engleski

Women's Parliamentary Representation in Croatia: Phases of ‘Invisibility’ and ‘Glass Ceiling’ followed by Regression

In the first ten years of Croatian independence, women barely managed to cross the 7% threshold of parliamentary representation. Although a mildly upward trend could be detected, nineties were characterized by single digit percentages of women in parliament. The sudden shift came with the regime and electoral system change in 2000. At that year’s election women achieved the best result (21.9%) which has not been repeated, let alone surpassed, since. In this and the next three election cycles female representation oscillated around 20% as an average. Optimism caused by the rapid rise in women's political participation in 2000, over the next ten years gave way to scepticism over the petrification of female political representation. The first cause for concern over the ‘normality’ of this female parliamentary fifth occurred after the 2015 parliamentary elections when only 15.2% of women got elected. Early elections in 2016 gave hope to gender equality advocates that this deviation will be corrected. However, the results of the last election clearly show that there is always room for further regression: only 12.6% of women got elected – making this the worst electoral result for women in the last 16 years. It is the purpose of this paper to analyse the results of the last parliamentary elections in Croatia within the context of a downward trend in parliamentary representation of women.

descriptive representation of women, parliamentary elections, Croatia, political parties

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