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5 Women’s Policy agency Success and Failure The Search for Explanations t he activity of women’s policy machineries is a significant influence on state responses to women’s movement demands; at the same time, the most effective agencies—insiders—are not necessary to achieve complete success. instead, insiders tend to be a backup when women ’s movement actors do not have the necessary resources, favorable policy environments, or support from left-wing parties and unions to achieve complete success with the state. Weak women’s movements and unfavorable policy environments are the norm in countries with the lowest level of women’s movement success. insider agencies in those countries have been important in bringing about the few successes women’s movements have enjoyed. in a majority of the debates, however, agencies were not insiders . they either adopted the movement goals but failed to change the frame of the debate—Marginal allies—or they did nothing at all—symbolics. a few even worked against movement actor goals—anti-Movement agencies. Why are some agencies effective allies and others ineffective? Why do some offices refuse to form alliances with women’s movement actors? answering these questions necessarily involves a systematic search for explanations of agency success and failure, to which we now turn in this chapter. the proposition that agency characteristics—structure, leadership, powers, and administrative capacity—are most likely to affect the success or failure of state offices as women’s movement allies is at the core of the analysis here. at the same time, the state feminism framework goes beyond the machineries themselves to look at the influence of women’s movement resources, of characteristics of the policy environment, and of support from the left wing. thus, this chapter examines agency characteristics alongside the explanatory power of the same sets of conditions that were important in understanding women’s movement success in chapter 4. We continue to use an integrated mixed-methods approach in the analysis of the full-fledged women’s policy agencies in 104 national debates.1 First, ordinal regression helps to determine if any agency, movement, policy envi- Women’s Policy agency Success and Failure / 101 ronment, or Left support variables affect degrees of agency activity. next, using csQca and case studies of causal mechanisms, we look for configurations of characteristics that distinguish fully insider agencies from Marginal ones. in the last part of the chapter, the darker side of state feminism is explored—both those agencies that did nothing to help women’s movement actors (symbolics) and the few that acted against their goals (anti-Movement agencies). Ideas about agency Success and Failure ever since the united nations declared women’s policy machineries to be the main engines for achieving equality for women, observers have considered the conditions that are conducive to reach that goal. a host of factors have been suggested: structure and capacity of the agencies, characteristics of women’s movements, state-society relations, state configurations, regime type, gender regimes, political will, and cultural factors. While analysts have used the tools of comparative analysis to determine the relative importance of factors through single-nation case studies as well as through comparisons of agencies in several countries or in groups of countries—both within regions and across regions—there is no definitive answer to questions about which determinants produce successful agencies. this section reviews what we know from previous research in relation to the cluster of agency characteristics as well as features of Movement resources, Favorable policy environment, and Left support used in this study. Women’s Policy Agency Characteristics studies suggest that certain administrative profiles produce more successful outcomes in a given national context. Weldon’s (2002b: 132) discussion of “effectiveness and accountability” shows agency independence, resources, formalized channels of access, and an ability to act across all policy areas to be important attributes for effectiveness. similarly, Jonathan Malloy (1999, 2003), in his research on women’s policy agencies in australia, points to agency autonomy , relations with groups, and resources as important factors. Findings of Comparative State Feminism (McBride stetson and Mazur 1995a) and other studies (e.g., squires and Wickham-Jones 2002) identify both administrative resources and a cross-sectional agency approach as important. research on femocrats in australia and the netherlands shows that agency leadership, particularly with respect to any ties to the women’s movement and its feminist leanings, affects agency activities (outshoorn 1994; eisenstein 1996; chappell 2002a; sawer 1990). shirin rai (2003b) identifies critical features of machineries : location...

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