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Moving to a Comparative Politics of Gender?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2006

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The subfield of women and politics research, established two decades ago, has followed a developmental trajectory of empirical research, original feminist theorizing, and new concept formation and evaluation. An early emphasis on women and politics—concern with political behavior, with voting patterns and gender gaps, with political institutional presence and women as political elites—involved crucial foundational work for the subfield. Empirical research focused on finding where women were politically located, what political power they had, and what “politics” meant for women; the availability of survey research data that included a “sex” variable, and the identification of specific female political elites channeled early work into questions that could be answered by—or that permitted the contestation of—these data. The earliest research grappled with comparisons of women and men in politics; subsequent research focused primarily upon women, and upon women across politically relevant differences (in the U.S. case, particularly in regard to race). Feminist theory began to contest, to deconstruct, and to reconstruct gendered concepts of power, of equality and difference, of justice, and of democracy, some of which empirical scholars began to import into their research.

Type
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER AND POLITICS
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , June 2006 , pp. 221 - 222
Copyright
© 2006 The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

The subfield of women and politics research, established two decades ago, has followed a developmental trajectory of empirical research, original feminist theorizing, and new concept formation and evaluation. An early emphasis on women and politics—concern with political behavior, with voting patterns and gender gaps, with political institutional presence and women as political elites—involved crucial foundational work for the subfield. Empirical research focused on finding where women were politically located, what political power they had, and what “politics” meant for women; the availability of survey research data that included a “sex” variable, and the identification of specific female political elites channeled early work into questions that could be answered by—or that permitted the contestation of—these data. The earliest research grappled with comparisons of women and men in politics; subsequent research focused primarily upon women, and upon women across politically relevant differences (in the U.S. case, particularly in regard to race). Feminist theory began to contest, to deconstruct, and to reconstruct gendered concepts of power, of equality and difference, of justice, and of democracy, some of which empirical scholars began to import into their research.

Comparative women and politics scholars began to publish studies of women and politics in countries other than the United States in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Women and politics comparativists were constrained by the lack of available data (particularly survey research data) and by the difficulties of obtaining funding for cross-national research and for foreign travel. Perhaps more importantly, they were constricted by concepts that were as yet underdeveloped for cross-national comparison. The difficulties of comparative political research generally, in terms of comparative political systems, meanings of democracy, and political stability, were compounded by difficulties with the meanings of politics for women. Where did women do politics? In marketplaces? In schools? In communities? In legislatures? The publication of Barbara J. Nelson and Nadja Chowdhury's Women and Politics Worldwide (1994) was both the culmination of early comparative women and politics scholarship and the foundation upon which future scholarship could build.

If, however, the early work helped to clarify the possibilities of women and politics research in comparative terms, it is not yet clear that it has provided the tools with which the subfield can move to a comparative politics of gender. The problematics of the concepts of women and men (in short, a variable of “sex”) diminish in comparison to the problematics of a cross-national concept of gender.

The inauguration of Politics & Gender signals an initiative in the subfield to move to a gendered analysis of politics, already established perhaps more clearly in feminist theory and in the gendered analysis of international relations. Is this shift possible for comparative politics? What analytical advantages/leverage would a comparative politics of gender provide that women and politics in comparative perspective does not? What do we mean by a comparative politics of gender?

We invited several well-known comparative political scientists to write to these specific questions. Louise Chappell, Laurel Weldon, and Aili Mari Tripp responded by writing the following three essays, staking out positions on the comparative politics of gender and institutions, on comparative gendered intersectional analytical strategies, and on the likelihood of disciplinary transformations regarding the regendering of comparative politics. We envision these essays as foundational for the ambitious and necessary project of articulating and establishing what we assert as a comparative politics of gender.

Comparing Political Institutions: Revealing the Gendered “Logic of Appropriateness” Louise Chappell, University of Sydney

The Structure of Intersectionality: A Comparative Politics of Gender S. Laurel Weldon, Purdue University

Why So Slow? The Challenges of Gendering Comparative Politics Aili Mari Tripp, University of Wisconsin at Madison