Female political participation—both as candidates and voters—has stirred one of the most heated debates over the past few decades not only in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA), but also in many parts of the world. Acknowledging the considerable gap in female political representation, numerous countries around the globe have adopted significant measures to promote the presence of women in the political arena. Including women in the decision-making process is widely considered one of the most effective institutional mechanisms to advance women’s interests and concerns, improve policy outcomes in favor of women, transform cultural stereotypes in regard to women’s roles in the public sphere, and create more equitable and just societies where all citizens are equally represented.
While women have made substantive gains in the political arena—not only on the institutional level but also on the societal level in many democracies—women across the MENA region are still struggling to achieve parity in the political realm. The fact that not a single Arab country has been rated as “free”1 over the past few decades, combined with the lack of genuine representative democracies in the region, has greatly affected the status of women in the political arena. Currently, the Arab region continues to have one of the lowest percentages of women members of national parliaments, with very slow improvement compared to any other region in the world.
Despite the fact that the political and social stagnation across the region in the past few decades has led to deteriorating levels of women’s overall participation in the political process, since the Arab Awakening, women across the region are demanding greater roles in the political arena and defying decades of marginalization in the decision-making process. Nonetheless, numerous institutional, cultural, and structural obstacles must be directly addressed and remedied to give women in the region the opportunity to participate actively and equitably in the political sphere.
This report will mainly focus on Jordan, as it is currently one of the region’s leading models for women’s political representation. Jordanian leaders have experimented with numerous institutional mechanisms to promote the inclusion of women in the decision-making process in the past few decades (e.g., a certain number of seats reserved for women members of parliament, quota regulations, and national closed-party lists).
The first section of this report outlines the theoretical framework of the various forms of women’s political representation and the significance of women’s presence in the political arena. The second section of the report sheds light on the societal and political context of women’s political participation in Jordan—with a special focus on the changes in the country’s electoral system over the past few decades and their impact on women’s political representation in Jordan. The third section of the report highlights the obstacles facing women in the legislative arena and offers insights from Jordan’s most recent parliamentary elections. While previous studies and analyses focused on the issues of tribalism and personalistic politics as the main impediments for women’s access to power, this report argues that the widespread perceptions of corruption and the general lack of trust in the electoral process as a whole are instead the main impediments to the political empowerment of women. The report concludes with an overview of the lessons learned from the Jordanian experience and offers specific policy recommendations for promoting women’s political representation that can be applied not only in Jordan, but also in other parts of the region.
