This latest volume from the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State (RNGS), inspired by Amy Mazur and Dorothy Stetson's 1995 Comparative State Feminism, explores women's campaigns for political representation in 10 European Union countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden) and the United States. The introduction and conclusion outline the RNGS framework, hypotheses, and findings, based on 33 debates (the basic unit of analysis) over three decades. Eleven chapters present each country's debates. RNGS promotes a theory of state feminism defined as “the advocacy of women's movement demands inside the state” (p. 4).
The volume's thesis is that women's policy agencies (WPAs) enhance women's movement activism, and promote positive outcomes, by working within state (and party) decisional arenas on gender issues; frame or reframe debates; and provide “necessary and effective linkages between women's movement activism and … democratic states” (p. 11). The goal is to identify characteristics of WPAs, movements, and policy environments most likely to make this happen.
The editors claim confirmation of state feminism theory (p. 292), but admit that it applies mostly when parties of the Left are in government. Consequently, “when the left was not in power, movements were successful in fewer than half of the debates [even] where WPAs were insider[s]” (p. 284). Cohesive women's movements that united around an issue and gave it significant priority were also needed. This argument was initiated by Nordic scholars in Unfinished Democracy, ed. E. Haavio-Mannila et al. (1985), and Equal Democracies, ed. Christina Bergqvist et al. (1999). But the claim that it applies to postindustrial democracies generally is less persuasive. Moreover, high representational levels in some less developed countries (e.g., Rwanda with 48% women legislators) suggest that more complex factors may be at play.
The book's strength lies in the fascinating insights the country chapters provide into debates about completing democracy by including more women in decision making. Unlike notoriously uneven collections, the country chapters follow a set format that makes comparisons easy, but involves much repetition since information appears in various sections. Frustratingly, some chapters mention debates about constitutional or state restructuring, which were not chosen because they did not fit the criteria of RNGS. Over a third (12/33) of the debates deal with quotas or parity. Some interesting analyses about more general reforms to electoral and voting systems, the civil service, and corporatism resulted, however, because authors were asked to select one debate not explicitly about women's representation. While the RNGS framework may be suitable for debates about job training, abortion, or prostitution, it needed to be adapted more to capture debates about the representational opportunities posed by nation-state restructurings. German reunification, federalization in Belgium and Spain, and devolution in Britain are tantalizingly mentioned but not analyzed. And although all debates, except three in the United States, happened within the EU, and nearly half the countries are federal states, the RNGS framework does not assess the impact of multilevel governance on the political environment (though Janine Parry's useful U.S. chapter does).
The framework assumes stable state structures and no impact from EU or sub-national WPAs. Glimpses of women's representational achievements in the new legislatures of Scotland and Wales, in Joni Lovenduski's excellent UK chapter, made me regret that debates about such institutional restructurings also were excluded. The absence of debates about representational claims directed at courts is puzzling to a North American, since senior courts often declared unconstitutional the legislation that women promoted. These omissions limit the book's contribution to global representational debates, although the country chapters make a valuable contribution in their own right.
The research reported in the book also advances the methodological development of feminist political science. The operationalizing of concepts, including the gendering of debates and descriptive versus substantive representation, is insightful and likely to be adopted. Women's movement activism is difficult to compare across jurisdictions because of the diverse meanings of key concepts. RNGS finesses this problem by using a “local option” strategy in which authors determine what is feminist during each of their country's debates. This works well, though neither editors nor most authors avoid frequent conceptual slippage between feminist and women's movements. Moreover, the women's movements analyzed are mainly those actors willing to engage with the state. While this is argued to be legitimate because the debates involved participating in state politics, we are often left with little understanding of how autonomous feminist movements saw things, and it is never revealed how women's groups/movements aligned with mixed-sex projects (nationalist or antiracist movements) viewed representational demands based on gender alone. (Aligned movements are invisible throughout.)
There is also slippage between the use of women (as a social category) and women's movements; this distinction is important for understanding the behavior of state WPAs, which usually are mandated to act for the social category. Moreover, women are treated mostly as a homogenous social category. The local-option strategy is also implicitly used to classify WPAs. Missing from the categories is one that other scholars of WPAs consider key: if they are part of the state, that is, staffed by regular civil servants. Johnathan Malloy (in Between Colliding Worlds: The Ambiguous Existence of Government Agencies for Aboriginal and Women's Policy, 2003) distinguishes between agencies that are part of the civil service and accountable to elected officials through a minister and those outside that are independent of bureaucratic norms. Consequently, this book misses the impact of new public management, which a theory of state feminism must take into account to capture how changes in state agencies affect their ability to advocate for women. Understanding the concept of accountability that each WPA holds would reveal the “boundary spanning” functions Malloy theorizes for agencies located between states and movements. These boundary-spanning agencies offer new insights for state-feminist theory that should be explored by RNGSs.
Nonetheless, the book represents significant methodological achievements and should encourage more broadly comparative projects. It is a useful contribution to feminist political science, from an energetic group of scholars.
