Has Democracy Failed Women? E-Book

Drude Dahlerup

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 167

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Why are women still under-represented in politics? Can we speak of democracy when women are not fully included in political decision-making? Some argue that we are on the right track to full gender equality in politics, while others talk about women hitting the glass ceiling or being included in institutions with shrinking power, not least as a result of neo-liberalism.

In this powerful essay, internationally renowned scholar of gender and politics Drude Dahlerup explains how democracy has failed women and what can be done to tackle it. Political institutions, including political parties, she argues, are the real gatekeepers to elected positions all over the world, but they need to be much more inclusive. By reforming these institutions and carefully implementing gender quotas we can move towards improved gender equality and greater democratization.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Series Title

Title page

Copyright page

Tables and figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

1: Exclusion Without Words

Plan of the book

Early exclusion

The unhappy marriage between women and liberalism

The Suffrage movements

Gender, class and race

Not an “identity” movement

The arguments

Opponents of women’s suffrage

The arguments of the suffrage movements

Three waves of women’s suffrage

Defining democracy

A gender perspective on the transition to democracy

Index of democracy

Conclusion

Notes

2: Breaking Male Dominance in Politics

Women as intruders

What constitutes male dominance in politics?

A slow start

Recent global increase

The “secret garden of politics”

Electoral systems

Blaming women

Political parties as gatekeepers

Ideology matters

Incremental versus fast-track development

Level of democracy

Conclusion

Notes

3: The Impact of Gender Quotas

The new top of the world

Defining quotas

Quota discourses

Predictions and results

The natural order

Merits

“Tokens”

The democratic legitimacy of being elected under a quota system

Gender, ethnicity and class

First, second and third quota waves

Driving forces

The effectiveness of gender quotas

Quotas in non-democratic countries

A short guide to gender quota advocates

Conclusion

Notes

4: Gendering Public Policy

What are women’s interests?

Theoretical dilemmas

Gendering politics

The critical mass theory

Women in leadership positions

Commitment

Glass ceiling and glass cliff

State feminism

The state as ally or enemy?

Notes

5: Women in Global Politics

Global democracy

Economic global governance

Structural openings

Women in peace negotiations

Are women more peaceful than men?

The influence of transnational women’s organizations

Global feminism(s)

The role of the UN

Discursive power

Conclusion

Notes

Further Reading and Resources

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

Tables and figures

Chapter 1

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Series Title

Democratic Futures series

Stephen Coleman,

Can the Internet Strengthen Democracy?

Donald F. Kettl,

Can Governments Earn Our Trust?

Copyright page

Copyright © Drude Dahlerup 2018

The right of Drude Dahlerup to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1636-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1637-7(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 11 on 15pt Sabon

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd. St Ives PLC

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Tables and figures

Tables

Table 2.1. Degrees of male dominance based on numerical representation of women

Table 2.2. Six dimensions of male dominance in politics

Table 2.3. Overcoming thresholds. Trajectories of women’s parliamentary representation in six old democracies since suffrage

Table 2.4. Variations between parties: percentage of women in the party groups in parliament

Table 2.5. Two leading regions for women’s political representation

Table 3.1. Women in parliament: top-ranking countries

Table 3.2. Seven arguments for and against quotas

Table 3.3. Immediate effect of quota laws on women’s parliamentary representation and on quota law revision

Figures

Figure 2.1. Percentage of women in parliament 1997–2017, worldwide and by region

Figure 2.2. Level of democracy and women’s parliamentary representation, in percentages

Preface

Has democracy failed women? Many would claim yes, since women have less than a quarter of the seats in the world’s parliaments, and since the elimination of gender inequality is not a salient issue high on the political agenda almost anywhere. Most of the political leaders in the world are men. Just take a look at the usual “family” photo taken at a world summit!

However, others would stress that women, from a position of total exclusion, are now gradually being included in elected assemblies all over the world, and more and more countries have experienced having a woman prime minister or president. We now even see women as finance and defense ministers – some of the last male bastions in politics.

The UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 represented a major shift of the global discourse away from the previous focus on women’s (alleged) lack of qualifications and political interest to a new focus on the lack of inclusiveness of the political institutions themselves. This is also the approach that I will adopt in this book.

“There [in Beijing, 1995] was an almost universal or palpable desire to be in power, to be in leadership, to change the terms of the relationship with the great globe; the mode of operation shifted from one of stating demands and needs to one of seeking control over the decision-making process,” wrote Devaki Jain in her book Women, Development, and the UN (2005). But can this optimism be maintained today in a world of climate change, economic crisis, armed conflicts and Trumpism? Is the world on the right track towards full inclusion of women in political life, and can we rule out future backlashes?

Paradoxically, at the same time that gender parity in politics is included as a principle in most international declarations, we find no uniform position among feminists on the benefits or actual outcomes of including women in male-dominated political institutions, for instance by the adoption of quotas. It will, however, be argued in this book that old democracies as well as countries in transition to democracy need what British political scientist Anne Phillips has called the presence of women, based on the new principle of parity – both as a right in itself and because women from all walks of life and from all over the world need more inclusive and well-functioning democratic political institutions to counteract the discriminatory effects of free market forces. The complexity of achieving parity in political life will be illustrated with examples from my work as an advisor on the political empowerment of women around the world.

Drude Dahlerup

Professor of Political Science

Stockholm, April 2017

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Louise Knight of Polity Press for suggesting this short book on women and democracy as a way to present an update of my many years of research on this topic and my recent experiences as a global advisor on how to empower women in political life in countries as diverse as Cambodia, Sierra Leone, China, Egypt, Tunisia, Kosovo, Bhutan, Kenya and the Ivory Coast. I am grateful to all the hard-working women’s NGOs and the many elected female politicians and government ministers who have shared with me invaluable insights into the barriers women meet in politics and how to overcome them.

I thank Nana Kalandadze and Rumbidzai Kandawasvika-Nhundu, International IDEA, and Zeina Hilal, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, for our great collaboration around the Global Quota Website, www.quotaproject.org. I also want to thank all my wonderful new friends in the Global Civil Society Advisory Group (2012–15) to UN Women’s Executive Director, first to Michelle Bachelet, followed by Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.

Emil Johansson, Alma Jonssen and Vaselis Petrogiannis have worked as research assistants with the coding of the Gender Quota Database (GQD), Stockholm University, 2014, and Tova Ask has worked as research assistant on various tables in the book. The DanishVelux Foundations have contributed through their financial support for the GRIP research project, based at Aalborg University, Denmark.

I am grateful to my colleagues at the department of Political Science at Stockholm University, especially Lenita Freidenvall and Diane Sainsbury, and to my extended research network all over the world for discussions on the development of Gender & Politics as a research field. Finally, I am grateful to my Danish-Swedish-Spanish family for so much in life, and I want to dedicate this book to my marvelous grandchildren, Carlos 8, Otto 6, Silas 5 and Alva 2.

1Exclusion Without Words

As the daughter of a feminist mother, I knew that my high-school teacher was wrong when, without any reservations, he taught us that the ancient city-state of Athens was the “cradle of democracy.” Can one really speak of democracy when a large portion of the population, perhaps even the majority, is excluded from political decision-making, as was the case in ancient Greece for women as well as for immigrants, slaves and workers? As a schoolgirl I protested in class, though to no avail.

The feminist critique of the celebration of the city-state of Athens as the cradle of democracy focuses on what we might call the “who” of democracy, that is, those who are included in, and those groups which are excluded from, political decision-making. This perspective challenges the traditional discourse, be it in political theory or in actual political life, which gives priority to the procedures – the “how” of democratic decision-making. Can one honestly speak of democracy if women and minorities are excluded, even if the procedures followed among the privileged men in the polity fulfill all the noble criteria of fair elections, deliberation and rotation of positions? In general, it is necessary to challenge the traditional definitions of democracy.

From a feminist perspective, the full and equal inclusion of women in politics is important as a right in itself because of the visible and highly symbolic value of political representation. Moreover, women’s movements have argued that the inclusion of women is necessary in order to change the political agenda and the political decisions. To those who say that the gender of politicians does not matter, feminists would respond: imagine a parliament or government with 80 percent women – would that not immediately cause a masculine uproar?

Two further dimensions of democracy are relevant here. The feminist critique also maintains that (although this is contested) there is a connection between those who participate in the decision-making and the policy result, that is, between women’s numerical representation and what we, thirdly, might call the “what” of democracy; in other words, which issues reach the political agenda and whose interests are being paid attention to? Some researchers talk further about the “where” of democracy as a fourth dimension.1 Democratic decision-making can be an ideal throughout society, from the kitchen table, the bedroom and the workplace, to education, sport and in civil society at large. Openness and inclusion in decision-making wherever it may take place are no doubt crucial for what happens within formal political institutions, and vice versa. The primary focus of this book is on the elected assemblies, the political parties, the governments and other key political institutions, including the pressure put on these institutions by national and transnational women’s movements and feminist scholarship.

Plan of the book

An ambiguous relationship exists between women and democracy. This relationship will be analyzed from a historical neo-institutionalist perspective, with its focus on the inertia, also called the “stickiness,” of institutions, many of which were formed before women had the right to participate. This approach implies a focus on formal as well as informal norms, including studies of the ways in which women’s under-representation is discussed (the discursive framework), and the constant pressure put on political parties and governments by women’s movements. This is all analyzed from a feminist scholarly perspective, stressing the unequal power relations between women and men.

Chapter 1 analyzes the early discussions about women’s right to vote before and just after the First World War. Key concepts to be used in this book are introduced, and references are made to contemporary discussions of women in political life. Chapter 2 looks at the gradual but still incomplete inclusion of women as political representatives into elected assemblies. Chapter 3 gives an overview based on new data on the unexpected global spread of gender quotas in politics in all types of political regimes. While Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the descriptive representation of women (the numbers), Chapter 4 discusses the substantive (the policy content) and symbolic representation of women, including the role of the few women in leadership positions. The fifth, and final, chapter takes us to the global arena, analyzing the presence – or lack of presence – of women and gender perspectives in global governance organizations, with examples from economic governance and from women in peace-building. This chapter also presents the final conclusions of the book.

Early exclusion

For a very long time, the exclusion of women was simply a non-issue. George H. Sabine, who wrote A History of Political Theory, the classic textbook read by so many generations of university students, including me, discusses the exclusion of workers, slaves and foreigners from political decision-making in the city-state of Athens and finds it explicable. Yet there is not a single word about the exclusion of women!

With the adoption of the first free constitutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which included some limited voting rights for men, it usually went without saying that women were denied such rights. The dominant perception was that the exclusion of women, and of other groups such as servants or people receiving poverty relief, from the political arena was insignificant or simply “natural.” Women’s right to vote and to stand for election was unimaginable far into the nineteenth century, even for the majority of women. In the United Kingdom, it was not until the Reform Act of 1832 that voting rights became specified as a right for “male persons.”2

Consequently, it was extremely burdensome to challenge the exclusion of women, as illustrated in the story behind the following Danish suffragist poster from 1909 about national (“political”) female suffrage:

“There is NO UNIVERSAL suffrage . . . when women are deprived of POLITICAL SUFFRAGE.”

Today, this statement would seem self-evident, but this was not the case at the time. The old protocol tells that the Danish Women’s Society, the feminist organization behind the poster, was reluctant to publish it. They feared the text would seem inappropriate and lead to protests, especially as every child learned in school that “universal suffrage” had been introduced decades before with the adoption of limited male suffrage.3

One might ask whether exclusion from voting rights on account of sex, race or ethnicity was not quite different in nature from the restrictions on property, income, paying taxes, being a convict or a recipient of poverty relief, or, of course, age. The latter characteristics could, at least in principle, change during one’s lifetime, whereas exclusion on account of sex, race or ethnicity was for life.

The unhappy marriage between women and liberalism

Political theorist Carole Pateman has argued that the division between the public and the private spheres and the exclusion of women from the public sphere was no coincidence but rather a constitutive element when liberal democracies were first established in the nineteenth century. The public sphere was the realm of men, while the private sphere, which should be protected from intervention on the part of the government, was the proper place for women, although with the husband as the head of the household.4

However, the classic liberal (as well as the contemporary neo-liberal) quests for limits to the scope of government vis-à-vis the private sphere were never part of feminist ideology. Instead of liberal demands for the protection of the family from state intervention, feminists from all political camps have called on the state to recognize women’s rights, and to intervene for economic redistribution and for the protection of women against domestic violence and abuse, as summed up in the familiar slogan of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s: “The private is political!”

Is the public–private division still a barrier for women in politics, even if so much has changed for women in public life all over the world? The many incidents of sexual harassment against young women during the recent Arab Uprisings, as seen for instance in the demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Egypt, should be interpreted as attacks on women’s right to be in the public sphere. In the same way, the recent outbursts of sexist hate speech against female politicians on the Internet have made many women abstain from political involvement.

How could women be tacitly excluded from the right to vote in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when male suffrage was on the public agenda? Early liberal writer James Mill argued that a husband could represent the interests of his wife and the entire household, a view to which his son, John Stuart Mill, so eloquently objected in his seminal book The Subjection of Women (1869), which was immediately translated into many other languages. In 1866, J. S. Mill presented the first proposal on women’s suffrage to the British parliament. Mill’s vision was not equality of result, but what we may call “competitive equality,” that is, equality of opportunity. The following quote is