Amy C. Alexander

Emancipating Sexuality: Breakthroughs into a Bulwark of Tradition

This article presents evidence for a rising emancipatory spirit, across generations and around the world, in a life domain in which religion hitherto blocked emancipatory gains: sexual freedoms. We propose an explanation of rising emancipative values that integrates several approaches into a single idea—the utility ladder of freedoms. Specifically, we suggest that objectively improving living conditions—from rising life expectancies to broader education—transform the nature of life from a source ofxa0threats into a source of opportunities. As life begins to hold more promise for increasing population segments, societies climb the utility ladder of freedoms: practicing and respecting universal freedoms becomes increasingly vital to take advantage of rising life opportunities. This trend has begun to spill over into a life domain in which religious norms have until recently been able to resist emancipatory gains: sexual freedoms. We present (1) crossnational, (2) longitudinal, (3) generational and (4) multilevel evidence on an unprecedentedly broad basis in support of this theory.

Women’s Political Empowerment Through Public Opinion Research: The Citizen Perspective

Engaging in politics through various activities is an important way for citizens to empower themselves politically. Using public opinion data (World Values Survey 2010–2014), Alexander and Coffe measure gender gaps in mainstream and activist modes of engagement, as well as more general attitudes towards women’s role in politics, thereby focusing on differences between birth cohorts and between countries, depending on their level of gender equality. The chapter concludes with suggestions on how public opinion research could help us to further improve our knowledge on gender differences in political empowerment by including more specific measures which take into account women’s different focus and interests compared with men.

Got Milk? How Freedoms Evolved From Dairying Climates:

The roots and routes of cultural evolution are still a mystery. Here, we aim to lift a corner of that veil by illuminating the deep origins of encultured freedoms, which evolved through centuries-long processes of learning to pursue and transmit values and practices oriented toward autonomous individual choice. Analyzing a multitude of data sources, we unravel for 108 Old World countries a sequence of cultural evolution reaching from (a) ancient climates suitable for dairy farming to (b) lactose tolerance at the eve of the colonial era to (c) resources that empowered people in the early industrial era to (d) encultured freedoms today. Historically, lactose tolerance peaks under two contrasting conditions: cold winters and cool summers with steady rain versus hot summers and warm winters with extensive dry periods (Study 1). However, only the cold/wet variant of these two conditions links lactose tolerance at the eve of the colonial era to empowering resources in early industrial times, and to encultured freedoms today (Study 2). We interpret these findings as a form of gene-culture coevolution within a novel thermo-hydraulic theory of freedoms.

Conclusions and Further Directions

This chapter returns to the definition of women’s political empowerment and the questions that motivated this volume. We assess the contributions of the chapters herein. We offer key takeaway points from these and call for greater connections to the established literature, particularly in development studies and advanced by international organizations. We end by discussing briefly the progress made by this volume toward the larger effort of conceptualizing and measuring women’s political empowerment and offer suggestions for moving forward with this agenda.

Does Gender Matter? Female Politicians’ Engagement in Anti-corruption Efforts

The research on gender and corruption has shown a positive link between the percentage of women in elected office and lower levels of corruption. This research has not focused much on the individual-level behavior of MPs but has nevertheless assumed individual-level mechanisms behind this link. Thus, there is a need to open this “black box” in order to find out whether female politicians actually engage successfully in anti-corruption efforts and to a higher extent than men. In this chapter we investigate whether female politicians have politicized corruption more often than men in election campaigns during the last twenty-five years. The results show that even though female candidates tend to politicize corruption more frequently, they rarely make it to a position powerful enough to influence policies directly.

The Historic Roots of Quality of Government: The Role of Gender Equality

Numerous studies confirm that ceteris paribus when a country performs well in gender equality, it performs well in quality of government and vice versa. This chapter adds to this literature a theory that considers gender equality within households fundamental to understanding the historical roots of the quality of government. The chapter argues that greater gender egalitarianism in early household formation patterns creates a core basis of “bottom-up” support for higher quality of government and related civic norms, namely, generalized social trust. From this perspective, the chapter works with fertility data for gauging the long-term effects of household gender equality on generalized trust and quality of government from 1800 to today.

Micro-perspectives on the Gender–Corruption Link

A growing literature evidences a strong link between higher levels of gender equality and lower levels of corruption. Much of this research evaluates the link through a focus on the impact of women’s inclusion in political office holding. Few studies turn to the analysis of mass attitudes for greater understanding of this relationship or larger links between gender equality and low corruption. This chapter works with global public opinion on the importance attributed to honest elections from the most recent wave of the World Values Surveys to further test theories behind the gender–corruption link. In particular, the chapter focuses on individual-level processes that might underlie the link as well as on contextual factors on which the impact of those processes may be conditional.

A multilevel study of gender egalitarian values across Muslim-majority provinces: the role of women and urban spaces

ABSTRACT In global value research, Muslim-majority countries emerge not only as consistently more patriarchal but also as a rather homogeneous cultural cluster to that effect. We, however, know little about the variation within Muslim-majority countries in these values through comparative analysis of subnational units. This limits the possibility of identifying ‘localized pockets of transformation’ in support for gender equality in what the global research depicts as a relatively stagnate region. This manuscript is a first attempt at explaining the subnational variation in gender egalitarian values across Muslim-majority countries and its effect on key individual-level variables like gender. We model province and individual-level variance across 64 provinces in Egypt, Iran and Turkey with multilevel analysis (Hierarchical Linear Modeling HLM 7.0). Results show that whether provinces are more urban positively influences gender egalitarian values. At the individual level, we find that whether provinces are more urban has the most powerful impact on unmarried women in increasing support for gender equality. Based on the results, we conclude that research must pay greater attention to the local contexts in which Muslim women are embedded, like their provinces, in terms of the opportunities they create outside of the ‘marriage market’ and the implications for their support of gender equality.

How does civil conflict influence gender equality? A case study of the Egyptian Revolution 2011–2013

ABSTRACT Analyzing the changes to gender equality in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, this manuscript evaluates whether civil conflict creates new openings for women’s empowerment. Recently, the literature has considered civil conflict a potentially powerful, transformative force in women’s social and political inclusion. Given Egypt’s comparatively low performance in gender equality achievements and policies, the 2011 Revolution creates a critical opportunity to evaluate the transformative power of conflict. The analysis shows that the Egyptian revolution was transformative of legislation on behalf of women’s physical security; women saw gains emerge in this area of legislation from processes connected to the revolution. Pre and post-test, qualitative and quantitative evidence suggest that the key mechanism through which such transformation occurred was the strengthening of the local women’s movement. This is demonstrated through a critical analysis of the various mechanisms of change highlighted in the growing literature on conflict and gender equality. However, the analysis also reveals that the lack of women’s formal representation and the seizure of power by Islamic forces contributed to setbacks that inhibited further-reaching change during the transition.