Conservative Quotas? How the Bavarian CSU Handles It's Women's Quota

In 2010 the German Bavarian Christian Democratic Party (CSU) has introduced a women’s quota. The process was accompanied by an intense and conflictive discussion about the democratic values of this organization. Since the discussion about quotas in Europe is traditionally a topic of the political left and most often theorized by use of socialist or social-democratic arguments I would like to illustrate the specifics and conflicts of implementing quotas while following and standing fast to a conservative agenda. Refering to a qualitative study on the experience of party members of the CSU with the quota and on media coverage of it’s introduction in German newspapers, I want to analyse how organizational change is narrated in conservatism.

Following Barbara Czarniawska (1997) and a constructivist concept of party sociology (Siri 2012)  I understand organizational identities in political parties as narrated forms. In the presentation I would like to show that conser­vative organizations cannot escape from 'leftish' egalitarian and emancipatory communication. Moreover they find ways to 'translate' socialist oder social-democratic ideas into conservative semantics. The presentation will analyze the specifics of conservative's story-telling on legimitate organizational change in times of a changing party system.

Literature

Czarniawska, B. (1997). Narrating the organization. Dramas of institutional identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Siri, J. (2012). Parteien. Zur Soziologie einer politischen Form. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.