Kathleen M. Fallon

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.

Transforming Women's Citizenship Rights within an Emerging Democratic State The Case of Ghana

Feminist scholars argue that women generally gain political rights followed by civil and social rights. However, this argument is based on data from North America and Western Europe, and few scholars, if any, have examined the progression of these rights within countries currently undergoing transitions to democracy in different parts of the world. Through in-depth interviews with members of womens organizations in Ghana, the author extends this literature. The findings both contradict and support the prior feminist argument. They indicate that prior to democratization, women focused primarily on social rights to improve their economic well-being. However, new opportunities emerged with the transition, which allowed women to use their political rights to secure more civil and social rights.

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.

Women's Transnational Activism, Norm Cascades, and Quota Adoption in The Developing World

Electoral quotas are a key factor in increasing womens political representation in parliaments globally. Despite the strong effects of quotas, less attention has been paid to the factors that prompt countries to adopt electoral quotas across developing countries. This article employs event history modeling to analyze quota adoption in 134 developing countries from 1987 to 2012, focusing on quota type, transnational activism, and norm cascades. The article asks the following questions: (1) How might quota adoption differ according to quota type—nonparty versus party quotas? (2) How has the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China (Beijing 95), contributed to quota diffusion? (3) Do global, regional, or neighboring country effects contribute more to quota adoption? Results provide new evidence of how quota adoption processes differ according to quota type, the central role played by participation in Beijing 95, and how increased global counts contribute to faster nonparty quota adoption while increased neighboring country counts lead to faster to party quota adoption.

Rip current literacy of beachgoers at Miami Beach, Florida

Rip currents are fast moving, offshore flows that have the ability to move even the strongest swimmers into deeper waters. Miami Beach, Florida is one of the most visited beaches in the USA and a sought after destination for citizens and international tourists alike. It is also known to be a rip current “hot spot.” These factors greatly increase the risk of drowning; however, no previous research has focused on beachgoer perception of rip-related risks in South Florida. Over a 12-month period, 203 public surveys were collected to determine the rip current knowledge of beachgoers at Miami Beach based on factors such as swimming ability and frequency of beach visits. The responses were analyzed by constructing a normalized component factor to determine the respondent’s comprehensive knowledge of rips, and multiple regression models were used to assess the net influences of sociodemographic and behavioral characteristics on the responses. A significant proportion of the survey respondents showed insufficient knowledge, indicating they are at risk of drowning in a rip current. Frequent beachgoer’s exposure to the beach environment, maturation, and nativity is identified as the main contributors to knowledge net of other sociodemographic compositions. The most at-risk groups were determined to be young adults, foreign tourists, poor swimmers, and those who infrequently visited the beach. Miami Beach needs to initiate a rip current safety campaign to target these at-risk beachgoers, where interventions beyond familial and educational institutions should be introduced.

Social Movements as Women’s Political Empowerment: The Case for Measurement

This chapter explores how to quantitatively measure women’s social movements: women who draw on their identities as women and engage in collective action to target national governments and their laws and policies. Drawing on previous qualitative and quantitative studies of politically influential social movements addressing women’s rights across developing countries, the authors examine what aspects of women’s collective action must be addressed to create a meaningful variable. The chapter concludes with a call for new methods to measure women’s movements, which can provide a more meaningful way to quantify the circumstances that lead to mobilization, the intricacies of women’s movements, and the ways women’s collective action leads to women’s political empowerment and gender equality in both the developing world and a global context.

Revisiting Repertoire Transition: Women's Nakedness as Potent Protests in Nigeria and Kenya*

The influential work of Tilly and Tarrow on social movement repertoire transitions—moving from older, local, and episodic tactics to newer, national, and sustained tactics—has contributed significantly to the development of social movements theory. This article expands Tilly and Tarrows theoretical framework by drawing on examples from Nigeria and Kenya. First, we examine the causal factors contributing to repertoire transitions in these postcolonial African countries, highlighting the importance of colonial state formation and social networks in changing repertoires. Second, we consider how the gravity and effectiveness of womens nakedness, used by mothers as a collective action tactic to shame those targeted, persisted and maintained its significance across tactical repertoire transitions, despite colonial repression. We argue that the continuance of tactics across repertoire transitions lies in their ability to maintain symbolic resonance, which simultaneously restricts the transmission of tactics to...