Liam Swiss

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.

The adoption of women and gender as development assistance priorities: An event history analysis of world polity effects

Growing similarity of development assistance policy and reference to emerging global consensus on development issues has been a striking trend in the foreign aid community in recent years. This article uses event history techniques to undertake an exploratory analysis and test world polity effects on the spread of gender and development policies and institutional structures among 22 aid donors of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee from 1968 through 2003. Findings point to the influence of other donors, international civil society, international treaties and conferences as strong determinants of the homogenization of development assistance policy and the adoption of gender policies by donor organizations.

Peace Accords and the Adoption of Electoral Quotas for Women in the Developing World, 1990–2006

T he high percentage of women in Rwanda’s parliament is well known. At 64%, it scores far above the world average of about 22% (IPU 2013). Rather than an anomaly, Rwanda is representative of many postconflict developing countries that feature women’s political representation at above-average levels. A frequently identified correlate of this heightened representation has been the presence of electoral quotas for women (Bush 2011; Fallon, Swiss, and Viterna 2012; Paxton, Hughes, and Painter 2010). More generally, the role of societal rupture and transitions from conflict to peace or from authoritarianism to democracy have been a focus of gender and politics research in recent years (Fallon, Swiss, and Viterna 2012; Hughes 2007; 2009; Hughes and Paxton 2007; Viterna and Fallon 2008). Within such transitions, the role of women’s participation has been identified as a key determinant of more beneficial

Decoupling Values from Action: An Event-History Analysis of the Election of Women to Parliament in the Developing World, 1945—90

World polity explanations of the isomorphism of institutions and values among nation-states have not focused sufficient attention on explaining the decoupling or gap between granting rights and actually implementing them. This article examines the decoupling phenomenon by exploring what factors influenced the gap between granting women the right to stand for election and the eventual election of the first woman to parliament in 92 countries of the developing world from 1945 to 1990. Both the influence of the world society and concepts of state-weakness are examined as determinants of this decoupling gap. This article shows that world polity influence on the nation-state extends beyond the adoption of policy scripts to bear on the actual implementation of world cultural models.

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.

The aid orphan myth

The term ‘aid orphan’ refers to a developing country forgotten or abandoned by the development community. This metaphor has featured prominently in the development assistance policy and research literature over the past decade. Development practitioners, policy makers and researchers have defined aid orphans in manifold ways and often expressed concern over the potential fate or impact of such countries. In this paper we first examine the many definitions of aid orphans and then review the main concerns raised about them. Next we empirically examine more than 40 years of bilateral aid data to identify aid orphan countries and their common characteristics. Our findings suggest that very few countries meet the definition of aid orphan and fewer still raise the concerns collectively expressed about the orphan phenomenon. We conclude by suggesting researchers and practitioners abandon the orphan metaphor and instead focus on issues of equitable aid allocation.

Foreign aid allocation from a network perspective: The effect of global ties

This article examines competing explanations for foreign aid allocation on the global level and argues for a new approach to understanding aid from an institutionalist perspective. Using network data on all official bilateral aid relationships between countries in the period from 1975 through 2006 and data on recipient country ties to world society, the article offers an alternative explanation for the allocation of global foreign aid. Fixed effects negative binomial regression models on a panel sample of 117 developing countries reveal that global ties to world society in the form of non-governmental memberships and treaty ratifications are strong determinants of the network centrality of recipient countries in the global foreign aid network. Countries with a higher level of adherence and connection to world society norms and organizations are shown to be the beneficiaries of an increased number of aid relationships with wealthy donor countries. The findings also suggest that prior explanations of aid allocation grounded in altruist or realist motivations are insufficient to account for the patterns of aid allocation seen globally in recent years.

From knowledge to action? The Youth Criminal Justice Act and use of extrajudicial measures in youth policing

Abstract Since its implementation, several studies have asserted that the Youth Criminal Justice Act [YCJA] (2003) has been successful in lessening the number of Canadian youth sent to court and later incarcerated. However, earlier work has not addressed the limitations of the YCJA in provinces where its provisions have only been partially implemented due to limited resources. Analyses of quantitative data derived from a survey of police officers in an Atlantic province reveals that knowledge of the YCJA and YCJA procedures is a poor predictor of officers’ likelihood to use extrajudicial (diversion) measures. Analysis of the open-ended portion of our survey, however, provides an explanation: the Act has not been fully implemented here because of resource limitations, which affect an officer’s ability to adhere to the YCJA.

Taking Care of Companion Animals

Focusing on local government and non-governmental nonhuman animal welfare organizations, this paper reports survey results on institutional policies, interpretive frameworks, and practices regarding companion animals in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The findings suggested that local governments and animal shelters use different interpretive frameworks of companion animal welfare, with the former taking a human-centric position and the latter focusing on animal well-being. The results showed that most local governments are not well engaged with animal welfare issues. Instead, these issues are more often dealt with by non-governmental organizations that operate on limited budgets and rely heavily on volunteer labor. Whereas federal and provincial governments are responsible for legislating companion animal welfare, practical implementation of animal welfare has been largely the responsibility of non-governmental organizations. Our findings demonstrated that the ways that animal welfare policy is interpreted and enacted at the local level have significant implications for animal well-being more broadly.

Space for Gender Equality in the Security and Development Agenda? Insights from Three Donors

In 2004, representatives of the 22 wealthiest foreign aid donor countries met under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and agreed to the above statement at a meeting that concretized the donor community’s views on the relationship between security and development. It is tempting to think that foreign aid’s recent alliance with security emerged primarily from renewed interest in national security in the wake of the September 2001 attacks on the United States. However, as the introductory chapter in this volume establishes, this assumption overlooks a lengthier dialogue between security and development communities that grew from the early-1990s turn towards human security as an organizing principle for some donors’ aid and their foreign policy objectives.