Suchergebnisse

Why do women protest? Under what conditions do women protest on the basis of their gender identity? Professor Baldez answers in terms of tipping, timing and framing. She relies on the concept of tipping to identify the point at which diverse organizations converge to form a women's movement. She argues that two conditions trigger this mobilization among women: partisan realignment, understood as the emergence of a new set of issues around which political elites define themselves, and women's decision to frame realignment in terms of widely held norms about gender difference. To illustrate these claims, she compares two very different women's movements in Chile: the mobilization of women against President Salvador Allende (1970–3) and that against General Augusto Pinochet (1973–90). Despite differences between these two movements, both emerged amidst a context of partisan realignment and framed their concerns in terms of women's exclusion from the political arena

In these two pieces, DeLaet and Bunting express reservations about the potential for international law to have positive effects on the de facto status of the world's citizens—but point to activism on the local level as the most viable way to strengthen the human rights regime. In her thorough overview of the literature on the impact of international law, DeLaet focuses on the ability of local activists to domestic international treaties by mobilizing at the grassroots level to enact the provisions of international law. Bunting's analysis of the offers a different solution, one that involves tacking back and forth between the precepts of international law and the lived experiences of victims of human rights violations.

What impact do U.N. human rights treaties have on the countries that ratify them? Most of the scholarly literature on this topic focuses on ratification, with little attention to the ways that the process of reporting can shape compliance. Ratification commits countries to a regular process of documenting and defending the extent to which they comply with a particular treaty. Many countries participate faithfully in the reporting process, devoting significant resources to it and subjecting themselves to vigorous review by the committees that oversee compliance. What is at stake in the reporting process? What can we learn from taking seriously the content of the exchanges between government officials and committee experts? This article examines Cuba's engagement the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) across eight reporting cycles, from 1982 to 2016. Cuba has adopted many changes, but has strenuously resisted the CEDAW Committee's assessment of its progress on critical aspects of violence against women policy.

Questions about the quality of political representation are central to research on women and gender, and to political science in general. Given a certain set of interests, how well do political institutions and political actors address and advance those interests? Research about the quality of political representation relies a priori on the existence of fixed, stable, and measurable interests; we need to know what women want before we can assess how well politicians represent them. Perfect measures of the interests that all women share have proven elusive. The measures of women's interests that scholars commonly employ lend themselves reasonably well to research, but have unfortunate side effects: They essentialize gender norms, exclude certain groups of women, or define women's interests too narrowly. In this essay, I explore the political implications of the empirical measures of women's interests on which scholars have relied in research on women's political representation. I offer a way to measure women's interests that draws upon the United Nations Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW provides a way to think about women's interests that is broad, inclusive, and sufficiently flexible to reflect changes over time. Furthermore, it enjoys the explicit approval of almost every nation in the world; 186 countries have ratified CEDAW since the UN General Assembly approved it in 1979.

What accounts for the glaring inattention to work on gender within mainstream political science? Part of the problem lies in the substance of scholarship itself. The concepts, central questions, and key variables that predominate in the mainstream literature on comparative democratization and in the literature on gender and democratization have contributed to the gulf between them. But a more fundamental explanation lies in the starting assumptions of scholars in the two camps. Mainstream scholars rarely question whether gender is relevant to politics, and gender scholars rarely question whether gender isn't relevant to politics. I illustrate some ways in which gender could be incorporated into mainstream work, and discuss how gender research could be made more broadly comparative.

Abstract
Parties throughout Latin America have recently addressed two distinct kinds of electoral reforms: primary elections and national-level gender quota laws. This study examines how these reforms interact, their mutual compatibility, and their effect on the nomination of men compared to that of women. It develops a series of hypotheses about this relationship by analyzing the 2003 legislative elections in Mexico, a case in which the three main parties relied on both gender quotas and primaries to select their candidates. Although the percentage of women elected to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies rose, the Federal Electoral Institute interpreted the gender quota law in a way that weakened its effect on women and limited the degree of openness in the primaries that were held.