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Gender and State Architectures: The Impact of Governance Structures on Women's Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2011

Jill Vickers
Jill Vickers
Affiliation:
Carleton University
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Extract

This essay explores gender scholarship about how state architectures affect women's politics. A rapidly growing literature addresses the effects of vertical and horizontal power divisions in federations. While just one in five states is a federation, federations govern 40% of the world's population (Watts 2008). Globalization and neoliberal ideology foster regionalization, devolution, and increased influence by international agencies, and so more people experience multilevel governance (MLG) in unitary states, too. Hence, feminist scholars now increasingly consider the impact of state architectures. The field's core idea is that while socioeconomic and ideological forces shape gender/power relations, governments and movements respond from within specific state architectures. Related debates involve how institutional designs shape opportunity structures, and how feminists respond to federal diversity.

Type
Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 254 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2011

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