In a comparative study of 36 democratic political systems, Weldon seeks to explain why some governments are more responsive than others to the problem of violence against women. Responsiveness, in her approach, is defined as specific governmental policy action, including legal reform, the provision of financial resources such as for women's crisis centers, and the provision of various governmental programs. She draws on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to substantiate her arguments. She uses multiple regression analysis to evaluate competing explanatory factors of variations in government policy responses. In addition, she draws on qualitative analyses of individual cases of policy formation to supplant her findings, with a particular emphasis on Australia and Canada, the two most responsive countries.

Weldon argues that two variables can explain variations in governmental responses toward violence against women. First, she finds that the existence of strong, autonomous women's movements are a necessary condition for the designation of violence against women as a public issue that requires a policy response. She demonstrates that a range of informal social-movement activity, including cultural production, protest politics, and everyday politics, in addition to more conventional formal political activities, represents a key variable in shaping policy responses in democratic political systems. Her findings confirm existing research that has demonstrated the influence women's movements have had on policy responses in comparative contexts (e.g., see Mary Katzenstein and Carol Mueller, eds., The Women's Movements of the United States and Western Europe 1987). However, Weldon argues that while autonomous movements are a necessary condition for gaining governmental responsiveness to the issue of violence against women, they do not constitute a sufficient condition. On the contrary (and here is the second variable), it is the interactive effect between women's movements and state institutions designed specifically to improve the status of women that can explain variations in policy responses. In many ways, feminist scholarship has already demonstrated through indepth case studies that gender issues can be addressed effectively through a combination of political activity both inside and outside the state (e.g., see Sonia Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil 1990).

The significance of Weldon's study is thus less in its conclusions that movements and institutions shape policy than in the systematic way in which she is able to demonstrate the explanatory significance of this interaction between women's movements and political institutions in a large-scale comparative study. In addition, an important aspect of Weldon's analysis is her finding that it is the structure of political institutions, rather than the numbers of women represented in elected office, that improves governmental responses to violence against women. Her study demonstrates that there is no relationship between the proportion of women in the legislature and policy responses to violence against women. Weldon does not dismiss the significance of individual women as political actors, but rather cautions against a “fallacy of aggregation” (89), which assumes that the actions of individual legislators can be added up to predict legislative outcomes.

There are two conceptual questions that rise to the surface in Weldon's study. The first pertains to the question of “responsiveness” and her conceptual distinction between policy responsiveness and policy effectiveness. She is careful to develop a measure of responsiveness that is not purely symbolic but that involves measurable governmental action, such as legal reform and the provision of financial resources. However, by excluding implementation from her conceptual definition of governmental action, she may be overestimating both the level of responsiveness and the impact of women's movements and women's policy agencies. For instance, in the case of India, to take just one of the countries in Weldon's sample, implementation of such policies has been uneven at best, despite the existence of strong, independent women's organizations and the existence of institutions focused specifically on the status of women.

A second conceptual question arising from the study is one that addresses structural inequalities (such as race and class) among women. One of the interesting findings is that in the most responsive countries, Canada and Australia, government responsiveness toward groups of women marginalized in terms of race and ethnicity improves when marginalized women's groups organize independently from existing women's movements. However, despite such findings and acknowledgments of women's differences, Weldon retains a notion of women as a unitary structural group. This produces some paradoxes in her argument. For instance, she argues that women's interests are not adequately addressed when they are handled by multiple, distinctive policy agencies, rather than separate “women's policy agencies.” As she puts it: “This creates the administrative challenge of coordinating women's policies and programs, which, as a result, often end up as low priority for all agencies concerned” (p. 121). Yet in her discussions of Aboriginal and minority women in Australia and Canada, she does not extend such an argument to a discussion of the administrative challenges for coordination between separate bureaucratic agencies designed to promote Aboriginal issues and women's issues. She suggests instead that “[p]erhaps such agencies give minority women multiple points of access and thus improve their access to the state” (p. 162). Such assumptions do not address recent research, which has argued that intersecting structures such as race, gender, and class fundamentally shape both women's structural locations and the ability of policies to respond to women's interests (e.g., see Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” in Martha Fineman and Roxanne Mykitiuk, In the Public Nature of Private Violence 1994). The emergence of the paradigm of intersectionality has posed much deeper challenges to the question of assessing and explaining policy responsiveness to such issues as violence against women, which are not addressed in Weldon's analysis.

Despite such conceptual limitations, Weldon's study fills an important gap in the fields of policy studies and women and politics. The book will be of use to a wide range of scholars, policymakers and activists interested in a broad comparative perspective on the problem of violence against women.