Women's political representation in the democratic countries in Africa. : A quantitative study related to whether electoral systems are a contributing factor to the increase of women in parliament.

The results in previous studies indicate that the electoral system plays an important role in women's political representation. Some researchers believe that the proportional electoral system contributes to more representation of women than the majority electoral system. The proportional electoral system is considered to be the most important factor explaining the cross-border differences in women's political representation. The aim of my research is to test whether similar results to those shown in previous studies will occur when using another method. To fulfill this purpose, I answer the following questions:Can electoral factors explain the variation in women's political representation in the democratic countries of Africa? Is there any indication that other factors are important, if so, which ones? In this research, different factors are used as the theoretical framework and starting point. After a theoretical review, the previous studies used to explain the underrepresentation of women in politics are introduced. The results from the previous studies are then compared to the results shown in this research to see if they can explain the variation in women's representation within the democratic countries in Africa. This study is a comparative and employs most similar system design (MSSD). The table analysis is used as a method to analyse the collected data. Consequently, the results from the previous studies are used to analyse whether the same results on the electoral system also occur in democratic countries in Africa. The findings show that countries with proportional electoral systems have a higher proportion of women in parliament compared to countries with a majority or mixed electoral system. However, the results also show that when compared with Catholic and Anglican countries, Protestant countries have a higher percentage of women in the national parliament. The explanation for this may be since the Catholic church is more associated with a hierarchical and authoritarian culture. The results in this study also indicate that the use of gender quotas is one of the factors that affect the women's political representation, which is consistent with the results shown in previous studies.