Closed Lists and Women's Representation: A Comparison Between Brazil and Colombia (2014–2022)

Abstract

This article analyzes the variables that explain differences in women's parliamentary representation in Brazil and Colombia, two countries sharing a 30% legal quota, proportional representation, and the absence of a mandatory placement mandate. Despite this common framework, Colombia has consistently achieved higher percentages of women elected across all three electoral cycles examined: 2014, 2018, and 2022. The analysis discards alternative explanations: Brazil outperforms Colombia in gender-sensitive campaign financing and enforcement mechanisms; both countries comply with the 30% candidate threshold. The determining variable is the ballot structure: Brazil permits only open lists; Colombia allows each party to choose between open and closed lists. It is demonstrated closed lists compensate for financing inequalities in systems without a placement mandate, by transferring from the individual candidate to the party the responsibility for ordering the list; and it shows that this variable explains Colombia's advantage. The methodology combines a most similar systems design (MSSD) with intra-Colombian variation analysis and a pooled logistic regression. Results show that closed lists multiply by 2.14 the probability that a seat will be occupied by a woman (β = 0.7585; OR = 2.14), an estimated impact of 16.2 percentage points.