WHAT IS FEMINIST INSTITUTIONALISM?

Feminist scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds have long since given considerable attention to the gendered nature and interconnectedness of all social institutions. Focus was given to gendered patterns of social interaction that were developed in the family and reinforced by norms in education, the labor market, politics, and policy (Gatens and Mackinnon Reference Gatens and Mackinnon1998, xiii). Alongside this, feminist sociologists sought to explain the persistence of masculine cultures within organizations despite women's presence (Acker Reference Acker1992) while feminist economists challenged the dominance of the male norm in (new) institutionalist economics. The latter suggested a feminist institutionalist perspective could stimulate a conceptual reformulation that would take account of the gender dimensions of economic activity (Ferber and Nelson Reference Ferber and Nelson2003; Greenwood Reference Greenwood1984; Waller and Jennings Reference Waller and Jennings1991).

In her prescient foreword to Mona Lena Krook's and Fiona Mackay's volume, Joni Lovenduski reminds us that feminist political scientists also have a long tradition of scholarship dedicated to explaining how institutions induce gendered outcomes (see also Lovenduski Reference Lovenduski1998). Although a single variant or definition of what constitutes FI is not an intended product of this volume (nor need it be, given the various strands of new institutionalism that have spawned wide-ranging scholarly interest), Lovenduski is adamant that a feminist institutionalist project is defined as such when concepts of gender are integrated into the research.

In their introduction to Gender Politics and Institutions: Towards a Feminism Institutionalism, Krook and Mackay offer a succinct review of the institutional turn that has emerged over the past three decades within feminist political science. They argue that theorizing the gendered dimensions of institutional stability and change requires renewed thinking about methods, frameworks, and research directions, with a focus on how gender informs both formal and informal institutions. They do not specify a definition of feminist institutionalism in their introduction; this task is left to the nine chapters that follow. But as Mackay reiterates in her thematically focused conclusion, although there is a plurality of definitions and operationalizations utilized in this volume, the authors all make a compelling case for the recognition and analysis of the gendered character of institutions, whether they be formal or informal (181).

APPLYING FEMINIST INSTITUTIONALIST PERSPECTIVES

Collectively, the authors in this volume survey the four variants of new institutionalism and the capacity of each to accommodate the intellectual demands of feminist political science: namely, that gender relations both shape and are shaped by the institutions within which they operate. Historical institutionalism (HI) is the approach most commonly employed in this volume, perhaps because both theoretically and methodologically it gives analytical space to context, complex causality, and the embedded nature of gendered legacies.

There are several exceptions, however. Lenita Freidenvall and Mona Lena Krook employ a feminist discursive institutionalist framework to explain variation in the implementation of gender quotas in Sweden and France and, in doing so, reveal the significance of the preexisting institutional configurations to the relative power and impact of similarly framed gendered claims for political representation. Michelle Beyeler and Claire Annesley argue that FI is best viewed as a stand-alone variant of new institutionalism (NI). Their analysis of welfare reforms in three countries suggests there is value in drawing flexibly from the conceptual tools each strand supplies. Furthermore, they offer a pointed reminder that contemporary FI should draw not only from the conceptual tools of NI, but also those provided by feminist scholars who integrated gender into analyses of welfare state institutions more than two decades ago. Jill Vickers also acknowledges the analytical advantages of a flexible FI framework. Drawing from the range of NI variants, in combination with federalism and comparative feminist scholarship, Vickers investigates whether the institutional arrangements of federalism are more likely to facilitate women's political representation and policy advocacy than unitary states. Her insights point to the relevance of strategic choice, institutional fit, and structural shifts to explain changes in gender/power relations; Vickers concludes with a call for more conceptually eclectic feminist research of complex federal state architectures.

Grace's examination of child care and social policy debates also addresses how the complexity of federal institutional design complicates both path dependence and the opportunities for policy change created through potential critical junctures. Grace demonstrates that historical institutionalism's (HI) conceptual capacities are useful but are disrupted when a feminist lens is added. She argues that key moments or opportunities created by Canada's federal politics of accommodation are distinctly gendered over time and space. Similarly, Hana Hašková and Steven Saxonberg test the utility of “critical juncture” moments in explaining the limited changes made to family policy in the postcommunist Czech Republic and Slovakia. Their application of a feminist-informed HI and sociological institutionalism (SI) framework (SI emphasises how social contexts inform and shape norms and attitudes) highlights how numerous critical junctures leading up to the collapse of communism produced an incremental institutional layering that has failed to unravel the conservative, normalized, and “defamilialized” gendered legacies of communist family policy.

Transitions to democracy, while not always labeled critical junctures, often induce expectations that new institutional arrangements will look different and be more inclusive of women. Why this expectation is only sometimes met is taken up by Georgina Waylen, whose feminist HI approach is distinguished by its attention to comparative historical analysis and the desire to identify key factors that explain this real-world puzzle. She concludes that these critical junctures can prove successful under certain conditions: when the pace of reform is sufficiently sedate for key actors to intervene across the institutional spectrum and when gender issues are strategically framed and promoted by alliances of insiders and outsiders.

In her chapter on the International Criminal Court (ICC), Louise Chappell argues that the creation of “new” institutions offers a rare opportunity to examine how formal and informal institutional arrangements create gendered legacies. Yet, employing an HI perspective also demonstrates that these “new” designs are influenced by and connected to past institutional remains and contemporary parallel institutions. This is captured in Mackay's concept of “nested newness,” which Chappell suggests helps to explain the ICC's very partial progress in enhancing gender justice (Mackay Reference Mackay2009).

Meryl Kenny also investigates “new” institutions and their potential to dismantle gendered legacies. She reveals a number of gendered cross-cutting dimensions that undermine the institutional opportunities initially offered by the “new” politics of devolution in Scotland. Centralized rules aimed at promoting the selection of women sit at odds with localized preferences and historically informed practices. Although formal selection procedures were redesigned to enhance women's political equality, countervailing gender effects emerge from informal institutional inertia and resistance.

Informal norms (such as the absence or presence of consensus-seeking practices and cross-institutional alliances) are a key explanatory factor in Susan Franceschet's gendered HI analysis of the substantive representation of women in Argentina and Chile. Formal rules governing the relative power of the executive and policy “gatekeepers” also matter in how they incentivize the articulation of women's rights. However, Franceschet highlights that these formal rules cannot be analyzed separately from existing historical practices if we are to explain incremental institutional change.

Thus, while feminist engagement with HI is featured in the majority of contributions to this volume, there are variations in how this engagement is translated into a research strategy. Mackay concludes that such variation is necessary for the development of the fledgling research agenda that is seeking a systematic yet contextualized explanatory framework that can account for gendered institutional change.

METHODOLOGICAL TOOLS AND MAPPING GENDERED INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTS

Mackay argues that a central tenet of any version of FI is to map the gendered dimensions of visible formal rules and the often hidden informal institutional practices. This calls for methodological eclecticism, although in-depth case studies and thick description to enable theory building tend to be featured in HI and FI projects. In Krook and Mackay's volume, descriptive analyses were undertaken using focused comparisons, larger comparisons that explored the possibility of more generalizable findings, and single cases that made temporal comparisons.

The latter method is a common feature of the three additional volumes by Melissa Haussman, Elin Bjarnegård, and Meryl Kenny reviewed here. Haussman's study of women's reproductive rights in the United States seeks to explain how and why political and private-sector institutions have ignored women's reproductive drug needs since the nineteenth century. The analysis draws primarily from historical institutionalism but marries this with policy process literature and Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo's (Reference Lombardo, Meier and Verloo2009) discursive approach to policy change. This complex theoretical framework overlays an FI approach and enables Haussman to focus on the gendered effects of path dependence, evolutionary policy development, critical junctures, and institutional change while also bringing both feminist and nonfeminist policy actors and networks to the fore, identifying how their behaviors impacted the institutional environment across jurisdictions and over time.

In keeping with the path-dependent model, Haussman begins her gendered analysis with a forensic review of the foundational institutional rules established in the late 1800s to govern drug regulation and how FDA rules have been adapted over time, albeit seldom in response to women's claims for safe and effective contraception. By contrast, the ever-growing power and influence of the male-dominated pharmaceutical industry, its informal networks with key congressional and executive actors, and the resulting mobilization of bias among religious and conservative voting blocs over time cemented an institutional resistance to regendering debates and state support for women's reproductive rights. This did not render feminist agency redundant. Reflecting Waylen's findings above, Haussman argues for the importance of key actors to institutional change through strategic framing, subversive acts, and critical alliances, illuminated most clearly in the analysis of Margaret Sanger's activism from the 1900s until the 1960s. Haussman's detailed mapping of the formidable formal institutional constraints and the miniscule windows of opportunity (both judicial and financial) that have been exploited by feminist activists such as Sanger reinforces the complexities associated with identifying determinants of institutional change over time in a federal liberal market economy.

Haussman goes on to identify two key policy punctuations in the postwar period that stimulated gendered institutional change. The first included the FDA's approval of the contraceptive pill in the early 1960s and the expansion of public funding for contraception; the second was the election of Reagan as president and the corresponding downsizing of government-funded programs and the increased political power of social conservative groups from the early 1980s. These groups had grown in influence since Roe v. Wade (1973). However, as Haussman's analysis shows, while the Reagan administration's policy agenda did not intentionally seek to create new gendered legacies around reproductive rights, unintended gender effects can and do emerge from institutional shifts, particularly in the economic sphere when neoliberal ideas and the profit imperative of market institutions collide. Although Haussman does not explicitly recognize Clinton's election as a third policy punctuation, implicitly it was a pivotal moment because feminist claims and women voters were sufficiently valued by political leaders. The election of both a Democrat president and Congress combined to create an opportunity to facilitate the introduction of RU486. This progressive institutional environment was short-lived; advocacy groups and influential women senators worked in coalition to make Plan B available over-the-counter, but progress was limited by informal institutional hurdles at the state level.

This brief overview does not do justice to the institutional complexities, both formal and informal, of the United States political system and the gender power dynamics associated with powerful lobby groups. Nevertheless, one underlying theme that resonates through the book is the relentlessness of male dominance across time, space, and venue. Women actors emerge, act, and pursue incremental policy shifts, suggesting feminist HI should continue to focus on women's political representation.

This theme of male dominance and institutional resilience underpins Elin Bjarnegård's research on informal institutions and political representation. Bjarnegård shifts the analytical emphasis from women's underrepresentation to focus on men's persistent presence in positions of political power in parliamentary democracies. Reminiscent of Joan Eveline's important contribution, The Politics of Advantage (Reference Eveline1994), Bjarnegård questions why male dominance of political power has been left unproblematized for so long and what explains men's continued resistance to share power with women? Part of the answer lies in the fact that mainstream political science scholarship, itself traditionally male dominated, has seldom considered the gendered nature of political power. However, Bjarnegård goes beyond this disciplinary answer to argue that despite the promise of democratization, certain political practices (informal institutions) have continued to cement and reproduce male dominance in the political sphere. More specifically, she suggests that clientelism (the exchange of personal favors for political support; vote buying is the most common form) operates as an institutional constraint to the achievement of political gender equality. Political liberalization may lead to formal institutional change, but invisible, closed, or tight-knit clientelistic networks will not necessarily disappear and may indeed be fostered in the new institutional context. The latter is unsurprising. There is always the possibility that politics will produce unpredictable outcomes. However, this unpredictability is heightened in systems where political parties that control the selection of candidates are less well established.

So why does clientelism benefit men over women, and how do clientelist practices translate into political representation? To answer these questions, Bjarnegård introduces the concept of homosocial capital. She argues that clientelism is only possible when individuals have accumulated sufficient interpersonal capital. Because men have more positional power in politics, men need only socialize with other men for access to resources, exchanging information and political networking. By contrast, women's political success is dependent on including men in their political networks. Thus, the gendered nature of existing political networks and secretive and hierarchical clientelist practices reinforces women's exclusion from candidate selection.

Bjarnegård does not explicitly seek to employ an FI approach, but her theoretical framework is informed by an eclectic mix of conceptual tools drawn from new institutionaIism, sociology, and masculinity studies as well as feminist political science. She also employs a mix of research method approaches. First, providing a large-N statistical analysis that finds clientelism (as measured by quality of government or corruption) is correlated with male parliamentary dominance. The case of Thailand is then explored in detail to reveal the causal mechanisms behind these statistical results. The social and political context is mapped first, followed by a closer examination of the process of candidate selection for the 2005 election. The final empirical chapter drills deeper to the individual level to reveal the nature and extent of gendered clientelist networks. Bjarnegård argues that because Thailand has experienced a raft of regime changes over a relatively short period of time, the demand for the predictability that clientelism delivers and the informal institutionalization of candidate selection procedures remain intact. The organizational weakness of political parties in Thailand increases the importance of personal networks and local connections at election time, and, as with formal instititutions, clientelism requires active maintenance through homosocial capital accumulation to retain its value. Extrapolating from the statistical results and the Thai case, Bjarnegård's conclusions reveal that the strengthening of party organizations and the bureaucracy needs to accompany political liberalization to undercut the demand for informal institutions, such as clientelism, to enable a regendering of political institutions.

Kenny also argues that institutional innovation does not in itself guarantee a new gendered context for candidate selection. Of the three sole-authored volumes reviewed here, Kenny's interrogates at length (across two chapters) the conceptual and theoretical possibilities of feminist institutionalism. For Kenny, FI is an approach that draws from feminist and new institutionalist theory in order to generate insights into the gendered nature of an interaction between formal and informal institutions, the power relations within and across institutions, and the gendered mechanisms of continuity and change (10). Not unlike Haussman, her version of the FI “tool kit” draws on the historical and the discursive variants of new institutionalism, facilitating a focus on the social construction of gender and institutional norms and gendered effects over time. Women's agency is not overshadowed in this approach. Kenny's analysis, similar to Waylen's, takes into account the roles played by women's mobilization in pre- and post-devolution in Scotland. However, her primary objective is to use FI to revise the seminal model of supply and demand created by Norris and Lovenduski (Reference Norris and Lovenduski1995). Specifically, Kenny makes a compelling case for the need to give more attention to (1) the constitutive effects of gender norms on the dynamics of supply and demand and (2) the interactive complexities of the candidate selection processes, both formal and informal.

Kenny argues that the case of Scotland offers regional subnational level insights into what opportunities and constraints emerge when “new” institutions are designed with transformative objectives in mind. Devolution in Scotland created an institutional and discursive space for women to claim more inclusive party selection processes in order to produce a new gender-friendly Scottish politics. Tracing both the macro trends since 1999 and micro level practices at the constituency level, Kenny's methodological approach takes seriously the importance of the politics of time. Although devolution is a recent institutional change, Kenny's attention to how history matters and her careful use of process tracing enables her to unpack the “hangover” legacies from the pre-devolution period, evident in informal practices, including the language used by political actors and tensions that emerged between centralized rules and local preferences, particularly in the Scottish Labor Party. While devolution might constitute a critical juncture, Kenny's analysis reveals that the initial dramatic increase in women's recruitment and election postdevolution has yet to be embedded. HI approaches recognize that incremental evolution and erosion are very real possibilities. Theoretically, formal institutional changes resulting from critical junctures should make erosion difficult (and costly). However, such junctures occurring in a broader and historically gendered context may be more difficult for feminist actors to engineer and, if contested, could be undermined by resistant informal “rule breakers.” Such contrary dynamics are evident in Kenny's constituency case study findings and reflect Streeck and Thelen's (Reference Streeck, Thelen, Streeck and Thelen2005) argument that for institutional change to retain its integrity, active maintenance and renegotiation by key actors is required. Who constitutes those key actors will also matter.

CONCEPTUAL INNOVATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

The feminist institutionalism project seeks to ask new questions to produce innovative conceptual tools and empirical blueprints that will enable us to better understand the interactive effects of gender and institutions and institutional change. To date, no consensus has emerged on whether there is, or can be, a singular feminist institutionalist approach. Key methodological differences remain, in part, a result of the variants of new institutionalism being subjected to feminist interrogation and adaptation. However, among the scholars reviewed here, there is a shared belief that applying a feminist lens to the study of institutions is critical in order to understand how gendered power relations shape, and are shaped by, institutional stability, change, and erosion. There is still much to learn in this regard, and the multiplicity of feminist institutionalist perspectives presented here makes an important contribution in advancing this research agenda.