Gender Gaps in Civic and Political Participation in Latin America

This article examines whether there is gender segmentation in civic participation in Latin America, and whether such segmentation is related to gender differences in political participation. Confirming the findings of other studies, this analysis indicates that there is gender segmentation in civic associational activities, and that men are more involved than women in political activities, except for voting. Among those involved in civic activities, however, women attend meetings more often than men or about equally in all types of activities under consideration, except for sports and recreational pursuits. This highlights the need to differentiate between type and intensity of civic participation and provides empirical evidence that Latin American women have strong community ties through a variety of organizations. The regression analysis shows that civic engagement has a positive effect on political participation but that the magnitude of that effect varies by gender depending on the activity.     

Collectivism or Isolation? Gender Relations in Urban La Paz,Bolivia

Latin American women's extensive collective action outside and inside the household has been paid much attention in the literature over the years. Only a handful of studies have challenged the arguments that Latin American women generally organise together and show solidarity with one another. This paper argues that women's collective action in contemporary urban Bolivia is relatively weak, both outside and within the household. The consequence is that women are isolated to a degree not hitherto recognised, an isolation women cope with in different ways.     

Temporeras and Household Relations: Seasonal Employment in Chile's Agro-Export Sector

Abstract — This paper considers how the growth in non-traditional fruit and vegetable exports has affected female employment patterns and the consequences this may have for household and gender relations. Within export agriculture, there has emerged a demand for specifically female labour, providing rural women with employment opportunities that had not previously existed. The majority of the female workers have only seasonal work and this has led to their designation as temporeras. Through a variety of interview material drawn from the experiences of women living and working in Region IV and VI, the paper seeks to reveal the complexities involved in attempting to conceptualise women's involvement in this emergent labour market. The composition of the household and the level of household income are important factors in determining women's labour force participation. The case studies appear to show that in spite of the hard work and unprotected conditions, working as a temporera is a desirable employment for women. The paper argues that the sweeping changes in the agricultural sector, in which women had previously been marginalised as'unpaid family labour', have created opportunities for them to rework household relations.     

Barrio Women and Popular Politics in Chávez's Venezuela

Since President Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela in 1998, ordinary women from the barrios, or shantytowns, of Caracas have become more engaged in grassroots politics; but most of the community leaders still are men. Chávez's programs are controlled by male-dominated bureaucracies, and many women activists still look to the president himself as the main source of direction. Nevertheless, this article argues, women's increasing local activism has created forms of popular participation that challenge gender roles, collectivize private tasks, and create alternatives to male-centric politics. Women's experiences of shared struggle from previous decades, along with their use of democratic methods of popular control, help prevent the state from appropriating women's labor. But these spaces coexist with more vertical, populist notions of politics characteristic of official sectors of Chavismo. Understanding such gendered dimensions of popular participation is crucial to analyzing urban social movements.     

Women's Citizenship and Neopopulism: Peru Under the Fujimori Regime

This article argues that the increased participation of women in Peruvian politics in the 1990s and the advances made in some areas of their citizenship rights are connected to the strategies put in place by some sectors of the women's movement and to the openings provided by the Fujimori regime. Some of the impact of neopopulist rule on political institutions is shown to be positively related to women's increased opportunities during this period; yet the weak rule of law and the political use of the women's agenda by an increasingly questionable regime placed the women's movement in a complex political panorama. A disaggregated analysis of the politics of women's citizenship reveals that women from the popular sectors did not benefit from the same progress in their rights claims as women from the feminist movement or women in party politics.     

States as Gender Equality Activists: The Evolution of Quota Laws in Latin America

This article examines two decades of strengthening, expansion, and diffusion of gender quota laws in Latin America. The analysis departs from studies of quotas’ adoption, numerical effectiveness, or policy impacts, instead focusing on states’ use of coercive power to integrate women into public and private institutions. Viewing these policies in light of feminist theories of the poststructuralist state reveals how state institutions act to restructure government and promote gender equality. In building this argument, the article presents an up‐to‐date empirical survey and conceptual understanding of quota evolution in Latin America, including recent developments in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.     

Poner el Cuerpo: Women's Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina

This article explores the relationship between women's embodiment and political resistance in Argentina during 2002–2003. This was a time of socioeconomic crisis, influenced by neoliberal globalization. In this tumultuous context, women's bodies became embattled sites, shaken by the crisis but also actively engaged in constructing a new society and new forms of womanhood. Bodies are important to understanding political resistance, as reflected by the meanings attached to poner el cuerpo , a common expression in contemporary Argentine social movements. This article analyzes how women construct embodied subjectivities through their activist practices and how they define poner el cuerpo in terms of collective protest and daily activist work, coherence between words and actions, embodied sacrifice, and risk taking and struggle. As life in Argentina deteriorated because of the crisis, women's bodies represented not only suffering but also resistance and renewal.     

Democratic Consolidation in Latin America: Recent Theoretical Developments,Facilitating Conditions and Outcomes

An increasing number of investigations have dealt with particular aspects of democratic consolidation in Latin America. The multitude of geographic, historical and social conditions underlying the process, however, have often constituted a formidable hurdle for comparative study and generalization. In this paper I undertake a preliminary screening of the existing data and present a summary of facts and theories on democratic consolidation in the region. After an extensive analysis of different sources, I compare the experiences of Latin American countries and define a series of factors that seem to facilitate the consolidation of new democratic regimes. These factors include the beneficial role of earlier democratic traditions, the negotiation of agreements among political elites, diffuse support for the regime, solid party systems, effective control over military participation in society and, to a lesser extent, a favorable economy, especially when accompanied by less unequal income distribution.     

The International Monetary Fund,Party System Institutionalization,and Protest in Latin America

Extant studies have documented a positive correlation between country participation in International Monetary Fund–sponsored programs and collective protests in Latin America. However, anecdotal evidence indicates that there is a great deal of variation in the number of protests in recipient countries across the region. This article provides a theoretical argument that explains how the fund interacts with the level of party system institutionalization to affect the level of protest. The main prediction is that the level of protest decreases in recipient countries when the level of party system institutionalization is high. Empirical results from a sample of 16 Latin American democracies observed from 1982 to 2007 provide strong statistical and substantive support for the main hypothesis.     

Inequality,Distributive Justice and Political Participation: An Analysis of the Case of Chile

Political participation has frequently been associated with individual resources; that is, individuals with higher incomes, higher educational levels and more time tend to participate in the political process to a greater extent than other individuals do. The present study suggests that in addition to resources, an individual's beliefs about economic distribution are an important determinant of participation both in elections and in protests. Based on the analysis of the Chilean data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) 2012, the results suggest that distributive beliefs are associated primarily with participation in protests.     

Be like bees - the politics of mobilizing farmers for development in Tigray, Ethiopia

Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article analysesthe relations between local politics and farmers’ participationin rural development in Tigray (Ethiopia). It takes an actor-orientedapproach and focuses on local government officials and farmerrepresentatives, who mediate between the government agenciesthat undertake rural development programmes and the farmerswhom they address. To reach the target numbers of programmebeneficiaries, these local development brokers ‘mobilize’farmers to participate. They capitalize upon the historicallegitimacy of the 1975–91 revolution against the militaryDerg dictatorship in which the Tigray People's Liberation Front(TPLF), now heading the national government, and Tigray's ruralpopulation successfully joined forces. They revitalize farmers’collective memory of this alliance and reinvent the revolutionarygrassroots institutions through which it was realized. The effectsof mobilization on participation in development are most evidentamong farmers who are members of the TPLF. A TPLF-developmentnexus arises, structuring local political career opportunitiesalong the lines of development. The case study attempts to contributeto an empirical understanding of the entanglement of local politicsand local development brokerage in rural African societies.     

Imposing Identity against Social Catastrophes. The Strategies of (Re)Generation of Meaning of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Argentina)

This article explores the processes of definition, construction and social management of collective identity in situations of social catastrophe such as that defined in the Southern Cone of Latin America following the grave human rights violations that occurred in the 1970s, especially those deriving from the forced disappearance of persons. This form of repression creates deep wounds in the social fabric affected and, besides this, produces what could be called a ‘catastrophe’, that is, a permanent confusion of the mechanisms of social construction of meaning and subjectivity within which one lives. In this case, the catastrophe affects several collective goods and, principally, the social bases of modern identity construction. In order to manage these catastrophes, the subjects that inhabit the social spaces formed around them – in this case those who live in the field of the detained–disappeared – develop very different strategies, with the most widespread in the Argentinean case being what I will call the ‘narrative of meaning’. This is a hard and conservative strategy that confronts the catastrophe of identity by employing identity constructions supported on old narratives of the family and biological heritage. This article is dedicated to an analysis of this socially successfully strategy and studies the form it adopts in the work of constructing identity of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.     

The Role of Local Government in the Prevention of Violence against Women and Girls during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article discusses aspects of the emerging evidence around the impact of COVID-19 on violence against women as well as local government interventions relating to the prevention of domestic violence in Latin American countries. I show how, during the coronavirus outbreak, local governments are vital in the prevention of violence against women and girls, and I present examples of some local actions that seek to guarantee access to the appropriate support and services during the pandemic.     

Contesting Mestizaje: Black Politics and Oral Traditions in Venezuela

Afro-descendant oral traditions are powerful modes of political expression that disrupt anti-black logics within Latin America's mestizaje. Scholarship on Afro-Latin American anti-racist mobilisation centres on large-scale, collective action. Instead, in this article, I examine songs and décimas, central forms of Afro-descendant cultural subjectivity. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in La Guaira state, Venezuela, I show how oral traditions are place-based forms of resistance against anti-black racism. This research calls on scholars to attend to oral traditions and their geographies as a tool of anti-racist political mobilisation.     

Laboring Under Chávez: Populism for the Twenty‐first Century

This analysis addresses two interrelated questions: what were labor conditions like under Hugo Chávez? and what do those conditions suggest about the relationship between populism and leftism in Latin America? The answer to the first question is unequivocal. Despite its socialist rhetoric, the Chávez regime fragmented and weakened organized labor, undermined collective bargaining, and exploited vulnerable workers in cooperatives. Thus the regime's primary foible was not its radical leftism but its pursuit of populist control at the expense of the leftist goals of diminishing the domination of marginalized groups and expanding their autonomous participation in civil society. This appraisal of labor politics under Chávez indicates substantial tension between the realization of these leftist goals and populist governance. It further suggests the need to distinguish more clearly between leftism and populism and their respective impacts on democracy.     

“El pájaro de cuatro notas”: the reception of Argentine women writers and artists’ work in avant-garde magazines (1920–1930)

This article assesses the reception of Argentine women writers and artists’ work within vanguard magazines. Taking as case studies the work of Norah Lange and Norah Borges, I identify four key tropes that emerge in reviews of their creative output published between 1920 and 1930. This article brings to light original archival material in order to expose how women’s peripheral position in the artistic sphere of early twentieth-century Latin America was enacted at a discursive level. In so doing, I propose that the gendered dynamics evident within avant-garde magazines represent a microcosm of women’s experiences within the vanguard more broadly. This article aims to contribute to a thorough investigation into how marginalisation is enacted and enforced, exposing the extra-literary processes which construct an artistic sphere that is inhospitable to women practitioners.     

Clientelism and Social Funds: Evidence from Chávez's Misiones

The latest president in Latin America to adopt social funds on a large scale as an integral part of his government program has been Hugo Chávez Frías of Venezuela. Based on the literature on clientelism and social funds in Latin America, this article finds that Venezuela's latest experiments with social funds were influenced by political variables. It uses empirical data from the distribution of resources for some of the subnational misiones programs to show how, given increased levels of electoral competition and weak institutional constraints, the government used these funds clientelistically, even while distributing oil income to the very poor. Chávez's misiones served two very different purposes: to manipulate the political context and to distribute funds directly to the low-income population.     

Gender and the State in Rural Chile

Abstract — This paper focuses on SERNAM, the state institution responsible for the incorporation of gender into public policy in Chile, and the actions taken by the state to benefit women employed in the modern agricultural sector. It charts the emergence of the demands for such an institution by the women's movement, and the creation of SERNAM as an integral part of the transition to democracy. In particular, the paper analyses the Programme for the Children of the Temporeras , which is a unique state-led initiative to provide childcare facilities to enable women to enter the seasonal labour market during the summer months. The paper explores the complex relations between gender, the state, capitalist agriculture and patriarchal structures, with the aim of highlighting the sometimes unexpected convergence of interests, and the points of conflict.     

Women in War and Peace: Karen Women’s Political Participation during and after the Karen–Burma Ceasefire Accords

ABSTRACT

This article examines Karen women’s political participation in the Karen National Union (KNU) and in KNU-controlled towns and villages during three phases of the protracted Karen conflict in Burma/Myanmar – the guerrilla activity phase, the civil war phase and the ceasefire phase. It argues that two interrelated institutions – a participatory governance system and a politically autonomous women’s group – affect Karen women’s levels of political participation in their communities. The logic is that as the Karen conflict de-escalated from the civil war phase to the guerrilla activity phase, the KNU’s leadership, in response to deteriorating security conditions and outside pressure, was forced to accept greater civilian participation in governance that opened up the political space for Karen women to become politically active. This de-escalation process also meant that the KNU had fewer resources and lacked the institutional capacity to control the activities of the KNU-affiliated women’s group – the Karen Women’s Organisation. When the conflict de-escalated again after the KNU signed a ceasefire accord with the Burmese government in 2012, the terms of the ceasefire agreement in combination with an influx of non-governmental organisations created new avenues in which Karen women could participate in politics.     

Getting On or Getting By? Women, Social Capital and Political Participation

This article considers the utility of the concept of social capital in explaining differences in patterns of political participation among women and men, with particular reference to local politics and governance in Britain. It investigates whether women have access to the same quantity of social capital as men, whether their social capital is of the same type, and whether they use their social capital in the same way as men. Taking forward the 'capital' analogy, the article looks at how rich women are, and the extent to which they invest their social capital in political activity. As well as providing new insights into women's political behaviour, the analysis illuminates key issues for the broader social capital debate—regarding the distribution of social capital within communities, and the nature of the link between networks of sociability and patterns of political engagement.