The Effects of Political Institutions on Women's Political Representation in National Parliaments of Post-Communist Countries from 1991 to 2018

The problem of female political representation has been of particular salience in recent decades. Women parliamentarians make up an average of 23.9% worldwide, which indicates a sharp lack of women in national legislative bodies. However, there is established evidence that women’s leadership in political decision-making processes improves them. Moreover, today's empirical evidence suggests that women politicians are more successful at managing the crisis due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This work is an attempt to explain the factors that influence the political representation of women in the post-communist space, where women and men formally had the same rights, but after the communist collapse, the place and role of women politicians turned out to be different in these countries. As the main research method, a multilevel regression analysis was used, with the help of which several conclusions were made. Firstly, political instruments for increasing the representation of women work depending on the context, for example, a proportional electoral system helps to increase the number of women if a certain level of democracy is achieved in the country. Secondly, gender quotas are a tool for balancing extremes in society, for example, gender quotas help maintain the number of women in parliaments with a high level of economic inequality, or conservative views regarding the role of women prevail in the country. These results indicate that the artificial increase in the representation of women, which has proven itself from a positive point of view in Western countries, will not work in the same way in the former communist countries, where there is a “development threshold” that must be crossed for political institutions to work in favor of women.