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