Will the year 2015 bring the return of electoral gender quotas? The history about how the lack of political will troubled the road to gender equality in Italy.

In Italy, affirmative actions or gender quotas, especially in regard to political representation, began to be matters of public and political debate in 1995, when the Constitutional Court deemed illegitimate, and therefore annulled, the provisions of the 1993 electoral law introducing corrective systems for equal representation between men and women at national and regional level. Since then, the issue of ensuring equal access to elective offices has been constantly on the political agenda. The ongoing debate about the electoral reform for the Chamber of Deputies (named Italicum,) promoted by the President Renzi, may represent the last opportunity to introduce gender quotas for national elections. The paper aims to provide an historical overview of the Italian debate on gender quotas, by investigating the last two decades events and answering the following questions: what conditions and processes have facilitated the adoption of gender quotas? Are there areas in which it is (has been) easier to adopt gender quotas? What resistances – and raised by whom – have hindered their spread through policy field and levels of government? Why gender quotas are far from been considered a legitimate instrument for gender equality?