What difference would it make for comparative political analysis if gender were central to our general research project? A focus on comparative politics in its cross-national emphasis shows that gender is so central to the politics of countries and peoples as to be invisible. The presence of exclusively male state institutions, such as the military, in many if not most nations; the gendered organization of political rights and liberties (including political participation, individual mobility, access to education and health care, among other political protections); and the nearly universal dominance of male actors in governments worldwide—socially and politically constructed and defended as a “male/female” cleavage—are strong evidence of the highly gendered nature of power and politics in comparative perspective.Footnote 1 This enduring and persistent cleavage is “not [the result of] short term policies introduced and withdrawn by each incoming government but [of] weighty tomes passed from one generation to the next.”Footnote 2 As a result, what is politically distinctive about women worldwide “is their exclusion from the political process and their collective status as political outsiders;”Footnote 3 what is politically distinctive about men worldwide is their universal presence in national, international, and political institutions and their disproportionate dominance in these institutions.
Given the universality of women's presence, and the universality of men's political dominance, it seem less than extraordinary to ask that questions concerning gender be placed centrally in comparative politics. A comparative politics of gender would take seriously the extent to which gender is a major and primary constitutive element of political power. This does not mean that other meta-concepts are not similarly important (for example, class),Footnote 4 but it does insist that comparative politics as a subfield have a theoretical understanding of gender as a meta-concept and that comparative political scholars raise questions about gender in our thinking about our research, even if ultimately we do not explicitly employ gender in our research.Footnote 5
Gender and Gendered Comparative Research
How does gender as a meta-concept contribute to comparative political research? Although much has been written about women, gender, and politics, including the study of women and comparative politics,Footnote 6 it is worth reiterating what is meant by “gender” for comparative political research. Gender as a concept in political research is conventionally understood as sets of socially constructed meanings of masculinities and femininities, derived from context-specific identifications of sex, that is, male and female, men and women.Footnote 7 These meanings emerge from stereotypes about male and female behavior; from characteristics and behaviors conventionally associated with women and men; from normative assumptions about appropriate behaviors of men and women; from assumptions about biological difference; and from social structures of power and difference. As a result, meanings of gender are multiple and contextual in time and space; hence, such meanings vary across nations and states.
No universal content emerges from “sex” that gives single and universal meaning to gender. Nonetheless, gender as a concept and gendered meanings mapped to “sex” have universal persistence. Because “the existence of bodies imbued with male or female secondary sex characteristics does not lead inexorably [or inevitably] to any particular practices or meanings,”Footnote 8 the universal persistence of gender, with its content variations, underscores that gender is constructed rather than natural. Gender represents both the outcomes and processes of human actors and institutions in developing meanings about a range of femininities and masculinities, and constitutes “a set of ideational and social structural relationships that people move through, rather than attributes they have attached to their persons.”Footnote 9
The constructed nature of gender and its variations across states, regions, and nations allows comparative political scholars to identify intersections of gender with other politically relevant categories and processes. Gender norms, practices, and identities vary “across groups of women and men as well as across nations, regions, generations, and cultural groups,”Footnote 10 and across age, race, and time, and have “multiple logics.”Footnote 11 As a result, gender as a comparative political concept carries with it an intersectional appreciation that “male” and “female” are manifested as contextual, time-bound, socially and politically constructed expressions of “masculinities” and “femininities” that are not perfectly congruent with “male” and “female” identities. That is, even in a single context at a specific time, women will evidence a range of masculinities and femininities, as will men, and these gendered expressions will vary according to other social identities, constraints, and expectations, as well as to the actors' institutional location.
These gendered intersectional meanings also reveal differences in political power. As Iris Marion Young observed, gender can serve to expose “the differentiations and contradictions in the social experience of gender…. [highlighting] the fact that not all men are equally privileged by gender. It also makes clear that some women are privileged in relation to some men … and allows the theorist to look for race or class in specific gender interactions and expectations without essentializing them.”Footnote 12 Variations in gender permit scholars to identify political inequalities and to analyze the extent to which—and how—such inequalities are dependent upon gender differences and practices.
How is gender conceptualized in the context of comparative political research? Apprehending gender as a meta-concept, gender functions in comparative political research as both an independent and a dependent variable. Insofar as gender is constructed by state and society, gender functions as an effect or outcome of human agency and politics. Because gender also serves to construct political choices and outcomes, it can function as a determinant of such phenomena. Furthermore, gender can function both as a categorical concept and as a dynamic process concept for comparative political research.
Gender as a category variable has utility in its classifying masculine or feminine behaviors, preferences, and opportunities, and in identifying their impact on outcomes, such as military intervention, social movement success, electoral choice, and public policy. Gender, conceptualized as a process, functions to identify how apparently gender-neutral structures and policies work upon women or men, and upon masculine or feminine actors, as well as on the interactions among individual women or men to shape structures and policies to a specifically gendered outcome. Examples of such research include studies of the gendered impact of electoral rules, nomination procedures, and policy-making and other decision-making processes, as well as the gendered outcomes of democratic transitions and other regime changes, citizenship and immigration policies, and genocide. Gender as process is also evidenced, for example, in the strategic decisions and actions of women and men in constructing new political systems, drafting constitutions, negotiating party alliances, struggling over party leadership, and organizing transnational social movement campaigns. Gender employed as a process variable moves beyond differentiating between, e.g., foreign policy preferences of male and female elites to a focus on the ways in which institutional structures and practices shape the interactions, alliance formation and discourses available to and influenced by male or female political elites in foreign policy decision-making.Footnote 13 Therefore, gender has utility for analyzing institutions and political structures, their functioning and their effects, beyond its more conventional uses for examining men's and women's political behavior and preferences, even cross-nationally.
In short, gender functions as a meta-concept.Footnote 14 Although gender as a concept has universal presence, its meanings and content are context-specific. Because gender is a constructed concept, its meanings vary across time and space, marking intersections and inequalities. Gender is evidenced both at the levels of individual identity and of institutions and structures; and it functions as a category marker as well as a process variable. These components of gender as a meta-concept fit well with the structure and foci of comparative politics as a subfield, underscoring gender's utility for comparative political research.
Intersections of Gender and Comparative Politics and the Implications for Gendered Comparative Research
The defining criteria of comparative politics shape the possibilities for a comparative politics of gender, almost all of which are positive. First, comparative politics' emphasis on “real world” questions offers an openness to questions concerning women or gender. Although the subfield as a whole might be faulted for the tardiness with which it has turned its attentions to these particular real-world questions—Why are there so few female suicide bombers? What is the relationship between women's rights and political stability? Is gender inequality responsible for the prevalence of dictatorship in the Muslim world?Footnote 15 Does gendered leadership gender public policy? —the subfield is nonetheless structurally open to these questions.
Second, comparative politics is also open to a broad scope of research questions concerning gender and women. Given the absence of a hegemonic research agenda, comparative politics—despite its own exclusionary practicesFootnote 16—has no necessary structural substantive constraints that would deter research focused on women and gender. Comparative politics has no major shared explanandum (or dependent variable);Footnote 17 recent “special issues” of political science journals concerning gender and comparative politics generally address a range of substantive concerns.Footnote 18 The absence of a constraining center to the subfield is in contrast to the international relations subfield where, as feminist IR scholars have argued, “the boundaries … have been quite rigorously policed” and the subfield “can be defined substantively, theoretically and methodologically”Footnote 19—a claim it would be difficult to substantiate for comparative politics.Footnote 20 This substantive inclusiveness is reflected in the range of research across comparative politics generally, and among women and gender scholars specifically, including, e.g., political development, democratization and democratic transitions, citizenship, revolution, mobilization, electoral systems, party competition, and political leadership, among other concerns.
Third, comparative politics' methodological pluralism is well-suited to a research subfield—women, gender, and politics—that of necessity has relied upon qualitative and small-n case analysis (as well as on large-n and quantitative statistical analysis). Major fights over epistemology, methodology, and methods that have characterized other subfields have not resonated as strongly among comparative women and politics scholars.Footnote 21 The data deficiencies—or, put more gently, the data collection challenges still to be surmounted—of comparative political research have required scholars of gender, women and politics to use the data available to answer questions that have only recently been posed, and to employ single-case, primarily qualitative field-based data to build a foundation of evidence for identifying further research questions, for purposes of generalization, and for developing comparative political theory (including feminist theory). The current debates in comparative politics generally have served more to emphasize the subfield's acceptance of multiple methods than to criticize them,Footnote 22 and comparative political research on gender and women has taken advantage of every one of these methods.
Finally, the emphasis on field research in comparative politics is particularly conducive to research on women, gender and politics. Field research is not only a valuable data collection strategy but is crucial for a women, gender, and politics research subfield that is still in the process of identifying the types of data that need to be collected. Moreover, because comparativists share a focus on multiple countries, including a subset external to our own, field research heightens the possibilities for increasing our awareness of intersectionality issues,Footnote 23 issues of particular importance for research on women, gender, and politics.Footnote 24
In short, comparative political research is a particularly conducive location for research on women, gender, and politics. The subfield's inclusive subject scope, its open research agenda, a logic of comparison which embraces multiple methods, and its structural advantages for intersectionality, grounded in a tradition of field research, have positioned comparative politics as well suited to posing the research questions, employing the methods, collecting the data, and developing the models and theories appropriate and necessary for a comparative politics of gender.
A Comparative Politics of Gender: What Does Gender Add to Comparative Political Analysis?
A comparative politics of gender can render visible a major enduring cross-national political cleavage—male/female—that is constitutive of political power, and comparative political science is structurally and methodologically positioned to incorporate gender as a central concept in the subfield. Most importantly, a comparative politics of gender can reveal insights concerning several central concerns of comparative politics research that involve the mutually constituent workings of gender and politics. Two substantive research foci illustrate this claim: 1) comparative violence and 2) comparative democracy and democratization.
Comparative Political Violence
A comparative politics of gender might be particularly useful in elucidating issues of comparative violence. The organization, control, and employment of violence are all highly gendered, not only as masculine behaviors and institutions, but as male-dominant institutions and as actions undertaken almost exclusively by male actors.Footnote 25 What is the relationship between political violence and gender? What sets of beliefs, cultural norms, and specific masculinities (and femininities) underpin political violence undertaken by men? What (other) gendered institutions might support or impede masculinized political violence? How are men specifically mobilized for political violence—and women not so mobilized? Under what conditions are women mobilized to enact—or to be complicit in—political violence? What political and social arrangementsFootnote 26 (or tactical choices) might deter potential violence?
Specific gendered questions concerning violence may deepen our understanding of political violence and of the use of military force. These questions might include why there are so few female suicide bombers.Footnote 27 What is the gendered organization of violence that recruits men exclusively, even in contexts where women's clothing and gendered assumptions about women's apolitical nature would position women strategically as potentially successful and very dangerous suicide bombers? Another question concerns the absence of women as a precondition for the use of violence. Is the presence of women more likely to deter violence in social movements? Does the presence (or absence) of women in collective action gender the tactical decisions of social movement activists concerning the use of violence? Does women's presence gender the context in which state agents refrain from using violence against social movement activists and, if so, under what specific conditions?
Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life Engendered?
In his book Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society, Ashutosh Varshney examines the role of civic associations in preventing ethnic differences from developing into violent confrontation. For Varshney, the issue is “that despite ethnic diversity, some places … manage to remain peaceful, whereas others experience enduring patterns of violence.”Footnote 28 Although Varshney is generally silent on gender, because organized violence is so highly gendered as masculine and predominantly (and often exclusively) involves men, Varshney's work can nonetheless be seen to address an implicitly gendered political research question.
Varshney distinguishes two forms of civic engagement: associational Footnote 29 and everyday. Footnote 30 These different types of engagement involve different network connections and different numbers of connections. Although routine engagement (in everyday networks) often functions to bring neighbors together to promote peace and to diffuse conflict, Varshney argues that they are less effective than is associational engagement. Civic associations are sturdier, more enduring, providing social links across anonymity (beyond face-to-face association) and reaching a larger number of persons. In addition, Varshney argues, these connections “constrain local politicians in their strategic behavior.”Footnote 31 Civic associations, especially cross-ethnic associations, recognize the benefits of “an institutionalized peace system;”Footnote 32 are positioned to identify, in the community, likely sources of violent conflict; and work with politicians to defuse possible violence. “A synergy emerges between the local wings of the state and local civic associations, making it easier to police the emerging situation and preventing it from degenerating into riots and killings.”Footnote 33 Cross-ethnic civic associations are more likely to prevent the emergence of ethnic violence than are intra-ethnic civic associations, where information across ethnic groups is not shared (or easily sharable); they are also more likely to succeed in preventing “small tremors (unconfirmed rumors, victories and defeats in sports)”Footnote 34 from erupting into large-scale violence than are everyday associations, where the limited reach of everyday networks constrains their capacity to contact sufficiently large numbers of persons, including beyond those networks, and to provide the information, reassurance and solidarity necessary to squelch rumors, discipline counter-productive behavior, and defuse conflict.Footnote 35
Varshney examined the role of peace committees among several groups whose organizing purpose was the mitigation of ethnic violence. He found such committees present in Calicut.Footnote 36 Peace committees form at the city level (from above) and also develop from everyday engagement (from below), but those that emerge from below are more likely to be intra- rather than inter-ethnic associations and limited in their reach. Nonetheless, even in Calicut, where citizens have been successful in resisting temptations to ethnic violence, Varshney finds everyday associations underpinning inter-ethnic interaction. In Calicut, Hindu and Muslim families eat together; their children play together; they visit each other and generally socialize.Footnote 37 Calicut also has a distinctively high literacy rate and a history of social clubs, such as reading groups, film and theatre groups, and science societies.Footnote 38
Varshney recognizes, in his discussion of civil society, that informal everyday networks have organizational and political importance, including in defusing ethnic violence, and that women construct (some of) these networks.Footnote 39 This suggests an unidentified (and unexamined) gendered relationship in regard to peace committees and to gendered inter-ethnic everyday engagements that might support inter-ethnic civic associations. Varshney makes a strong case that everyday associations are insufficient to withstand provocations to ethnic violence; he does not, however, examine the extent to which inter-ethnic everyday associations underpin inter-ethnic civic associations.
It may be that strong inter-ethnic civic associations are undergirded by strong inter-ethnic everyday engagements that are gendered. In the case of Calicut, a gendered analysis might consider the extent to which everyday socializing, among adults and among children, relies upon wives; the extent to which play among children requires trust and cooperation among mothers; the extent to which eating together, with knowledge of cross-ethnic dietary restrictions and conventions, relies upon women cooking and negotiating and issuing social invitations. A gendered analysis might also examine whether inter-ethnic everyday engagements, dependent upon (primarily) women, support and sustain inter-ethnic associations among (primarily) men, and whether the absence of inter-ethnic association at the everyday level deprives civic organizations of the connection and reassurance at the base necessary for inter-ethnic respect, tolerance and peace.
In Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society, Varshney offers a passing—but highly intriguing—set of examples of the role of women in constructing cross-ethnic social, and eventually political, cooperation. In Saharanpur, women in Disha,Footnote 40 a women's NGO, organized separately among women in the Muslim and Hindu poor communities, creating opportunities for discussion within each ethnic community. This discussion provided cross-ethnic information that served to develop women's trust and interest, and, eventually, inter-ethnic mobilization among women around common concerns and convening of inter-ethnic meetings among women. Varshney claims that Disha was instrumental “in stopping the national controversy over the Baburi mosque from destroying local communal harmony.”Footnote 41
A second example is that of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA). An inter-ethnic poor working women's association, SEWA formed a series of associations among women to improve their situation.Footnote 42 In Ahmedabad, women in SEWA organized across ethnic lines to promote peace. “In principle,” Varshney writes, “the associational links between large numbers of Muslim and Hindu women should offer a bulwark against violence, at least in the neighborhoods where the female union members live.”Footnote 43 Although threats from Hindu nationalists were sufficiently intimidating to shut SEWA down in the early 1990s, Varshney argues that, despite the conditions SEWA faced, the organization nonetheless had some limited success in mitigating some ethnic violence.
In short, Varshney's research lends itself to a comparative politics of gender. Although Varshney's research is not explicitly gendered, it nonetheless lends itself to further analysis from the perspective of a comparative politics of gender. This is not a criticism of Varshney's work per se; indeed, his research is an important contribution to the growing comparative (and gendered)Footnote 44 research concerning socially diversity networks and the value of heterogeneous association, secular or religious, in developing tolerance, generating social cooperation, and defusing violent conflict.Footnote 45 Nonetheless, there are missed opportunities in Varshney's work, which raise additional questions. What is the relationship between women's everyday engagement across ethnic lines and successful inter-ethnic civic associationism? Do women contribute to inter-ethic violence at the everyday level and, if so, how? Are women excluded from organized male violence and, if so, how and why? How do women in homogeneous groups (intra-ethnic) become violent—or stay peaceful?
Furthermore, a gendered analysis might also examine the extent to which women may be foreclosed from participation in civic associations (which involve businessmen and union members)Footnote 46 and the extent to which inter-ethnic associations may be more friendly to women than are intra-ethnic ones. In his discussion of Aligarh, Varshney found intra-ethnic association in political parties, business associations, and in educational and social groups, concurrent with—or perhaps reinforced by—diminished experiences of inter-ethnic social contacts. Varshney concludes that “everyday interethnic engagement may be enough to maintain peace on a small scale … but it is no substitute for interethnic associations in larger settings.”Footnote 47 While Varshney's work does not address these questions that a gendered analysis would entail, it does position us at least to ask such questions, including whether a predominantly male set of civic associations persuades women not to engage in or to encourage violence—or how such associations might diminish women's ability to do either.
Again, given men's predominance in the political organization, control, and use of violence, asking about the relationship between political violence and gender specifically focuses the research on the constitutive nature of gender in politicizing ethnicity and encouraging ethnic-based violence. Answers to questions about this relationship would have enriched Varshney's analysis and might have revealed additional links among cross-ethnic every-day engagements, women's civic associations and the probability of inter-ethnic political violence.
Comparative Democracy
Sonia Alvarez, Lisa Baldez, Miki Caul Kittilson, Georgina Waylen, and many other scholars have written about the gendered nature of democratization and democratic transitions; Baldez writes explicitly about a comparative politics of gender and democracy in the second half of this symposium, and hence I give less attention to a comparative politics of gender in comprehending democracy than would otherwise be the case.Footnote 48 In addition to the work of Baldez and other scholars, research on the alternation of dictatorship and democracy, resulting from military coups, would benefit from the recognition that these are highly gendered transitions, involving as they do the male and masculinized military creation of governments. The fact that the military, in a coup, replaces a civilian government means not only that the transition is not democratic but that it is a distinctively masculinized—and hence gendered—transition. The mutual constitution of military and political elites in many countries underscores the gendered nature of political rule—not just in terms of the explicit exclusion of women from political governance, but in terms of the reinforcing congruence of military masculinities and governing masculinities located in male actors. A comparative politics of gender leads us to examine military-created governments as gendered political institutions.
In regard to democratic practice and participation, gender is likely to have distinctive contributions yet to be fully studied and understood.Footnote 49 Research on women's movements suggests that political women organize in communities in ways that are distinctively inclusive;Footnote 50 and that women's movement activism often involves the explicit practice of democracy. In addition, democratic political systems, established with women's full citizenship, are gendered toward women at the outset, and are likely to exhibit distinctive (although not necessarily feminist) practices and policies in comparison with those democracies in which women were among the last to be fully included as equal citizens.Footnote 51
Conclusion: Toward a Comparative Politics of Gender
What would it mean for political scientists to move toward a comparative politics of gender? First, a comparative politics of gender would place gender as a concept central to comparative political research. Second, it would make visible a major enduring cross-national political cleavage that is constitutive of political power.
A comparative politics of gender could also encourage scholars to broaden, extend, enrich, and correct our analyses and conclusions in regard to comparative political research and in regard to gender. A comparative politics of gender discourages provincialism and could serve to correct US political science hegemony in gender and politics research. In several areas of research, a comparative politics of gender has recast and improved our understanding of social policies and welfare states;Footnote 52 electoral systems; democratic transitions; and social movements.
Furthermore, a comparative politics of gender means moving single-nation analyses of women and politics, and of gender and politics, to a comparative framework. Single-country emphasis in political research on women and gender would benefit by being informed by a comparative context.Footnote 53 As Mona Lena Krook reminds us, claims about proportional representation and women's candidacies are only accurate for specific time periods and for specific parties.Footnote 54 Similarly, first-past-the-post electoral systems function well in advancing women's candidacies as soon as political parties commit to nominating women for office.Footnote 55 Claims about the role, for example, of personal and political ambition as a precondition for access to election to officeFootnote 56 may be specific to political systems with high levels of incumbency and candidate (self-) re-selection, or to parties where routes to nomination are informal, unclear, and “structureless.” A comparative politics of gender would serve to reveal the conditions under which individual ambition and personal recruitment are essential preconditions for candidacies, as well as those conditions where individual ambition is counter to the norms of nominating and selecting processes within parties.
A comparative politics of gender would contribute to the emerging research suggesting that the political opportunity structure for advancing specific issues varies not only according to political system, “prevailing state strategies,”Footnote 57 or “configuration of power,”Footnote 58 but according to the type of issue. For example, Htun found, for Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, that governments were more resistant to mobilization around the liberalization of abortion than to political initiatives concerning other women's issues, including divorce.Footnote 59 Similarly, for Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, Mounira Charrad found that these states were more favorable toward women's mobilization concerning women's legal and citizenship rights, but thoroughly resistant to issues involving reproductive freedoms and sexuality.Footnote 60 A comparative politics of gender has as much to offer to our study of women, men and gender as it has to offer to our comparative political research.
Finally, a comparative politics of gender could also have the added benefit of encouraging comparative political scientists to be modest in our generalizations when our work does not take gender explicitly into account.
Moving toward a comparative politics of gender will not be easy; paradigmatic developments rarely are. Such a move, in comparative political analysis, would mean thinking about how masculinities and femininities travel across nation-states and regions; how conceptions of what constitutes masculinity are employed differently and variably (and constantly across) states and political actors; how and under what conditions femininities accrue to states, specific leaders, public policies, and national discourses. A comparative politics of gender would also mean continuing to analyze, as many scholars currently do, the location of presumably sex-specific persons, men and women, in national legislatures, cabinets, executive positions (both actual and symbolic), political movements, electorates, and political communities. It would also require pushing further to plot and to analyze coalitions between women and men, among women, and among men, along lines of masculinities and femininities; and to identify cleavages organized along lines of sex and gender. In the richness of comparative political research, a comparative politics of gender can lead us more clearly to the questions we want to ask about politics and power, and to more complete answers to those questions.
