Seats without Substance

Sri Lanka’s legal architecture appears progressive on paper: since 2017, a law has guaranteed that 25 percent of seats in local government be reserved for women. However, the headline figure masks a persistent reality: the quota increases women’s numerical presence without guaranteeing them a voice, authority, or independent power. The forthcoming local authority elections have made that gap visible again: parties, legal loopholes, and a hostile information environment combine to blunt the quota’s intended effect, leaving many women in symbolic roles while the levers of decision-making remain male-dominated.

The quota has shifted the arithmetic at the local level: women’s representation in local government increased after the 2017 amendment, and official figures still indicate higher female participation at the municipal level than in the provincial or national legislatures. Yet, national bodies remain stubbornly male: parliamentary representation has been in the single digits for much of the last decade, and has improved only modestly in recent cycles, underscoring that gains at the municipal level have not translated into parity at higher levels.

Three interlocking mechanisms explain why the quota has often been a cosmetic fix rather than a vehicle for empowerment.

Party gatekeeping and candidate placement
Political parties control nominations and list order, and where they treat the quota as a procedural checkbox, they frequently place women on low-priority proportional lists or in unwinnable wards. The result is more women on ballots and even in councils, but not in positions where they can set agendas, chair committees, or manage budgets. In other words, seats without substance. Civil-society reporting and local investigative pieces in 2025 documented repeated cases where women were effectively nominated to preserve party optics rather than to lead.

Legal loopholes and implementation gaps
The Local Authorities Elections framework contains provisions, in particular a clause widely discussed as Section 65AA, that allow parties or lists to escape full compliance when they win fewer than a threshold number of seats or votes. That exemption has been deployed as a practical workaround, enabling male-dominated parties to minimize the quota’s reach without formally breaking the law. The problem is not only the letter of the law but weak, reactive enforcement: when the regulatory architecture permits selective application, numerical targets become fragile.

Social norms, unpaid care burdens, and the campaign environment
Beyond rules and procedures, everyday reality skews political opportunity. Women candidates shoulder disproportionate unpaid care burdens, face mobility and ‘respectability’ constraints during campaigning, and often lack the informal patronage networks that fund and sustain competitive runs. Even when elected, female councillors report being sidelined in committee appointments and budget decisions; their proposals are regularly dismissed, a pattern that reproduces a gendered division of political labour. Surveys and a recent literature review reinforce the notion that societal expectations hinder the pipeline of viable female candidates.

Online gendered abuse compounds structural hurdles
Regional surveys and parliamentary monitoring show a high incidence of hate speech, doxing, image-based abuse, and coordinated disinformation directed at women officeholders and aspirants. Such attacks are not abstract: they deter new entrants, exhaust incumbents, and weaponize reputational risk to push women out of public life. In a country where online spaces are central to campaigning, the threat of digital violence poses a practical barrier to both running for office and governing. With fresh elections on the horizon, several worrying trends have emerged.