S. Laurel Weldon

The Civic Origins of Progressive Policy Change: Combating Violence against Women in Global Perspective, 1975-2005

Over the past four decades, violence against women (VAW) has come to be seen as a violation of human rights and an important concern for social policy. Yet government action remains uneven. Some countries have adopted comprehensive policies to combat VAW, whereas others have been slow to address the problem. Using an original dataset of social movements and VAW policies in 70 countries over four decades, we show that feminist mobilization in civil society—not intra-legislative political phenomena such as leftist parties or women in government or economic factors like national wealth—accounts for variation in policy development. In addition, we demonstrate that autonomous movements produce an enduring impact on VAW policy through the institutionalization of feminist ideas in international norms. This study brings national and global civil society into large-n explanations of social policy, arguing that analysis of civil society in general—and of social movements in particular—is critical to understanding progressive social policy change.

Beyond Bodies: Institutional Sources of Representation for Women in Democratic Policymaking

The idea that individual members of marginalized groups provide substantive representation for the wider group rests on a problematic understanding of the relationship between individual experience and group perspective. I propose understanding group perspectives as collective products. In this view, institutional structures and social movements, not just bodies, can be more or less representative of groups. Comparing the impact of various modes of womens representation on policies to address violence against women in 36 democratic countries in 1994, I find that womens movements and womens policy agencies may provide more effective avenues of expression for womens perspective than the presence of women in the legislatures. Thus, studies of representation for marginalized groups should consider institutional changes and increased political mobilization as potential sources of improved political representation.

When Do Governments Promote Women's Rights? A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Sex Equality Policy

This essay proposes a framework to analyze cross-national variation in women’s legal rights. To explore the distinct logics of policy change, we disaggregate sex equality policies on two dimensions: 1) whether they improve the status of women as a group or alleviate gender-based class inequalities, and 2) whether or not they challenge the doctrine of organized religion and the codified tradition of major cultural groups. We show that policies promoting gender equality seek fundamental social change and therefore challenge historical patterns of state-society interaction concerning relations between the state and the market; the respective authority of the state, religion, and cultural groups; and the contours of citizenship. Different issues, however, challenge different aspects of these relations. What’s more, the priorities, strategies, and effectiveness of advocates and opponents of change (including women’s movements, left parties, international NGOs, and organized religion) are shaped by state capacity, policy legacies, international vulnerability, and the degree of democracy.

The Structure of Intersectionality: A Comparative Politics of Gender

A comparative analysis of gender relations incorporates and goes beyond a “women and politics” approach by focusing on the organization of political life, illuminating the systematic way that social norms, laws, practices, and institutions advantage certain groups and forms of life and disadvantage others. In order to illuminate the various ways that women and men are advantaged and disadvantaged as women and men , gender analysis must incorporate analysis of race, class, sexuality, and other axes of disadvantage, and explore interactions among them. These axes are defined differently in different national contexts, and so examining variation across national borders illuminates the variety of social arrangements that are consistent with human biology: This type of analysis thereby denaturalizes and politicizes gender, racial/ethnic, and class relations (among others). The wide variety of modes and degrees of resistance to these forms of social organization, and success in challenging them, illuminate and inspire new strategies of resistance for people in other countries.

Inclusion, Solidarity, and Social Movements: The Global Movement against Gender Violence

Womens movements are increasingly divided along lines of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. When such division obstructs cooperation, women lose their most effective advocates in the public sphere. How can movements overcome these divisions and improve their influence on policy and society? In some contexts, it seems that activists are able to overcome such divisions without denying politically salient conflicts. The transnational movement against gender violence, for example, mobilizes people not only across differences of race, class and sexuality but also across differences of language, national context, level of development, and the like. How do they do this? I argue that the movement against gender violence has achieved cooperation through the development of norms of inclusivity. Such norms include a commitment to descriptive representation, the facilitation of separate organization for disadvantaged social groups, and a commitment to building consensus with institutionalized dissent. Developing such norms is not the only possible path to cooperation, but it is an important and overlooked one. It illuminates a way of maintaining solidarity and improving policy influence without denying or sublimating the differences and conflicts among activists. Existing scholarship on social movements that attributes successful cooperation to shared interests, identities, or opportunities, is incomplete because it does not take account of relations of domination among activists who cooperate. Attending to the context of structural inequality in which social movements operate improves our understanding of social mobilization and illuminates overlooked paths to cooperation. S. Laurel Weldon is associate professor of political science at Purdue University (weldon@polsci.purdue.edu). The author thanks Jane Mansbridge for her help. Thanks also to Karen Beckwith, Elisabeth Clemens, Jennifer Hochschild, Aaron Hoffman, Debra Liebowitz, and Iris Young for comments on earlier drafts. Thanks to Anne Walker and Vicki Semler for helpful conversations, and to Charlotte Bunch, Arvonne Fraser, and Jutta Joachim for helping with key details. Reviewers for Perspectives provided many valuable suggestions. Errors and shortcomings remain my responsibility.

The Dimensions and Policy Impact of Feminist Civil Society Democratic Policymaking on Violence against Women in the Fifty US States

In this article, I develop the concept of feminist civil society, that is, the idea that womens self-organizing to further their own empowerment constitutes a sort of counter-public of women that can influence the broader, male-dominated (and raced and classed) public sphere in which it is embedded. The development of feminist civil society, particularly the proliferation of feminist civic and political organizations, makes democratic policymaking processes more inclusive of womens voices and reflective of their perspectives. I apply this conceptualization in a study of feminist politics and democratic policymaking in the fifty United States. Using factor analysis, I discern three distinct dimensions of womens organizing: externally oriented (political and civic) organizing; internally oriented (cultural and self-development) organizing; and intra-state organizing. I examine the association of these different aspects of civil society with government responsiveness to violence against women across the fifty states. Applying OLS regression analysis, I find that the first of these forms of organizing, civic and political organizing, is positively and significantly associated with greater responsiveness to violence against women, while the other two dimensions are not so related.

Feminist mobilisation and progressive policy change: why governments take action to combat violence against women

Some national governments have adopted a wide variety of measures to address violence against women, including legal reform, public education campaigns, and support for shelters and rape crisis centres, but other governments have done little to confront the problem. What accounts for these differences in policy? To answer this question, we analysed policies on violence against women in 70 countries from 1975 to 2005. Our analysis reveals that the most important and consistent factor driving policy change is feminist activism. This plays a more important role than left-wing parties, numbers of women legislators, or even national wealth. In addition, our work shows that strong, vibrant domestic feminist movements use international and regional conventions and agreements as levers to influence policy-making. Strong local movements bring home the value of global norms on womens rights.

Making Change: Norm-Based Strategies for Institutional Change to Address Intractable Problems

This paper identifies and describes two new norm-based strategies for institutional change to address intractable social problems. In both strategies, advocates “foreground” and criticize norms supporting the institutional status quo before either promoting an alternative existing norm via normative reframing of the issue, or creating and promoting an entirely new norm via normative innovation to build support for new institutional arrangements. Drawing on examples of institutional change addressing the problems of climate change and violence against women, the analysis illustrates how these strategies are especially effective in the face of opposition from vested interests or problematic existing norms.

Women’s Movements, Identity Politics, and Policy Impacts: A Study of Policies on Violence against Women in the 50 United States

Scholars of social movements and democratic political theorists have argued that “identity politics” weakens social movements and undermines their influence on public policy. I offer a theoretical argument that at least some forms of “identity politics” likely have the reverse effects. In particular, when marginalized groups organize around ascriptive characteristics or “social location,” they generate knowledge about the social group, strengthen participants’ feelings of affiliation with the movement, produce more representative movement agendas, and create the building blocks for broader coalitions. In a study of the U.S., I find that separate organization by women of color strengthens women’s movements, and indirectly improves government responsiveness both to violence against women of color in particular and to violence against women in general.

Informal Institutions, Protest, and Change in Gendered Federal Systems

Federalism seems to play a widely varying role in maintaining or undermining gender hierarchies around the world. In 1869, for example, federalism allowed Wyoming—a new state in the United States—to enfranchise women before this happened at the national level. But in Switzerland, federalism let a recalcitrant canton disenfranchise women until the 1990s—20 years after women achieved the vote on the national level (Banaszak 1996). More generally, federal institutions are associated with widely varying policies on womens rights. Table 1 groups countries according to Lijpharts (1999, Chapter 10) three measures of federalism: a numerical summary measure (column 2), whether the country is centralized or decentralized (column 3), and a dichotomous measure of federal or unitary based on the countrys constitution (column 4). No matter which measure is used, gender equality policies vary greatly within each type of system. The wide variation within each category suggests that standard approaches to federalism give us little purchase on gender politics.