EU Democracy Assistance in the Mediterranean: What Relationship with the Arab Uprisings?

This article analyzes the European Union (EU) policy for democracy assistance toward the Southern Mediterranean countries and tracks changes in the last decade, with a special emphasis on the most recent period. It shows that the EU policy, which goes under the acronym of EIDHR, has evolved, but predominantly in response to internal dynamics rather than to developments in Arab countries. The EU has increasingly provided assistance to local actors on the ground in non-member countries and has differentiated its action in authoritarian countries from countries in transition. When it comes to implementing its own policy, however, the EU is less able to promote democracy than human rights, and most of the funds go to support projects centered on relatively uncontroversial rights such as women's and children's.     

Democratization,civil society,and women's organizing in post-revolutionary Mozambique and Nicaragua

Mozambique and Nicaragua have each experienced a transition from a Marxist–Leninist, revolutionary state to a liberal–democratic–capitalist, multi-party state in the 1990s. However, in Mozambique, the historic party of the revolution, FRELIMO, remains the party in power, whil in Nicaragua the Sandinistas have been the opposition party since 1990. What impact have these transitions had on democracy, civil society, and the nature of women's organizing in the post-revolutionary period in each country? This article offers a critical examination of the notions of “democratization” and “civil society” by assessing the gains and losses that each country has experienced in terms of political, economic, and participatory democracy in the post-revolutionary period. Then, using the example of contemporary women's movements and current constructions of “feminism” emerging in each country, this article attempts to show the potential of autonomous women's organizing in civil society today.     

Women are more likely than men to blame structural factors for women's political under-representation: Evidence from 27 countries

Over time, gender and politics research has made progress in identifying those factors that result in low numbers of women in political institutions and in making evidence-informed suggestions about how to ameliorate them. These factors include discrimination in party recruitment processes, male-dominated political culture and broader gender inequalities in society. In contrast, little is known about public opinion regarding these drivers of women's political under-representation, especially whether to who or what women assign blame for the under-representation of women in politics differs from men. This article provides the first discussion and analysis of blame assignment for women's numeric under-representation in politics. In doing so, it outlines and operationalises a framework that distinguishes between meritocratic explanations of women's under-representation, whereby the blame for women not holding political office in greater numbers is assigned to women themselves, and structural explanations, whereby social forces external to women are seen to result in their numeric under-representation. Cross-national data from 27 European countries is used to show that women are significantly more likely than men to assign blame for women's numeric under-representation to structural factors. The hierarchical nature of the dataset is exploited using multilevel models and significant differences in levels of structural blame assignment between countries is found as well as between-country variation in the probability of women assigning blame to structural explanations for women's under-representation. Finally, the category of structural explanations is disaggregated in order to assess their relative prominence and to provide strong corroborative evidence that women predominantly assign blame for women's under-representation to political culture over other structural blame factors. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the study's findings for policy makers contemplating the pursuit of gender equality policies aimed at increasing women's political representation and makes suggestions for the direction of future research in this area.     

The gender gap in populist radical-right voting: examining the demand side in Western and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

In most countries, men are more likely to vote for parties of the populist radical right (PRR) than women. The authors argue here that there are two mechanisms that might potentially explain this gender gap: mediation (women's attitudes and characteristics differ from men's in ways that explain the PRR vote) and moderation (women vote for different reasons than men). They apply these two mechanisms to general theories of support for PRR parties—the socio-structural model, the discontent model, and the policy vote model—and test these on a large sample of voters in seventeen Western and Eastern European countries. The study shows that the gender gap is produced by a combination of moderation and mediation. Socio-structural differences between men and women exist, but the extent to which they explain the gender gap is limited, and primarily restricted to post-Communist countries. Furthermore, women generally do not differ from men in their level of nativism, authoritarianism or discontent with democracy. Among women, however, these attitudes are less strongly related to a radical-right vote. This suggests that men consider the issues of the radical right to be more salient, but also that these parties deter women for reasons other than the content of their political programme. While the existing research has focused almost exclusively on mediation, we show that moderation and mediation contribute almost equally to the gender gap.     

All Male Panels? Representation and Democratic Legitimacy

What does women's presence in political decision‐making bodies signal to citizens? Do these signals differ based on the body's policy decisions? And do women and men respond to women's presence similarly? Though scholars have demonstrated the substantive and symbolic benefits of women's representation, little work has examined how women's presence affects citizens' perceptions of democratic legitimacy. We test the relationship between representation and legitimacy beliefs through survey experiments on a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens. First, we find that women's equal presence legitimizes decisions that go against women's interests. We show suggestive evidence that this effect is particularly pronounced among men, who tend to hold less certain views on women's rights. Second, across decision outcomes and issue areas, women's equal presence legitimizes decision‐making processes and confers institutional trust and acquiescence. These findings add new theoretical insights into how, when, and for whom inclusive representation increases perceptions of democratic legitimacy.     

Hard times for citizenship: Women's movements in Chile and Mexico

This article comparatively analyses the cases of Mexico and Chile to understand how women's movements contest the meaning of citizenship in various national contexts. We also assess the consequences that different movement strategies, such as ‘autonomy’ versus ‘double militancy’, have for movements' citizenship goals. To explain the different outcomes in the two cases, we focus on the nature of the democratic transition, the internal coherence of women's movements, the nature of alliances with other civil society actors, the ideological orientation of the newly democratized state, the form of women's agency within the state, and the nature of the neoliberal economic reforms. We argue that a serious problem for women in both Chile and Mexico is the fact that governments themselves are deploying the concept of citizenship as a way to legitimate their social and economic policies. While women's movements seek to broaden the meaning of citizenship to include social rights, neoliberal governments employ the rhetoric of citizen activism to encourage society to provide its own solutions to economic hardship and poverty. While this trend is occurring in both Chile and Mexico, there are some features of the political opportunity structure in Chile that enable organized women to contest the state's more narrow vision of democratic citizenship. In Mexico, on the other hand, the neoliberal economic discourse of the current government is matched by a profoundly conservative ideological rhetoric, thereby reducing the political opportunities for women to forward a gender equality agenda.     

Ethnic Politics and Women's Empowerment in Africa: Ministerial Appointments to Executive Cabinets

Under what conditions do women participate in executive power in multiethnic societies? Previous research has examined how political institutions, socioeconomic factors, and cultural norms affect the appointment of women as cabinet ministers. However, no study has assessed the extent to which the politicization of ethnicity—a cleavage that shapes political life in many countries—affects women's cabinet appointments. Focusing on sub‐Saharan Africa, we argue that women are less likely to become cabinet ministers where incumbents use such appointments to build patronage‐based alliances with politicians who act as advocates for ethnic constituencies. Using an original dataset on the composition of cabinets in 34 African countries from 1980 to 2005, we show that women's share of cabinet appointments is significantly lower in countries where leaders must accommodate a larger number of politicized ethnic groups, but it rises with higher levels of democracy and greater representation of women in parliament.     

Embedded in Social Cleavages: An Explanation of the Variation in Timing of Women's Suffrage

Under which conditions did introduction of women's suffrage occur before the First World War (early), and when only after the Second World War (late)? This article analyses necessary and sufficient conditions to explain both early and late introduction of women's suffrage in 14 Western European countries using Rokkan's cleavage theory, which distinguishes between four cleavages: religious, ethnic‐linguistic, class and sectoral. In addition to testing Rokkan's cleavage theory, this study adds a structural dimension to agency‐based studies on the role of the women's movement, which helps to explain why some such movements had much earlier success than others. Finally, this article advances the democratisation literature that takes the timing of the introduction of male suffrage as a proxy for the timing of the introduction of women's suffrage, as the timing of the introduction of male suffrage does not necessarily mean early introduction of women's suffrage. Based on fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), the article shows that the absence of an ethnic‐linguistic cleavage is a necessary condition for early introduction of women's suffrage. Moreover, the fuzzy‐set analysis highlights that the absence of a religious cleavage combined with a class cleavage or a sectoral cleavage combined with the absence of a class cleavage is sufficient for early introduction of women's suffrage. Concerning late introduction of women's suffrage, it is the combination of a class cleavage with a religious cleavage or the presence of an ethnic‐linguistic cleavage in the absence of a sectoral cleavage that prove to be sufficient.     

Feminism and Contemporary Liberal Citizenship: The Undecidability of 'Women'

Liberal citizenship has been seen as posing a dilemma for feminists. Either women are taken to be equal to men, in which case their specific capacities as women are unrecognised and their citizenship is substantively unequal; or else women are taken to be different, with the consequent risk that the rights citizenship allows and the obligations it imposes will again be substantively unequal. On this view, women cannot simply be included in liberal citizenship because the meaning of the liberal public sphere is constructed in opposition to the private sphere of natural feminine care and women's subordination to male heads of household. Using Derridean deconstruction to examine three significant moments in liberalism, this paper argues that the term 'women' is more productively seen as 'undecidable' in this tradition, working both to construct the binary opposition between public and private on which it depends but also to disrupt it. While the feminist critique of liberalism is important to analysing the logic by which women have been positioned outside full citizenship rights, in practice feminists have made some gains by reconfiguring the terms of liberalism around this undecidability. The aim of the paper is to carry out something like a genealogy of contemporary liberalism in order to discern its multiple origins and contingent development; we will then be in a better position to understand the practical possibilities for women's citizenship in Britain today.     

Japanese women in grassroots politics: building a gender-equal society from the bottom up

Abstract

The 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women highlights the importance of equal participation of women in public life. Since the early 1960s, women in Japan have voted in elections at significantly higher rates than men. However, Japanese women's equal participation in policy formulation and decision making lags far behind major democracies. Gender equality is stated under the Japanese Constitution, but social practices are far from equal. There are no legal constraints on Japanese women's right to candidacy for public office, but they are far underrepresented in local and national elected assemblies. In 1999 an important landmark in the substantial progress towards gender equality took place when the Japanese government, for the first time, legally denounced the stereotyped division of roles on the basis of gender and described men and women as equal partners. An unprecedented amount of legislation, together with policy changes and organizational reform at the national level were introduced from this state-led initiation. In the same year, women's grassroots groups were rapidly moving beyond the reach of policy, organizational, and legal changes; they successfully conducted a major nationwide campaign for ‘More Women to Assemblies¡’ and increased the number of elected women representatives at the local level at an unprecedented rate. The purpose of this article is to assess the potential of increased women's political voices in Japan, which can be seen as an alternative way of solving the problems of political disengagement in the male-dominated representative democracy. To this end, the article examines the course of watershed events in 1999 towards a gender-equal society in Japan, with special emphasis on the importance of grassroots missions in eliminating barriers to Japanese women's political participation.     

Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Local Gender‐Based Earnings Inequality and Women's Belief in the American Dream

This article ties together research on gender, income inequality, and political ideology, by exploring the effect of gender‐based earnings inequality on women's belief in a fundamental tenet of the “American Dream”—meritocracy. Focusing on gender‐based earnings inequality in women's local residential context, and drawing upon relative deprivation theory, this article argues that variation across local areas in the relative economic status of women should influence the ideological outlook of resident women. In contrast to relative deprivation theory, but consistent with rising expectations theory, I argue that ideological disillusionment should peak in contexts in which women's earnings fall closely behind men, and that ideological optimism should rebound in contexts in which women's earnings have achieved parity with that of men. Utilizing pooled survey data, I find strong evidence that individual women's belief in the American Dream varies according to whether local women's relative earnings indicate confrontation with or breaking of the “glass ceiling.”     

Is Standing for Women a Stand Against Terrorism? Exploring the Connection Between Women's Rights and Terrorism

Previous large-N studies have found that the advancement of women's rights leads to a decline in conflict, but no large-N research has explored the possibility of a similar relationship between women's rights and terrorism. Nevertheless, policymakers have long argued that the advancement of women's rights forms a key component of counterterrorism policy. Simply put, we lay out a rationale for the argument that increased women's rights reduce the likelihood of terrorism. We test this hypothesis using CIRI's women's rights data combined with two datasets accounting for domestic terrorism and the production of transnational terrorism. While the results show that women's rights overall are not a panacea for both types of terrorism, the provision of women's rights is shown to have a negative relationship with domestic terrorism. States and international institutions should take the differing effects of women's rights across different types of terrorism into account when designing counterterrorism policies.     

Women's rights in transition: the collision of feminist interest groups,religion and non-governmental organizations in three Latin American countries

This article explores the roles and successes of feminist interest groups, religious interests and non-governmental organizations in promoting or blocking reproductive policies in three Andean countries—Chile, Ecuador and Peru. Access to reproductive services and facilities, such as birth control and elective abortion, in the transitional democracies of Latin America has remained as restricted as under authoritarian regimes. The issue is complicated by the involvement of ideologically driven domestic and foreign interests attempting to influence policy decisions. The political outcomes have significant implications for the nature of democracy and for women's representation across Latin America. The evidence shows that successes have been varied for all women's groups involved in the reproductive rights issue. The primary reason appears to be that, despite advances in political representation in the region, the more established religious interests and other countervailing forces have managed to maintain the status quo in the face of feminist interest group demands. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Women's rights as human rights’: Feminist practices,global feminism,and human rights regimes in transnationality 1

This paper argues that the recent calls for articulating women's rights as human rights can be successful only by misrecognition of the geopolitical context of human rights internationalism and the nationalisms that are sustained by it. Arguing that it is only on the level of universalized constructions of ‘women’ as a category and the generalized invocations of oppression by ‘global feminism's’ ‘American’ practitioners that such discourses of rights become powerful, this paper argues that policy and action require addressing localized and transnational specificities that created gendered inequalities. Even in national contexts such as in India, generalized invocations of women's human rights have not been useful since hegemonic forms of religion and culture have also been oppressive to women in minority communities. Concepts of economic and social justice rather than rights may work better in many such cases.     

Women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion in Mexico City: citizenship,experience and clientelism

In April 2007, after a period of intense social debate, the Mexico City Legal Assembly legalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, which was an unprecedented development in women's rights in Mexico. Within the context of a proliferation of public discourses about women's citizenship rights changes in women's social status in Mexico, this article explores the extent to which the newly legalized character of abortion is interpreted by women as a right. Drawing on 24 interviews with women who had a legal termination of pregnancy between 2008 and 2009, this research shows that legalization opens up new and complex relationships between women as subjects of rights and the state. Such relationships are expressed as three discursive figures: legal abortion (1) as a concession from the government, (2) as ‘excessive’ tolerance by the state, and (3) as a right to be protected and guaranteed. The analysis shows that women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion are mediated by profound transformations, which Mexican society is currently undergoing. These include changes related to a shift from a clientist political culture to one more framed in terms of citizenship, the subjective effects of family planning policies, and their ambivalent relationships with Catholic notions of women and motherhood, and the effects of feminist discourses of women's citizenship, abortion, and reproductive rights.     

How Vigilant is the Vibrant Civil Society in Bangladesh? A Survey-based Analysis

Although international development organizations and donor countries regard civil society organizations (CSOs) as the best instrument for institutionalizing democracy in third world countries, few of these organizations have successfully influenced government policies or played a role in consolidating democracy. Based on survey data and empirical observations, this article will argue that civil society in Bangladesh may be noteworthy for its contributions to development and social welfare but that it can hardly contribute to democracy. CSOs participate in vibrant grassroots social services. However, they lack the necessary participatory attributes for proper interest articulation and monitoring of the state, resulting in a less vigilant civil society. The article links civil society's non-vigilant nature to co-optation and politicization by political forces.     

Protest,citizenship and democratic renewal: the student movement in Chile

What is the significance of upsurge of protest and claims-making for how we understand citizenship in relatively new democracies? In Chile, some 20 years after a paradigmatically successful democratisation, student protests for a more equitable education system have re-politicised and transformed debates about what democracy and citizenship should mean. Claims are being staked not only for educational reform but also for a new model of citizenship based on rights and welfare, in contrast to neoliberal models of citizenship as individualisation and consumption. In raising consciousness as regards the costs of neoliberal democracy, the student protests are reviving the country's radical traditions and past practices of an engaged, political active youth movement.     

Do female politicians empower women to vote or run for office? A regression discontinuity approach

Persistent gender gaps in political officeholding and mass political participation jeopardize women's equal representation in government. This paper brings new evidence to the longstanding hypotheses that the presence of additional female candidates and officeholders helps address these gaps by empowering other women to vote or run for office themselves. With a regression discontinuity approach and data on 3813 US state legislative elections where a woman opposed a man, I find that the election of additional women in competitive US state legislative elections has no discernible causal effects on other women's political participation at the mass or elite levels. These estimates are precise enough to rule out even substantively small effects. These results stand in stark contrast to a number of findings from India, suggesting that although electing the first women in a society can have these empowering effects, remaining barriers to women's inclusion in American democracy go beyond what further increases in female officeholding can themselves erode.