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