Research

Applications to Non-Western Countries

Workshop: “Does Research on State Feminism Travel? New Agendas for Studying Gender Equality Mechanisms Outside the West

From the beginning the RNGS research project focused on postindustrial democracies in the West. At the same time, we have long been interested in exploring the ways the state feminism approach might be useful to scholars who are interested in studying women’s policy offices in transitional regimes. By collecting names of experts and others interested in this question, we waited for an opportunity to bring people together to discuss possibilities. Thanks to a tip from Melissa Haussman, we found the Women’s Worlds Conference in Ottawa in 2011 to be that long awaited opportunity. We offered a half day workshop that attracted 19 scholars and activists from 10 different countries. This group agreed to build a loose network, Going Global with State Feminism, to help regionally based groups pursue coordinated research on women’s policy agencies. The original workshop materials, the workshop report, and the working list of participants are available on this website. We had originally planned on making an application to the Rockefeller Foundation to hold a meeting of the new group in Bellagio Italy, with Amy and Amanda Gouws (Stellenbosch University-South Africa) and Dzodzi Tsikata (University of Ghana). But we have since put these projects on hold due to our work schedules. Of course, if anyone is interested in taking up the coordination of the network, please do not hesitate to contact Amy. The workshop materials, report from the workshop and the working list of the incipient network can be found in the section on documents and materials.

World Bank Report

The World Bank commissioned us to prepare a background paper on the design and effectiveness of gender equality mechanisms for the World Development Report in 2012, which was to have a significant gender component. The submitted paper focuses on how to take the RNGS findings and apply them to understanding women’s policy agencies outside the West. Part one presents the RNGS findings. It assesses the usefulness of the RNGS measurement tools for research in other countries along with a set of questions that must be considered in designing such a tool. This first part concludes with a list of conditions that, in various combinations, may lead to agency success and policy recommendations for designing gender machineries in the western democracies. The second part of the report makes a critical analysis of published work on gender machineries in developing countries. Based on a systematic inventory of the literature on these structures it aims to show the extent to which we have credible evidence to know if, how, and why gender machineries have been important and effective “…institutional channel[s] for gender policies and guidelines for the State”. The paper concludes with a presentation of policy recommendations that aim to promote a more systematic study of gender machinery performance. The paper served as an important foundation for the Ottawa Workshop and for our User’s Guide for practitioners. The report is also available on this website.

Qualitative Phase – Issues, Networks & Books

The first phase of the project is the collection and qualitative / descriptive analysis of the findings from research on more than 100 policy debates in 15 countries and at the European Union level, occurring between 1970 and 2000. All data is being collected according to a common research design (see RNGS project description developed in collaboration with scholars in the RNGS network. Six edited books—one on each of the issue areas covered by the project (job training, abortion, prostitution, political representation, and a hot issue)—and a capstone book will present the qualitative form of the information through descriptive analysis of the project’s hypotheses. See specific descriptions below for each issue network. Two of these books were published in 2001; one in 2004 and two in 2005-6. The capstone book will appear in 2008. For more on issue network see below under this rubric. For more on the capstone book, go to capstone.

The design of this study purposefully uses the policy debate as the unit of analysis, and not the nation state. This reflects the trend in comparative public policy that identifies sectoral level dynamics as being just as, if not more, important as national determinants in explaining variations in policy formation. The RNGS group conceptualized the universe of policy debates in terms of four policy areas that touch upon major areas of gender relations—work, sexuality, reproduction, and citizenship. Specific policy areas in each of these four sectors were selected to be studied—job training, prostitution, abortion and political representation. The group selected a fifth area to determine whether women’s movements and women’s policy agencies have any impact on non gendered policy areas of great national significance—the “hot issue.”

Country researchers were asked to select three debates in which to study the interface between movement and agency for each of the four gendered areas in their country using sampling criteria determined by the group. For the hot issue, researchers selected one debate. The table below shows the distribution of the qualitative studies that were conducted by country and by policy area. In addition to these, studies were conducted on Israel for prostitution and on Japan for political representation.

Quantitative Phase – Data Set

Closely following from the first qualitative phase of the RNGS project is the quantitative aspect of the long-term study. This second phase involves transposing the qualitative analyses of the impact of women’s movements and women’s policy agencies on policy formation in 13 western post industrial countries into a quantitative form through a “bridging approach.” For more on our bridging approach see Bridging through RNGS 2006.

RNGS transposed the major variables of the qualitative model into quantitative measures and descriptive texts in a way that allows testing of the project hypotheses AND provides user friendly information about the policy debates, women’s movements, and women’s policy agencies. The codebook includes a detailed discussion of nominal and operational definitions and measurements for each concept listed below. Each concept is broken-down into variables as well.

The final dataset contains 130 observations coded on 29 concepts with a total of 108 variables. It provides information on women’s movements, women’s policy offices, policy making processes and policy debates in the 13 countries over a 30 year time period. It is a unique source of cross-national, cross-sectoral, and longitudinal information on comparative gender policy issues.

RNGS researchers filled out new worksheets to transpose their qualitative descriptions into a form that could be coded. These uniform worksheets were used to code the variables/concepts of the study except for the national level independent variables. These worksheets produced additional text information that is included as an appendix to the quantitative data set. We conducted intercoder reliability checks on 22 debates (Cohen’s Kappa of 0.762). The RNGS dataset will also be archived with ICPSR in 2008.

RNGS Dataset Suite
The dataset suite includes a PDF codebook/users guide and two data files—one of the numerically based data set in SPSS and a second file with text appendices of supplemental descriptive information for 22 variables in PDF.

Measuring Women’s Movement Change

Measuring Women’s Movement Mobilization—Concept 21

In measuring the effect of the variation in the women’s movements capabilities to mobilize women, we identified two components: mobilization potential and degree of activism—Concept 21 in the dataset. Data on women’s activism through various mobilization structures over time was available from the country directors. Measuring potential—which would standardize variations in the measures of activism comparatively—proved to be more difficult. Social movement literature defines potential as “the degree to which women have sympathy for and/or contribute to organizations supporting movement goals and the proportion of individual members of a society willing to support the movement”. We sought to determine those attitudes across time and countries through results of public opinion polls. We looked for survey questions that tapped into attitudes toward both general women’s movement goals and specific women’s movement policy issues identified by researchers in each country for the different time periods studied in that country from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

The World Values Survey was a potential longitudinal source, but we found that it had many validity problems. In some countries, public opinion data on women’s attitudes on similar questions from reputable national surveys showed very different results to the WVS. In France for example there was as much as 20% difference. This echoed the reliability and validity issues raised by other researchers about the WVS. As an alternative, we looked into using a series of international and national surveys as a source for this variable; however, we found that comparable surveys for all time periods and countries did not exist. In fact, especially for the 1970s, no opinion surveys remain.

We have made available here, in a single document, the working materials from our attempts at compiling the data for movement mobilization—go to the quantitative dataset and see Concept 21. The document first presents the context and operationalization of the variable as it appears in the codebook, which includes the rationale for the final decision to exclude the variable. The second part includes the raw data collected in the effort to operationalize the variable, including an assessment of the different surveys, a list of the specific questions on gender equality from the different surveys by country, and a presentation of the collected survey data by country.

Institutionalization and Mobilization

Our efforts to develop measures of institutionalization and activism were more successful. We included both indicators in the quantitative dataset over-time and cross-nationally. One of our last projects was to analyze this data in the context of developing a more reliable and valid longitudinal and cross-national measurement of women’s movement change, conceptualized in terms of variations in strength. Dorothy and Amy coauthored the first draft of the paper “Women’s Movement Change: Conceptualization, Measurement and Investigation” with Season Hoard, who undertook a significant review of recent feminist and non-feminist scholarship that attempts to measure women’s and social movement change. We presented the paper at the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop, “Thinking Big About ‘Gender Equality’ Policy in Comparative Perspective” in Antwerp in April and will be presenting a revised version at the upcoming APSA meetings in New Orleans. Our aim is to submit the piece to a social movement journal. See the version we presented at ECPR.

Comparative State Feminism II

Joyce Outshoorn (Leiden University) and Johanna Kantola (University of Helsinki) have assembled a group of researchers, including many from RNGS, to report on changes in women’s policy machinery in Europe, North America, and Australia a decade after the publication of the initial study, Comparative State Feminism (Sage: 1995). The starting point is the dramatic restructuring of the political context, where state feminism is situated, in the 2000s. There have been major developments, such as globalization, regionalization, welfare state restructuring, privatization, the rise of multilevel governance and international terrorism. The book analyses the effects of these state reforms on the institutionalisation of women’s public policy in twelve Western democracies since the mid-1990s. Key questions include: Have the women’s policy agencies – state institutions charged with developing and implementing women’s public policy – been able to develop, maintain or enhance their roles in transformed political contexts? Have state feminists made use of possible new opportunities arising from the changes? Have they kept women’s issues on the transformed political agenda and preserved their alliances with women’s movement groups? Have women’s movements themselves changed in ways that make them less or more effective as a political base for policy change?

Johanna and Joyce worked with contributors to complete the book following a highly successful conference at the University of Washington in the end of April 2006. The conference was attended by almost all of the book contributors, gender scholars from the UW, Sweden, California, and Washington State and graduate and undergraduate students from the UW. Changing State Feminism: Women’s Policy Agencies Confront Shifting Institutional Terrain is now available from Palgrave Macmillan.

Capstone Book

The Project—In 1998, RNGS agreed that at the end of the project we should do an overview analysis of our results across the five policy areas using both the quantitative and qualitative data findings from the project. Referred to as the capstone analysis, this part of the project has been just as, if not more complicated and time consuming as the qualitative and quantitative phase. The capstone book, co authored by Dorothy McBride and Amy Mazur, with the participation of Joni Lovenduski, Joyce Outshoorn, Marila Guadagnini, Birgit Sauer and the help of Diane Sainsbury, The Politics of State Feminism: Innovation in Comparative Research (2010, Temple University Press), presents an integrated mixed methods exploration into state feminism. It integrates statistical analysis, qualitative comparative analysis and case studies of causal mechanisms to investigate the role of women’s policy agencies in enhancing the influence of women’s movements in the affairs of the state through representation—in other words their role in achieving state feminism. The book has two parts—the first develops a theory of state feminism through a systematic mixed methods analysis; and the second presents separate chapters by Outshoorn, Lovenduski and Guadagnini, Sauer, and Mazur and McBride that go “beyond state feminism” to examine the implications of RNGS data for theories of women’s movements, political representation, framing and gendering and feminist institutionalism. While it uses RNGS data as a launching pad, the capstone study and findings are a separate contribution to both feminist and non feminist research and the study of democracies, movements, representation and policy in a comparative perspective. Temple University Press publishes The Politics of State Feminism, August 2010.

The Findings (excerpt from the book) “In Western postindustrial democracies, women’s movements have had remarkable success in achieving procedural access and policy response since the 1970s. However, contrary to social movement theories as well as the state feminism framework used in the book, there is no one recipe for success—not resource mobilization, not political opportunity structure, not support of the Left, and not alliances with women’s policy agencies inside the state. Movement actors make their claims on government in a variety of contexts, some more favorable than others, and while agencies may help from time to time, they are not necessary. Rather, their role has tended to be one of back-up, stepping in to make the difference when usual favorable conditions, such as open policy arenas, supportive governing majorities, or welcoming policy cultures are not present; otherwise movements can usually succeed on their own.

Nevertheless, a majority of women’s policy agencies support women’s movement goals that oppose the status quo and many of those help gender the terms of policy debates. They thus represent the women’s movement despite their place inside the state and their closeness to traditional structures of power. Agencies rarely work to bury women’s movement aims; they are, however, Symbolic in a minority of debates and thus disappoint those seeking women friendly outcomes. There are no easy explanations for different levels of agency activities: there are no regional groupings where agencies conform to specific patterns. There is also no blueprint for designing a movement ally inside the state. Administrative resources and policy capacity do not portend agency effectiveness nor do identifiable levels of Women’s Movement Resources, Favorable Policy Environments or Left Support. The new politics of state feminism is complex, context specific, and conditional.”

Bibliography

This bibliography includes some of the sources that were used in the RNGS project for research and designing the study. It is not an exhaustive project bibliography. The following themes were used to classify the literature:

Women’s Movement
Women’s Policy Agency
New Institutionalism
Gendering
Methodology (Feminist, Comparative, Quantitative, etc)
Job Training
Prostitution
Austria Prostitution
Abortion
Austria Abortion
Belgium Abortion
Political Representation/ Democratic Theory (Feminist and Non Feminist)
Austria Political Representation
Belgium Political Representation
Hot Issue – Australia
Transnational Feminism/ Gender Mainstreaming
Gender and Welfare State
General Social Movements
Public Policy/ Comparative Public Policy
Comparative Feminist Policy
Feminist Theory