Women’s Policy Agencies, Women’s Movements and a Shifting Political Context: Towards a Gendered Republic in France?

Abstract The question of whether social movements can catalyze change has preoccupied researchers but an understanding of how such change can be created is equally important. Specifically, there has been little investigation of how women's movements engage in the process of implementation of women's rights laws. We use a case study of Ghana's Domestic Violence Coalition to examine the challenges that movements face in the policy implementation process. The Domestic Violence Coalition, a collective of women's rights organizations, was instrumental to the passage of Ghana's Domestic Violence Act in 2007. Our study investigates the coalition's subsequent attempts to influence the act's implementation. Drawing from the social movement literature, we apply an analytical framework consisting of three internal factors (strategies, movement infrastructure, and framing) and two external factors (political context and support of allies) that have mediated the coalition's impact on implementation. We find that changes in movement infrastructure are most significant in explaining the coalition's relative ineffectiveness, as these changes adversely affect its ability to employ effective strategies and take advantage of a conducive political context and the presence of allies. This article advances the literature on rights advocacy by women's movements by analyzing the challenge of translating success in policy adoption to implementation and explaining why women's movements may have less impact on implementation processes.

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The RNGS Data Set: Women's Policy Agencies, Women's Movements and Policy Debates in Western Post-Industrial Democracies

French Politics ◽

10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200101 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

pp. 209-236 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Amy G Mazur ◽

Dorothy E McBride

Keyword(s):

Women's Movements ◽

Data Set ◽

Policy Debates ◽

Industrial Democracies ◽

Post Industrial ◽

Women's Policy Agencies

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Movement Institutions: The Bureaucratic Sources of Feminist Protest

Politics & Gender ◽

10.1017/s1743923x18000399 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 14 (3) ◽

pp. 407-432 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Laure Bereni ◽

Anne Revillard

Keyword(s):

Women's Rights ◽

Women's Movement ◽

The State ◽

Women's Movements ◽

Women’S Rights ◽

The Past ◽

French Case ◽

Institutional Dimension ◽

Women's Policy Agencies

AbstractOver the past several decades, scholarship on women's movements, feminism, and the state has brought renewed attention to the study of protest politics by questioning its frontier with dominant institutions. This article takes this critique a step further by considering the institutional dimension of the state-movement intersection. Drawing on the French case, we argue that institutions that are formally devoted to women's rights inside the state (women's policy agencies) can operate asmovement institutions—that is, as bureaucratic instances routinely engrained with a protest dimension—rather than being only a shelter for a network of insider activists. As such, they can provide a specific, institutional feminist socialization to their members; they can purvey, rather than only relay, feminist protest, and they can deploy institutional repertoires of protest, combining bureaucratic and movement dimensions. We conclude that the definition and boundaries of the women's movement need to be broadened to include bureaucratic sources of feminist protest.

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Women's Rights and Democratic Transitions

Review of Human Rights ◽

10.35994/rhr.v7i1.164 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 1-26

Author(s):

Abida Bano

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Institutional Change ◽

Vital Role ◽

Political Context ◽

Qualitative Approach ◽

Women's Movements ◽

Policy Outcomes ◽

Democratic Transitions ◽

Research Questions

Democratization provides women an opportunity to represent their interests/issues effectively. Institutional change of democratic transition proves women's movement's best chance to push for gender-sensitive policy outcomes. This case study critically examines three selected democratic transitions' workings and assesses the cross-cases variation in women's gendered outcomes (South Africa, Chile, and Pakistan). The research questions state as "how and why did women's movements perform differently in achieving gendered policy outcomes in the democratic transitions?” Engaging comparative framework and the qualitative approach, the study shows that the socio-political context, historical legacies, and party alliances have played vital role in varying gendered outcomes.

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