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10 Gendering New Institutionalism Amy G. Mazur Dorothy E. McBride p olitical institutions are central to state feminism theory. in turn, findings from this study of state feminism make important contributions to theories associated with “new institutionalism,” an approach that typically ignores the complex interplay linking gender, change, and political institutions. the goal of this chapter is to add to ongoing efforts by feminist scholars to gender new institutional approaches. it begins with an overview of this feminist research and lays out the components of new institutional theory. next, using the rngs-based dataset of women’s policy agencies (see chapter 3), we assess propositions from new institutionalism about change over time and across sector, country, and region. the analysis first focuses on propositions based in historical institutional theories. then, we turn to agency-movement alliances as they inform theories of discursive institutionalism in terms of Movement state Feminism and transformative state Feminism. the chapter concludes with a review of the implications of the findings for a better integration of feminist and nonfeminist institutional work. approaches to Gendering New Institutionalism since the late 1980s, social scientists have turned their attention to institutions as major factors in explaining political and social outcomes, and have sought to understand how, why, and to what end institutions change.1 Within political science, new institutionalism has been associated with “bringing the state back-in” (skocpol 1985) through a focus on formal political institutions both inside and outside of government, ranging from parliamentary commissions and bureaucratic agencies to political parties and interest groups. in this literature, institutions are defined as systems of rules and norms that structure political behavior: “codified rules of political 218 / Unpacking State Feminism contestation” (pierson 2004: 21). although there is often overlap, three general approaches have emerged: (1) rational-choice institutionalism conceptualizes institutional change and dynamics in terms of the logic of individuals maximizing opportunities; (2) historical institutionalism seeks to explain the changes of formal political institutions and patterns of institutional interaction across time; and (3) discursive institutionalism, a more recent variant, approaches institutional change in terms of set patterns of discourses and ideational logics or frames that structure political action within the state (schmidt 2008). all of these theories virtually ignore issues of gender (chappell 2006; Mackay and Waylen 2009). one of the more notable examples of this omission is the Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (rhodes, Binder, and rockman 2006). this inventory of the field of institutional analysis has no separate entry on gender or feminist institutionalism, and only one of thirty-eight chapters mentions feminist analyses of the state (Jessop 2006).2 While the new institutionalism has become a well-developed area of study despite ignoring gender, feminist theorists and analysts have produced an equally impressive body of work, beginning in the early 1990s, to advance theories of gender, state, and institutional change.3 From the beginning, their central question has been whether the contemporary state and its various institutions could help women and promote the cause of gender equality and if so how, why, and to what end. Feminist scholars agree that state institutions are inherently gendered (acker 1992) and gender-biased—either patriarchal or driven by organizational masculinism (Lovenduski 1998). early feminist theorists argued that the state is a monolithic patriarchy that women’s advocates and feminists should avoid. in the late 1980s, australian feminist scholars deconstructed the state and asserted that there are different state arenas, some of which could be effective sites for feminists and women’s rights activists to gain entry and promote women-friendly policy (e.g., connell 1987; pringle and Watson 1992). this conceptualization of the state as a more porous and disaggregated entity allowed analysts to consider it as a potential vehicle for feminist change. still, feminist analysts saw the need to focus on the specific gendered culture of many individual state structures, like commissions or bureaucratic agencies, and identified the so-called culture of neutrality in many agencies as highly gender -biased (cockburn 1991; Ferguson 1984; chappell 2002b; stivers 1993). Whatever the label, it is in the nature of institutions, according to this perspective , to ignore gender equality and women’s issues, setting up barriers to women ’s participation. Feminist engagement with the state is an attempt to change the inherently gender-biased dynamics of state institutional processes. a new generation of scholars, using the australian poststructural analyses as a point of departure, saw that feminist activists have the potential to enter certain state arenas to change the gendered nature...

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