Jocelyn Viterna

Pulled, Pushed and Persuaded: Explaining Women’s Mobilization into the Salvadoran Guerrilla Army

Using a rare representative sample of grassroots activists and nonactivists, this study identifies three paths that consistently led Salvadoran women to involvement in the FMLM guerrilla army: politicized guerillas, reluctant guerillas, and recruited guerillas. These mobilization paths arose from the patterned intersections of individual‐level biographies, networks, and situational contexts. The implications of these findings extend beyond studies of revolutionary activism to analyses of microlevel mobilization in general. Activists are heterogeneous and often follow multiple paths to the same participation outcome. Capturing these multiple paths is imperative for generating theoretically sound explanations of mobilization that are also empirically effective in distinguishing activists from nonactivists.

Resolving the Democracy Paradox: Democratization and Women’s Legislative Representation in Developing Nations, 1975 to 2009

Increasing levels of democratic freedoms should, in theory, improve women’s access to political positions. Yet studies demonstrate that democracy does little to improve women’s legislative representation. To resolve this paradox, we investigate how variations in the democratization process—including pre-transition legacies, historical experiences with elections, the global context of transition, and post-transition democratic freedoms and quotas—affect women’s representation in developing nations. We find that democratization’s effect is curvilinear. Women in non-democratic regimes often have high levels of legislative representation but little real political power. When democratization occurs, women’s representation initially drops, but with increasing democratic freedoms and additional elections, it increases again. The historical context of transition further moderates these effects. Prior to 1995, women’s representation increased most rapidly in countries transitioning from civil strife—but only when accompanied by gender quotas. After 1995 and the Beijing Conference on Women, the effectiveness of quotas becomes more universal, with the exception of post-communist countries. In these nations, quotas continue to do little to improve women’s representation. Our results, based on pooled time series analysis from 1975 to 2009, demonstrate that it is not democracy—as measured by a nation’s level of democratic freedoms at a particular moment in time—but rather the democratization process that matters for women’s legislative representation.

Democratization, Women's Movements, and Gender-Equitable States : A Framework for Comparison

There is a rich collection of case studies examining the relationship between democratization, womens movements, and gendered state outcomes, but the variation across cases is still poorly understood. In response, this article develops a theoreticallygrounded comparative framework to evaluate and explain cross-national variations in the gendered outcomes of democratic transitions. The framework highlights four theoretical factors—the context of the transition, the legacy of womens previous mobilizations, political parties, and international influences—that together shape the political openings and ideologies available to womens movements in transitional states. Applying the framework to four test cases, we conclude that womens movements are most effective at targeting democratizing states when transitions are complete, when womens movements develop cohesive coalitions, when the ideology behind the transition (rather than the ideology of the winning regime) aligns easily with feminist frames, and when womens past activism legitimates present-day feminist demands. These findings challenge current conceptualizations of how democratic transitions affect gender in state institutions and provide a comparative framework for evaluating variation across additional cases.

How Development Matters A Research Note on the Relationship between Development, Democracy and Women's Political Representation

Most studies find that the substantial cross-national variation in womens legislative representation is not explained by cross-national differences in socioeconomic development. By contrast, this note demonstrates that economic development does matter. Rather than looking for across-the-board general effects, we follow Matland (1998), and analyze developed and developing nations separately. We find that accepted explanations fit rich nations better than poor nations, and obscure the effects of democracy on womens representation in the developing world. We call for new theoretical models that better explain womens political representation within developing nations, and we suggest that democracy should be central to future models.

Transnational social protection: setting the agenda

Abstract Social welfare has long been considered something which states provide to its citizens. Yet today 220 million people live in a country in which they do not hold citizenship. How are people on the move protected and provided for in the contemporary global context? Have institutional sources of social welfare begun to cross borders to meet the needs of individuals who live transnational lives? This introductory paper proposes a transnational social protection (TSP) research agenda designed to map the kinds of protections which exist for people on the move, determine how these protections travel across borders, and analyze variations in access to these protections. We define TSP; introduce the heuristic tool of a ‘resource environment’ to map and analyze variations in TSP over time, through space, and across individuals; and provide empirical examples demonstrating the centrality of TSP for scholars of states, social welfare, development, and migration.

Wiring the World: Access to Information Technology and Development in Poor Countries

Abstract Scholars and policy makers continue to debate whether information technology (IT) facilitates economic growth and quality of life throughout the world. “Cyber optimists” argue that access to IT promotes development whereas “cyber pessimists” assert that such access simply exacerbates global inequality. Our quantitative analysis generally supports the former perspective, showing that access to IT increases economic expansion and decreases child mortality in the developing world. However, the increasing “digital divide” between rich and poor countries threatens the capacity of IT to contribute to development and may, in the long run, provide greater support to those who criticize development efforts based on information technology.

The Left and “Life” in El Salvador

Throughout the past decade, governments across Latin America have experienced an unprecedented swing to the left. In this essay, I ask: Does the rise of the Left promote womens equality? Or in contrast, could womens continued subordination be an important factor promoting the rise of the Left? Using the case of El Salvador, I demonstrate how the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) deradicalized its public image—away from “guerrilla insurgents” and toward a viable political party—at least in part by converting its 1980s support for reproductive rights into present-day support for one of the most restrictive abortion policies in the world. I conclude that reversing the causal question about gender and left-leaning political parties may not only extend our understanding of the complicated relationship between gender and the Left but also improve our understanding of the factors moving Latin America from right to left, and from “red” to “pink.”

Conceiving While Poor, Imprisoned For Murder

Abstract Though the Salvadoran total abortion ban has been a rallying cry for the global abortion rights movement, these 17 Salvadoran women appear to have not even purposefully ended a pregnancy, but rather to have suffered from a combination of obstetrical complications and poverty.

The Organizational Complexities of Transnational Humanitarian Aid

For decades, sociological studies of ‘‘development’’ have primarily revolved around analyses of why some nations have higher levels of economic development than others. Significantly less attention has been paid to those individuals and organizations professing to do development. How do practitioners within the expanding, transnational development industry understand and enact their work, and how is this multi-billion dollar industry consequential for the lives of those targeted for service? The two books reviewed here—Monika Krause’s The Good Project and Renée C. Fox’s Doctors Without Borders—represent the best in a welcome and expanding new area of scholarship investigating a subset of this development industry: transnational humanitarian organizations. Both books examine the complexities encountered by humanitarian organizations as they aim to stem humanitarian crises in developing nations or to promote human rights for distant others. Both find that the peculiar dynamics of humanitarian organizations, more so than the needs of the potential beneficiaries, determine which actions are taken, where, and for whom. Explaining the complexities and potential consequences of these organizational processes is the goal of each book, although each author’s approach to this goal is quite distinct. Krause’s main argument is clearly stated and well reasoned. In a world full of need, humanitarian organizations are in the unenviable position of selecting who to help, and how, with the limited resources available. To negotiate this dilemma, Krause finds that humanitarian organizations have entered the business of producing ‘‘relief.’’ Specifically, humanitarian organizations package relief into ‘‘projects’’ and then market those projects to the ‘‘consumers,’’ or donors, willing to pay for them. The beneficiaries of the projects—those targeted for relief— are therefore considered an integral feature of the project itself, and not the clients of the organization. The more marketable the beneficiaries, Krause suggests, the more marketable the project. As a consequence, humanitarian organizations regularly undertake those projects that are deemed especially feasible and especially marketable, perhaps at the expense of projects that serve populations most in need. The book’s main object of analysis is the shared social space, or transnational field, in which humanitarian organizations operate. According to Krause, managers seeking to design good projects do not do so in a vacuum, but rather as individuals embedded in an organizational field characterized by shared logics and practices. These shared logics and practices are sometimes generated through formal statements (like Sphere and HAP initiatives, or ideologies of ‘‘human rights’’) and other times through shared technologies like the ‘‘logframe.’’ The logframe is a relatively standardized form for planning projects that emphasizes feasible goals and measurable outcomes Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières, by Renée C. Fox. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Political Demands, Political Opportunities: Explaining the Differential Success of Left-Libertarian Parties

24.95 paper. 316 pp. ISBN: 9781421416922.