We are happy to announce that the first two books in the Oxford Univeristy Press’ series Studies in Feminist Institutionalism is now out!
Defending the Status Quo: On Adaptive Resistance to Electoral Gender Quotas by Cecilia Josefsson
Defending the Status Quo explores political elites’ resistance to electoral gender quota reforms. In order to explain this phenomenon, Cecilia Josefsson develops an original theoretical framework that she calls the Resistance Stage Framework.
Anchored in feminist institutionalism and mapped onto the policy process, Josefsson outlines how status quo defenders adapt their resistance strategies to accommodate institutional and ideational changes across agenda setting, policy formulation, decision-making, and implementation phases. She bolsters her theory with a thick description of a 30-year-long process to adopt and implement electoral gender quotas in Uruguay. While Uruguay has been a vanguard in the women’s rights movement, men’s political dominance has been pervasive in this country. The struggle to introduce a gender quota has been marked by repeated reform attempts, persistent resistance, and a wide variation in the responses of the Uruguayan political parties, making this case apt for developing theory and shedding light on the adaptive nature of resistance.
Drawing on extensive interviews with Uruguayan political elites, three quota debates, and party electoral lists, Josefsson carefully examines the power struggle over gender quota reform. She shows how powerful status quo defenders, seeking to ignore, stall, and undermine gendered institutional change, adapt their resistance strategies across different political parties and over time, as quota advocates make advances and manage to change the institutional and ideational context.
The Face of the Nation: Gendered Institutions in International Affairs by Elise Stephenson
Foreign services globally are undergoing fundamental and rapid gendered change, spurred on by shifting social and governance norms and even the adoption of an explicit feminist foreign policy in some stages. For some, this has resulted in women’s rapidly increasing representation at the frontlines of global governance. Yet, compounded by COVID-19, a rise in right-wing misogyny and extremism, and sometimes archaically slow-moving institutions, progress is marred by women’s continued, entrenched under-representation in leadership and devastating challenges that have increased in recent years. Women remain frequently side-lined, marginalized, under-valued, and overlooked in international affairs. In short, international affairs has a gender problem, and remains one of the worst-performing sectors of the state.
After studying women’s leadership and gender relations across four international affairs agencies spanning diplomacy, defense, national security, policing, and intelligence, The Face of the Nation contributes empirical data from the last 30+ years on women’s representation in a leading case context—Australia—to understand the disconnect between pockets of progress and undercurrents of resistance. Australia is a global leader in terms of representation of women and policy supports for gender equality in governance. Yet, Australia also demonstrates how deeply gendered, racialized, and heteronormative international institutions remain. Through in-depth interviews with almost 80 global leaders, including with Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, and first female foreign minister, Julie Bishop, this book delivers a much-needed Intersectional Feminist Institutionalist approach to trace the evolution of inequalities in international affairs and interrogate why women still remain under-represented in international affairs.