Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State.

Edited by Lee Ann Banaszak, Karen Beckwith, and Dieter Rucht. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 372p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

If there is a political science counterpart to that field of physics occupied with a search for a unified theory of everything, it is comparative politics. Comparative politics scholars take on vast and complex questions of power and governance, develop complicated theoretical propositions, and, with determination, expose these theories to an empirical environment with too many variables and too few cases. These big questions are, of course, the really interesting ones. In this pioneering tradition, Lee Ann Banaszak, Karen Beckwith, and Dieter Rucht assembled a team of scholars to study the intersection of two of the most significant changes in the late-twentieth-century postindustrial democracies: the reconfiguration of states—comprising changes in their organization, powers, and discourse—and the shifts in the organization, strategy, and discourse of women's movements. Their goal was to make sense of each of these transformations, the interactions between them, and the effects of these interactions on both the states and the movements.

What makes a study comparative is the systematic exposure of theory to empirical methods. Given that, however, there are options available to researchers contemplating a major project. In Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State, rather than design a set of research questions and methods to be followed by each contributor, the editors offer a framework that maps a number of significant research questions, which the authors can use to study one or more countries. This strategy, in their words, allows for a “less stringent and more flexible pattern of comparison” (p. 27). In confronting a completely new area of research such as this, their approach has much to recommend it, and the group has produced an informative and provocative work.

The editors set forth the conceptual framework and methods in the first chapter. Reconfiguration involves the process of moving state authority within the state, as well as altering state/society relations. Three patterns of in-state changes are labeled uploading, for trends toward moving responsibility to higher state and superstate levels; downloading, for the move from higher to lower levels; and lateral loading for the horizontal shift of policy responsibility from elected to nonelected, mostly bureaucratic, bodies. Off-loading is the name for state/ society shifts as states reduce expenditures through privatization and reductions in welfare state programs. These metaphors provide a very useful shorthand for referring to complex shifts in policymaking.

The second part of the introduction sets forth a model for analyzing the interactions between states and movements that tracks variations from cooperation and assimilation, on the one hand, and conflict and confrontation, on the other. Patterns of interaction can be mapped over time—in this book the 1970s are compared with the 1990s—and the changes that are observed can be compared to the particular type of state reconfiguration occurring in the country. The research questions are: 1) As the configuration of power and responsibility has changed in the state and in state/society relations, how have women's movements responded? and 2) To what extent have the interactions of women's movements and the state changed the state itself?

As the authors note, there are still few systematic comparative studies of women's movements and state responses. That explains the need to take the time to develop a conceptual framework that carefully defines the state and state processes. However, it is curious that the authors do not make a similar effort to define women's movements and their processes. Their definition of women's movements as “movements whose definition, content, leadership, development, or issues are specific to women and their gender identity” (p. 2 n. 3) is general enough to encompass a variety of phenomena. But it essentially leaves it up to the individual researchers to define what constitutes the movement in particular countries. This is flexible, but does it allow for comparative conclusions?

After the introduction, there are eight chapters which, to varying degrees, apply the framework of state reconfiguration and movement politics to one or more countries. Each is an informative and useful study in its own right. There are single-country studies of changes in women's movements in Italy (Donna della Porta) and Spain (Celia Valiente) and of welfare reform in the United States (Mary Katzenstein). The cross-national studies of movement/state politics focus on specific issues, such as parity (Valiente and Jane Jenson), equal pay, abortion (Banaszak), constitutional reforms (Alexandra Dobrowolsky), participation (Beckwith), and violence against women (Amy Elman). While each author is inspired by the central question of state reconfiguration, not all use the framework provided in the introduction, making it difficult to compare findings across the various chapters.

Instead of a single concluding chapter, therefore, there are three, all more inspired by placing the results in terms of the general social movement literature than by zeroing in on the question of state reconfiguration and its effects on women's movements. Carol McCluerg Mueller and John McCarthy assess changes in radical, socialist, and liberal feminist activism in response to changes in the state. The authors of this chapter equate state reconfiguration (something new) with political-opportunity structure theory (something familiar). Yielding to that temptation renders their results less insightful than the preceding chapters. The second is a study of four social movements in Germany by Dieter Rucht. German patterns among labor, women's, peace, and environmental movements suggest that the most similarity is found between women's and environmental movements.

The final chapter is by David Meyer, who is charged with pulling all the chapters together. This is a challenge given the variation in the authors' use of the organizing framework of the first chapter. Being an expert in social movements like Mueller and McCarthy, Meyer tends to be drawn to conventional social movement theory of political opportunity and political mobilization, rather than exploring insights offered by the state reconfiguration framework. The conclusion suggests, as does the entire book, many directions for future research. But I would have liked to see Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht write a concluding chapter in the terms of their introductory chapter and offer explicit suggestions for the next research to be undertaken by themselves and others in exploring the topic of state reconfiguration and social movements.