non-democratic legislatures.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MS: The book targets a broad audience: academics, researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and gender-focused organizations. It can be assigned to courses on legislative politics, Middle Eastern political systems and governments, authoritarianism, comparative political parties, and gender and politics. In addition, the book can be an essential source for NGOs, policymakers, and policy practitioners. Although the book employs cutting-edge data analysis and methods, the findings are presented in an accessible manner to general audiences and non-specialized readers interested in learning more about women’s political leadership in atypical settings.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MS: I am finalizing a book manuscript on the role of the opposition in Arab parliaments. The book is under contract with Cambridge University Press. I am also starting the data collection and fieldwork for my new book on women in local politics in autocracies. I will investigate how women access local politics in contexts where parties are absent (Qatar) and where they are historically strong and active in the legislative arena (Morocco). I will rely on election data as well as interviews and focus groups with female candidates and winners.
J: Please provide five interesting facts someone would learn from reading your book.
MS:
- Most autocratic countries have functioning parliaments with varying degrees of autonomy and legislative power. However, political parties are still banned in many autocracies.
- The strength of political parties matters for women’s exercise of political power and influence, even in autocracies.
- The mere presence of political parties in dictatorships does not guarantee the representation of women’s interests.
- Parties’ ideologies play a marginal role in shaping women’s legislative priorities and policy preferences.
- Gender quotas are crucial for increasing women’s numbers, but not enough to promote their legislative power and influence
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 1 to 3)
Sit down, Hind! Sit down, Hind! May God curse the day and those who introduced the [gender] quota system to the Jordanian Parliament.
—Member of Parliament (MP) Yehya al-Saud during a legislative session to a female MP, Hind al-Fayez, on December 2, 2014
It was far from an ordinary day in the Jordanian parliament. Heated floor discussions on political Islam and Arab nationalism had started when a member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) took to the floor to criticize the larger space given to the nationalists in Jordan as compared to the Islamists. Hind al-Fayez, a female legislator who won a quota seat in the 2013 legislature and came from a nationalist family, dared to disagree and criticize the divisive rhetoric of the Islamist party member. Soon, a heated confrontation erupted between Hind and male legislator Yehya al-Saud, who interrupted his colleague and asked her repeatedly to sit down and stop talking. Hind continued her speech while ignoring al-Saud’s requests. Right after, he started banging aggressively on the bench and verbally assaulting her while cursing the gender quota and those who introduced it to the Jordanian parliament. Even after being rebuked by the head of the session for his aggressive and sexist comments, he refused to apologize and yelled at the other female legislators, “Go back home and put some makeup on for your husbands and do some cooking.”
While this incident may reflect one of the countless instances of sexism and violence against women in politics across the globe, what is remarkable about this incident is how Hind al-Fayez was verbally attacked not because of her performance or policy stances but because of the way she entered the parliament: the quota system. An institutional mechanism widely hailed as an important step toward female political empowerment was used as a weapon against her and other female legislators to demoralize them and belittle their presence and influence. In a personal interview with Hind al-Fayez three years after this incident, she expressed her frustration with the long-standing inequalities in the Jordanian political realm where “the Honorary President, the President of the King’s Bureau, the Prime Minister, the President of the Senate, most of the appointees [in the Senate], the President of the General Assembly—are all men. This would make you think that men can lead and women cannot since they are absent from these positions. It has been rooted in them. . . . You need to fight this image and bring women in.” Despite being directly attacked for being a female legislator with a quota seat, Hind still believed that gender quotas are one of the most important mechanisms to correct inequalities and address the marginalization of women in politics. A former female legislator in Morocco echoed a similar view: “Despite the shortcomings of the existing quota system, I believe that quotas are necessary to combat the systemic exclusion of women from the legislative sphere. Gender quotas are like medications that may be prescribed short-term to address specific issues or can be a long-term treatment for a chronic illness.”
Unquestionably, the introduction of gender quotas across the globe has transformed the political landscape for women. Since the mid-1990s, women’s representation in national politics has exponentially increased—in both democracies and autocracies (figure I.1). Women’s numerical presence in national legislatures has risen substantially since the implementation of gender quotas in the twenty-first century in many dictatorships, including the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
The incremental increase in women’s descriptive representation over the past two decades in autocracies raises two important puzzles. The first puzzle relates to whether the increased number of women in authoritarian legislatures has granted them more power and influence: How do the politics of authoritarianism shape women’s political influence? How does autocratic regimes’ restriction of political competition, such as banning or weakening political parties to constrain the opposition, affect women’s legislative behavior and priorities? Despite the proliferation of studies on authoritarian legislatures that have scrutinized the role of seemingly democratic institutions under authoritarianism and the autocrats’ incentives to incorporate women in decision-making processes, we still have little notion of women’s political power and legislative behavior.
The second puzzle of this book deals with the role of political parties in shaping women’s legislative behavior and political power. Research investigating the link between the presence and strength of political parties and women’s political representation has flourished in established and new democracies. However, our knowledge remains limited in autocratic settings where political parties vary widely in terms of their organizational strength and capacity. As figure I.2 reveals, there has been a strong association between authoritarian party-based regimes and women’s numerical presence in national legislatures over the past few decades. The figure also demonstrates that women are more likely to gain greater access to national legislatures in party-based regimes compared to other authoritarian regime types, such as military and personalist regimes. Yet, scholars have paid little attention to the intersection of women’s political representation and political parties in autocracies.
This book offers insights into both puzzles and aims to develop a novel theory on women’s political representation under authoritarianism. Thus, it focuses on three distinct yet interrelated dimensions of women’s political power in nondemocracies: presence, influence, and representation. By presence, I allude to the conceptualization of descriptive representation as the representative’s characteristics rather than their actions and how legislatures should mirror society regarding gender, race, and other demographics.