Democratization, Women's Movements, and Gender-Equitable States: A Framework for Comparison

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.

Bicultural Iranians Political Tendency: In Between Two Cultures

“…It is evidently in consistent with previous research findings [29,14]. In addition, the present findings, in line with previous studies [3,2] demonstrate a positive association between empathy and support for democratic values, it is expected to see women to be more acceptant of democratic values than men, the fact that Miklikowska [2] found in her study showing that female participants were more supportive of democratic values than their male counterparts.…”

“…We are, moreover, interested to gauge the gender effect, as some of the proposed variables in this study proved to be gender sensitive eg, adherence to democracy [13,14] empathy [15] suggestibility [16] and egalitarian sex role [17]. We also aim to examine the inter-correlations of the variables.…”

NGOs and Political Change: A History of the Australian Council for International Development

“…It also probably reflected a disconnect between gender issues and the broader social and liberation movements in developing countries of the time, which were generally patriarchal in their structures and practices. Gender was seen as secondary in the broader struggle to avoid possible divisions within the movements (Sigmund 1990;Graham 2003;Viterna and Fallon 2008). Meer (2005) talks specifically about the case of South Africa and the anti-apartheid movement, but the same issues were found in Latin America, where gender and women's issues were seen as divisive and to be dealt with after the broader 'struggle' had achieved its aims (Hassim 1991).…”

The Politics of Mobilising for Gender Justice in Egypt from Mubarak to Morsi and Beyond

“…Feminist scholarship suggests that the nature of women's collective action prior to regime change plays an important role in influencing the extent to which the processes and outcomes recognise gender equality (Waylen 1994;Viterna and Fallon 2008;Zulu 2000). Viterna and Fallon's study of four countries that have experienced regime change (South Africa, Argentina, Ghana and El Salvador) indicates that among the key factors that account for a positive outcome for integrating gender equality in new political orders are a cohesive coalition within the women's movement and a legacy of women's activism that legitimates present-day feminist demands (2008: 669; Tadros 2013).…”