University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons CUREJ - College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal College of Arts and Sciences 3-30-2009 Beyond the Ley de Cupos: The Variation in Gender Empowerment between Argentina and Chile Ameya S. Ananth University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/curej Part of the Comparative Politics Commons Recommended Citation Ananth, Ameya S., "Beyond the Ley de Cupos: The Variation in Gender Empowerment between Argentina and Chile" 30 March 2009. CUREJ: College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, University of Pennsylvania, https://repository.upenn.edu/curej/106. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/curej/106 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Beyond the Ley de Cupos: The Variation in Gender Empowerment between Argentina and Chile Abstract This thesis identifies the ariancev in gender empowerment between Argentina and Chile, two countries that share countless parallels in histories, cultural norms, and political achievements. Using women’s formal legislative representation as a gauge for gender empowerment, this comparative study uses a most-similar-systems design to investigate and generate a hypothesis of the factors that contribute to Chilean women’s lack of empowerment, contrasting with the mechanisms by which Argentine women have achieved empowerment. Both Catholic nations of the Southern Cone re-democratized following military regimes, currently enjoy female heads of state and possess similar cultural phenomena where motherhood has defined women’s social and political roles for decades. Nevertheless, Argentina and Chile remain starkly dissimilar in the scope of women’s legislative presence. Chile’s open-list electoral system that exposes women to rampant machísmo and the conservative influence from the Church that encourages women to embrace their primary role as mothers are two significant factors that prevent women’s legislative representation and thereby empowerment.