C

Week 4 Readings

Gender and Democracy

Paxton, Kunovich, and Hughes

  • Women = underrepresented in politics
  • Gender inequality in politics involves:
    • Voting, campaigning, leading
    • Political knowledge, socialization, attitudes, women’s place in political theory
    • Cultural barriers to women’s use of their political rights: family resistance + illiteracy
    • Underrepresentation as political leaders
  • Supply and demand for women
    • Supply-side factors: increase the number of women with the will and experience to compete against men for political office
    • Determined by gender socialization → women’s interests, knowledge, ambition
    • Women are less encouraged to run for office
    • Less time, less education, employment opportunities
    • Demand-side factors
    • Democracy: women are less well represented in democratic systems
    • Electoral system: PR systems = women do better
  • Culture: beliefs + attitudes influence the supply and demand for female candidates
    • Facing prejudice as leaders
    • Religions
  • Gender quotas: legislation of party rules that require a certain percentage of candidates to be women
  • Critical mass: when women reach a certain percentage of a legislature, they will be better able to pursue their policy priorities
  • 4 recommendations for future research:
    • Globalizing theory and research
    • Expanding data collection
    • Remembering alternative forms of women’s agency
    • Addressing intersectionality

Colonialism and Gender + ILO

Stevenson

  • Foreign government + foreign missionaries = wanted to transform Aboriginal Peoples into Euro-Canadian prototypes

    • State: provided legal authority
    • Missionaries: provided the moral and ideological rationale

  • The status and autonomy of First Nations women were attacked

    • This attack was later institutionalized by the Canadian government
    • Indian Act
    • Lost autonomy in the areas of membership, marriage, divorce, sexuality, land and family property, political decision-making
    • Goal = reduce women to a condition of dependency on their male relatives

  • First Nations women resisted this oppression and retained much of their traditional knowledge and roles

    → Colonialist transformations were not entirely successful

  • The tenacity of traditional Indigenous lifeways

Lipset

  • Michels
  • Oligarchy: the control of a society or an organization by those at the top
  • Democracy + large scale organization = incompatible
  • Increased bureaucracy = concentration of power at the top + less power for members
  • Incompetence of the masses: less education, general sophistication, less time to participate in party/union meetings
  • Leaders = power elites
  • Socialist party leaders placed the needs of organizational survival over adherence to doctrine
  • Over-deterministic: saw only the restrictive side of bureaucracy
  • Charismatic leaders: they can break through the inherent conservatism of organization and excite the masses to support great things
  • Power: capacity to mobilize resources of the society for the attainment of goals for which a general public commitment has been made
  • Democracy: conflict of organized groups competing for support