Since 2000, only twenty-seven women have achieved executive office worldwide. Congress contained only about 17% and the Japanese Diet had only 11%. For example, in December of 2009, Rwanda’s legislature contained 56% women, while the U.S. Women’s participation in parliaments, high courts, and executive offices worldwide has reached record high numbers, but this global increase in women’s representation masks significant variation among different democratic political systems. The third section applies a ‘gendered institutionalist’ (GI) framework to the contrasting cases of Argentina and Chile, showing how formal and informal institutions structure the legislative process in ways that influence the actions of female legislators and the likelihood that women’s actions will succeed or fail. The second section outlines the features shared by HI and FPS that address these gaps. The first provides a critical overview of the existing literature on women’s substantive representation, highlighting some of the gaps in our knowledge about whether, why, and how female legislators ‘act for’ women.
The chapter is divided into three sections. This chapter combines the main contributions of historical institutionalism (HI) and feminist political science (FPS) to show how a ‘gendered institutionalist’ approach fills in the lacunae in the existing literature. The first investigates the factors that shape women’s participation in electoral politics and the second explores whether women’s presence makes a difference, particularly in terms of advancing women’s rights.
Women have made impressive gains worldwide in terms of their access to elected office, a development that has led to two distinct research agendas. However, this chapter argues that what has changed is the way in which women's and feminist lobbying has taken advantage of transformations in the state and political structures and entered into a more interactive and dynamic relationship with those structures. In broad terms, the content of the public policy areas around which women organize has not necessarily changed dramatically. Its formation and modus operand, are described, and the chapter considers a number of theoretical models explored for understanding the new forms of organization which have emerged within the Brazilian women's movement as well as the movement's relationship with a state that is highly porous and now undergoing some profound structural changes. It then takes as a case study the Feminist Research and Advisory Centre (Centro Feminista de Estudos e Assessoria, CFEMEA, formed in the 1990s as a new kind of feminist lobbying organization.
The chapter begins with historical perspectives on how the women's movement has approached the state in Brazil prior to, and during, the transition to democracy in the 1980s. This chapter examines the ways in which the women's movement in Brazil has come to organize itself so as to exert maximum, effective lobbying pressure on particular points of the Brazilian state in order to get gender-sensitive legislation and policy formulated, debated and passed.
0 kommentar(er)
