Influencing Our Decisions: Why Quotas Are Accepted by the Public in the Bureaucracy and Not In Legislatures

Abstract

The Canadian public has offered little protest to the implementation of quotas for women in the bureaucracy while giving diminutive thought to the introduction of quotas in legislatures. This paper first examines the underrepresentation of women in politics, the nature and the existence of quotas in Canada, as well as the public opinion towards them. To understand what affects public opinion, the examination of elite framing and socialization by the effective majority of the public was necessary. The result of this work is the acknowledgement that bureaucratic quotas are considered legitimate due to elite framing; however, the possibility of legislative quotas is unknown to the public as a result of an absence of both elite framing and socialization by an effective majority of the population.