No abstract

W ith the recent wave of democratization across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, scholars have begun to explore how democratic changes affect women. Like other analyses of gender and the state (Brush 2003;Eisenstein 1988;MacKinnon 1989;Orloff 1996;Pateman 1988), these studies examine how states create and govern gender relations among their citizens through institutions, laws, and legal discourses (Jaquette and Wolchick 1998;Stephen 1997;Waylen 1994Waylen , 2000. Importantly, they extend previous gendered state literature by asking what happens to the political institutionalization of gender when a state is transformed by democratic transition.There are strong theoretical reasons to anticipate that democratic transitions will create more gender equitable states. First, democratic transitions provide women (and men) with new opportunities for political participation. Second, new participatory opportunities typically coincide with the negotiation and implementation of new state institutions and policies.There is a rich collection of case studies examining the relationship between democratization, women's movements, and gendered state outcomes, but the variation across cases is still poorly understood. In response, this article develops a theoreticallygrounded comparative framework to evaluate and explain cross-national variations in the gendered outcomes of democratic transitions. The framework highlights four theoretical factors-the context of the transition, the legacy of women's previous mobilizations, political parties, and international influences-that together shape the political openings and ideologies available to women's movements in transitional states. Applying the framework to four test cases, we conclude that women's movements are most effective at targeting democratizing states when transitions are complete, when women's movements develop cohesive coalitions, when the ideology behind the transition (rather than the ideology of the winning regime) aligns easily with feminist frames, and when women's past activism legitimates present-day feminist demands. These findings challenge current conceptualizations of how democratic transitions affect gender in state institutions and provide a comparative framework for evaluating variation across additional cases.

Increasing levels of democratic freedoms should, in theory, improve women's access to political positions. Yet studies demonstrate that democracy does little to improve women's legislative representation. To resolve this paradox, we investigate how variations in the democratization process-including pre-transition legacies, historical experiences with elections, the global context of transition, and post-transition democratic freedoms and quotas-affect women's representation in developing nations. We find that democratization's effect is curvilinear. Women in non-democratic regimes often have high levels of legislative representation but little real political power. When democratization occurs, women's representation initially drops, but with increasing democratic freedoms and additional elections, it increases again. The historical context of transition further moderates these effects. Prior to 1995, women's representation increased most rapidly in countries transitioning from civil strife-but only when accompanied by gender quotas. After 1995 and the Beijing Conference on Women, the effectiveness of quotas becomes more universal, with the exception of postcommunist countries. In these nations, quotas continue to do little to improve women's representation. Our results, based on pooled time series analysis from 1975 to 2009, demonstrate that it is not democracy-as measured by a nation's level of democratic freedoms at a particular moment in time-but rather the democratization process that matters for women's legislative representation.

Several women have been successful candidates in Latin American presidential elections during the last decade. But this historical success has been limited to only a few countries in the region. What are the main causes of this variation? The article develops arguments stemming from the institutionalist theory and proposes that electoral-institutional characteristics of the countries should be considered to be important determinants. The variables which increase the electoral system permissiveness for women are the electoral formula for the presidential election, the constitutional rules that prohibit the election of relatives of former presidents, the presence of legislative quotas for the election of women and the prohibition of immediate presidential reelection. The effect of institutional permissiveness is not automatic but is conditional based on the level of human development. Methodologically, we estimate a regression model to explain the percentage of votes for women in the last three presidential elections in 19 Latin American countries. The validity of the model is further confirmed through the identification and analysis of outliers and influential cases.

Feminist scholars argue that women generally gain political rights followed by civil and social rights. However, this argument is based on data from North America and Western Europe, and few scholars, if any, have examined the progression of these rights within countries currently undergoing transitions to democracy in different parts of the world. Through in-depth interviews with members of women's organizations in Ghana, the author extends this literature. The findings both contradict and support the prior feminist argument. They indicate that prior to democratization, women focused primarily on social rights to improve their economic well-being. However, new opportunities emerged with the transition, which allowed women to use their political rights to secure more civil and social rights.