The Politics of State Feminism: Innovation in Comparative Research

Preface

Preface t his volume, The Politics of State Feminism, is the culmination of fifteen years of work by more than forty researchers in thirteen countries. the collective odyssey began when a critical mass of researchers working on gender politics and the state became interested in doing a systematic study of government agencies established to address women’s status and gender equality. this first scholarly collaboration produced Comparative State Feminism in 1995 and then led to the establishment of the research network on gender politics and the state (rngs) that same year (http://libarts.wsu.edu/polisci/rngs/). since then, the network has produced five issue books, a follow-up book to Comparative State Feminism, and a comprehensive dataset. The Politics of State Feminism uses the rngs study as a launching pad to show to what extent and why women’s policy agencies bring about positive state responses to movement claims that expand women’s representation. this work is the capstone of the rngs study; however, its focus and approach are broader than rngs and should be seen as part of a larger scholarly project on state feminism. the central focus of rngs was the interface between movements and agencies. the network researchers developed a complex analytical approach and model to analyze agencies’ influences on women’s movement access and policy. developing a theory of state feminism was not their major goal. indeed, the rngs documents and books use the notion of state feminism in a variety of ways: as a term to describe women’s policy agencies and as a label to identify the agencies most friendly to the women’s movement. it was not until the end of the rngs x / Preface study, ironically, that it became clear that state feminism was explicitly about the movement-agency nexus. thus, this book builds from rngs work, taking it a step further into systematic empirical theory building across all of the issue areas covered in the project. the data used in this book come from the qualitative studies of policy debates across thirteen countries published in the five issue books. these cases describe the activities of women’s movement actors and women’s policy agencies and the results they achieved. the rngs dataset, available on the rngs Web site, is also based on those original process-tracing studies. the dataset comprises information on 120 variables for 130 policy debates. in this book, authors have repackaged these original measures into several new datasets appropriate to the specific research questions, propositions, and methods selected for study. in addition, the qualitative studies are the basis for several detailed case studies presented throughout the book. The Politics of State Feminism uses rngs’s innovative approach, which combines qualitative and quantitative components in its design: in-depth, primary research on cases according to a uniform causal model. going beyond rngs, this book sets forth an explicit theoretical framework about state feminism and uses an integrated mixed-methods approach to explore and test the propositions from that framework. these methods are statistical inference, crisp-set Qualitative comparative analysis, and causal-mechanism case studies . the goal is to develop an empirically based theory of state feminism. the idea of bridging the quantitative/qualitative methodological divide, so central to rngs, has carried over into this capstone study through the rigorous conceptualization of major ideas that compose the theoretical framework. We take a qualitative approach to concept construction, considering the cultural meaning and detailed dimensions before operationalizing core concepts with valid and reliable measures. these concepts, first presented in chapter 2, derive from in-depth discussions among members in the rngs project. throughout the theory-building process, in rngs and in this capstone endeavor, we have sought to have a dialogue with feminist and non-feminist scholars, taking into consideration the degree to which “mainstream” political science has ignored insights from gender scholarship. thus, this project is innovative for taking an integrated mixed-methods approach while operationalizing feminist theory and using gender as a significant component of the analysis. another innovation of rngs and of this book is the way countries are considered . From the beginning, a question of research was whether movement and agency relations would follow patterns across specific policy sectors: the universe of policy debates pertained to five different issues—abortion, prostitution, political representation, job training, and priority topics of the 1990s, called “hot issues.” By making policy debates rather than countries the units of analysis , the design of the study also provided a way to assess...