Where Is Gender in Agenda Setting?

Abstract

Why do some issues surge to the forefront of our attention while others languish in obscurity? Feminist scholars have explored the emergence of issues such as rape, battering, no-fault divorce, pay equity, and other women's issues on the public agenda. Despite a burgeoning body of literature on feminist social movements within history, political science, and sociology over the last twenty-five years, scholars of agenda setting, public policy, and American politics more generally have largely ignored this work. Not surprisingly, this research cannot be simply added in to the dominant agenda setting theoretical paradigm; rather, the findings disrupt conventional understandings. This essay critiques two canonical works, Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies (1995) and Baumgartner and Jones's Agendas and Instability in American Politics (1993), and discusses exemplary feminist research. It argues that if we want to know how norms change we need to broaden our scope beyond political elites and interest groups to include social movements and newly politicized grassroots activists. We must see change as produced by networks of insiders and outsiders rather than exclusively caused by elites in formal positions. Feminist scholarship also takes seriously the discursive and emotional aspects of politics rather than utilizing a narrow pluralist framework. Moreover, it recognizes the important yet neglected role of law as both an arena and a discourse.

How to Resist Austerity: the Case of the Gender Budgeting Strategy in Andalusia

“…The connection of institutional feminism to the social movement, with its particularities in Andalusia as well as its importance for the creation and maintenance of the GBA, highlights some of the critiques that have arisen from the feminist approach to Kingdon's theory on agenda setting (Kingdon, ). According to Kenney (), Kingdon's approach to policy community is dominated by insiders; that is, the policy community is composed of elites, forgetting grassroots politics and social movements and their interactions with feminist men and women insiders (what we have called ‘femocrats’). The nature of our investigation made it compulsory to take into account the feminist social movement, as without incorporating the voice of feminist social movement and their interactions with femocrats it was not possible to understand the emergence and maintenance of the gender budgeting tool in Andalusia…”

Cultural Penetration and Punctuated Policy Change: Explaining the Evolution of U.S. Energy Policy

“…Some scholars suggest that this gap in the literature can be filled by theoretically and empirically testing the role that culture and social movements play in explaining which events result in punctuating policy making. For example, Kenny () contends that, to understand the changing of norms and agendas that shape policy making, we must integrate social movements into our theories. Similarly, John () suggests that we should pay more attention to the focusing events that shape policy in order to determine when the punctuation actually begins (p. 489).…”

Gender equalities work in health organisations in England

“…Equalities leads rely on technocratic solutions such as impact assessments which turn equalities objectives into bureaucratic goals, recreating an organisational discourse in which equalities work is a tick-box exercise, and further distancing the work from the mainstream policy agenda and objectives (Kenney, 2003).…”