Melanie M. Hughes

Intersectionality, Quotas, and Minority Women's Political Representation Worldwide

The majority of the worlds countries have implemented policies designed to advance the political representation of women and/or minority groups. Yet we do not yet understand how these disparate policies affect the election of minority women. In this article, I draw on theories of intersectionality to conduct the first worldwide analysis of the effects of gender and minority quotas on minority womens representation in national legislatures. Using hierarchical linear modeling, I analyze how quotas influence the election of women from more than 300 racial, ethnic, and religious groups across 81 countries. I find that policies designed to promote the political representation of women and minority groups interact to produce diverse but predictable outcomes for minority women. Although quotas are ostensibly designed to promote diversity and inclusiveness, the quota policies in effect today rarely challenge majority mens dominance of national legislatures.

Are “Failing” Schools Really Failing? Using Seasonal Comparison to Evaluate School Effectiveness

To many, it seems obvious which schools are failing—schools whose students perform poorly on achievement tests. But since evaluating schools on achievement mixes the effects of school and nonschool influences, achievement-based evaluation likely underestimates the effectiveness of schools that serve disadvantaged populations. In this article, the authors discuss school-evaluation methods that more effectively separate school effects from nonschool effects. Specifically, the authors evaluate schools using 12-month (calendar-year) learning rates, 9-month (school-year) learning rates, and a provocative new measure, “impact”—which is the difference between the school-year learning rate and the summer learning rate. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of 1998–99, the authors show that learning- or impact-based evaluation methods substantially change conclusions about which schools are failing. In particular, among schools with failing (i.e., bottom-quintile) achievement levels, less than half are failing with respect to learning or impact. In addition, schools that serve disadvantaged students are much more likely to have low achievement levels than they are to have low levels of learning or impact. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to market-based educational reform.

Power and Relation in the World Polity: The INGO Network Country Score, 1978–1998

World polity theory is explicitly relational, implying a global network structure that exists outside of the nation-state. And world polity theory increasingly acknowledges power – that some states and regions are dominant in the international field. But current world polity measures of international nongovernmental organizations do not adequately incorporate either networks or power, leading to a mismatch between theory and measurement. In this article, we draw upon world polity, world system and social networks theories to inform the development of a new over-time measure of country-level connectedness to the world polity, which we label the “INGO Network Country Score.” This measure scores countries by their centrality in the world country-INGO network. We compare our newly-proposed INGO Network Country Score to the traditional measure (country-level raw counts of INGO memberships) and demonstrate striking differences. Our network-based measure shows less inequality among Western countries than the traditional measure, and greater inequality between the West and the rest of the world. Looking over time, we draw three further implications from our new measure. First, there is evidence of inequality in network centrality in the world polity at all time points. Second, regional inequalities persist. Third, connections in the world polity are not exponentially increasing, as previously hypothesized. An added benefit of the analysis is our presentation of the first visual representation of country connections through INGOs.

Continuous Change, Episodes, and Critical Periods: A Framework for Understanding Women's Political Representation over Time

In recent decades, scholars have documented remarkable changes in women’s political representation around the world. At present, however, researchers are ill-equipped to explain these changes in women’s representation in politics. In this article, we introduce a broad theoretical framework for reorienting existing explanations of women’s formal political representation to account for change over time. We conceptualize stasis and growth in women’s political representation as the balance between forces of resistance and forces for change. We also classify forces by timing, distinguishing among those that are continuous, are episodic, and have originated from critical periods. Using data on women in national legislatures from 1945 to 2003, we find that longitudinal forces combine to produce four common trajectories of women’s political representation across time. We also discuss how various approaches, including event history analysis, latent growth curve models, and the focused ethnographic revisit, are well suited for modeling the different types of forces that combine to produce these trajectories. Overall, we argue that implementing a longitudinal framework for understanding women’s political representation has the power both to alter the way we think about established findings and to suggest new theories for empirical evaluation.

Cultural Explanations for Men’s Dominance of National Leadership Worldwide

Women’s election to national executive leadership is a rare occurrence. The overwhelming majority of presidents and prime ministers have been—and still are—men. One way to make sense of men’s dominance of executive political office is to look at the role of culture. Our beliefs about how men and women should behave, and how they are the same or different, benefit men politically in myriad ways. And yet, men’s privilege is not entirely automatic; men candidates and politicians also deploy masculinity, embodying the cultural practices and expressions of manhood. Various forms of instability, including political transitions toward democracy, can disrupt these dynamics and create spaces for women to rise. Stereotypically feminine traits, including the perceptions that women are less corrupt, can mean that women candidates for president or prime minister are taken more seriously. Still, more often than not, even in these contexts, men are ultimately elected to lead.

The Price of Protection A Trajectory Analysis of Civil Remedies for Abuse and Women’s Earnings

We know men’s violence against women is costly. Yet, we know little about the costs—or benefits—of women’s efforts to end it. This study investigates the temporal dynamics of women’s earnings and petitioning for a Protection from Abuse (PFA) civil restraining order. Women’s earnings might rise or fall at the time of petitioning but quickly return to pre-petitioning levels, a short-term boost or shock; or, petitioning might precipitate a longer-term stall or upward shift in women’s earnings. To test for these effects, we use latent growth curve analysis and evaluate women’s earnings trajectories over six years. We find overwhelming evidence that the period around petitioning is one of exceptional earnings instability for petitioners, many of whom experience both shocks and stalls. Virtually no one experiences a boost in the quarter of petitioning or an upward shift in earnings growth in the year after petitioning for a PFA. Welfare, however, buffers negative effects of petitioning on women’s earnings growth. We also calculate lost earnings as the difference between women’s counterfactual projected and estimated earnings. Our findings inform theoretical and policy debates about interventions intended to address poverty and violence against women.

Work, Welfare, and Protection Orders: Modeling Changing Earnings in the Context of Group Differences and Institutional Shifts:

Researchers who study violence against women often face problems when trying to understand the causes of individual changes in the context of group differences, targeted interventions, and institutional shifts. The authors explore these problems through research on the connections among women’s earnings, welfare, and protection orders. The authors use multigroup, piecewise, latent growth curve models to explore differences in the initial earnings and earnings changes for two groups: welfare recipients who have and who have not petitioned for a restraining order. The authors further examine these differences in the context of institutional change, specifically the implementation of the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996.

Intersectionality and Women’s Political Empowerment Worldwide

Intersectionality allows us to confront the reality that women’s political experiences vary, such that empowerment for some may not mean empowerment for all. Intersectionality points out the ways that women are internally a diverse group, brings other forms of oppression into the center of study, explicitly references power, and acknowledges the complexities of social and political life. In this chapter, we discuss how intersectionality should influence the research questions that we ask, the explanations for why women remain politically disempowered, and the methodology we use. Challenging and revolutionary, intersectionality is an opportunity for researchers to more fully comprehend the rich and deep political life of women and girls from diverse experiences, and thus the idea, policy, and practice of political empowerment across the world.

Building Cross-National, Longitudinal Data Sets: Issues and Strategies for Implementation

With recent advances in computing power enhancing the ability of social scientists to analyze newly available “big data,” there is a new set of challenges for researchers building cross-national, longitudinal data sets. While scholars should embrace these new sources of data, we must carefully consider cleaning and coding decisions and how these influence our ultimate findings. In this article, we outline five common issues that researchers may face in building large cross-national, longitudinal data sets and suggest strategies for how to address each: (1) country data consistency including births, deaths, splits, unifications, and name changes, (2) longitudinal string matching, (3) identifying different types of missing data, (4) using these types of missing data in developing a theoretically and empirically grounded imputation strategy, and (5) understanding whether systemic change is driven by real world processes or by coding/cleaning choices. We also touch briefly on some general technical and technological considerations when working with large data sets. Throughout, we illustrate issues and strategies with examples drawn from our experience building a cross-national, longitudinal network data set of country-international nongovernmental organization memberships.

Gendered Jobs: Integrating Immigrants versus Controlling Immigration in the European Union

Over the past fifteen years, concerns related to immigration and the integration of immigrants have risen to the forefront of European politics (e.g., Givens and Luedtke 2005; Guild, Groenendijk, and Carrera 2009). As anti-immigrant nationalist parties have gained ground, European governments have closed borders and even deported immigrants en masse . At the same time, countries throughout the European Union (EU) have increasingly stressed the importance of the social, economic, and cultural integration of immigrants. As immigration has become increasingly politicized across Europe, many governments have restructured themselves. Some countries have created new cabinet ministries designed to focus on immigration and immigrant integration. Other countries have assigned new immigration-related tasks to existing political bodies. In the face of new or radically transformed governance structures, one important question emerges: To what extent do women serve in immigration ministry leadership?