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Social Movements as Women’s Political Empowerment: The Case for Measurement

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Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment across the Globe

Part of the book series: Gender and Politics ((GAP))

Abstract

This chapter explores how to quantitatively measure women’s social movements: women who draw on their identities as women and engage in collective action to target national governments and their laws and policies. Drawing on previous qualitative and quantitative studies of politically influential social movements addressing women’s rights across developing countries, the authors examine what aspects of women’s collective action must be addressed to create a meaningful variable. The chapter concludes with a call for new methods to measure women’s movements, which can provide a more meaningful way to quantify the circumstances that lead to mobilization, the intricacies of women’s movements, and the ways women’s collective action leads to women’s political empowerment and gender equality in both the developing world and a global context.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We do, however, discuss the existing literature in developed countries when we turn to existing quantitative measures.

  2. 2.

    The Smith and Wiest dataset includes all TSMO in a nation during a given year. The authors code organizations by the organization’s goal, such as “human rights,” “environmental protection,” “ethnic unity,” or “women’s rights.” Smith and Wiest assign multiple codes to organizations with multiple goals and organize them by goal priority.

  3. 3.

    Alternatively, the authors used data from the Yearbook to create new variables.

  4. 4.

    Paxton et al. designed their sample to be representative of the growth of WINGOs and country-level associations over time, and therefore, the measure of WINGOs for a single year may not be representative of all country-level associations in a given year.

  5. 5.

    Most quantitative studies create separate variables for WINGOs/TSMOs, conference participation, and CEDAW ratification. However, True and Mintrom measure “transnational networks” by combining WINGOs with conference participation. The authors count all INGOs that attended the four UN conferences on women with the goal of advancing women and women’s issues. In addition, the authors accounted for local presence by determining if the included organizations had members or affiliate organizations in a nation during a given year.

  6. 6.

    Yoo uses INGOs rather than WINGOs as an indicator of world polity influence. Future research could look more specifically to WINGOs as a proxy for women’s issues within the world polity.

  7. 7.

    The relationship between WINGOs, UN conference participation, and CEDAW ratification has led some research to focus specifically on state feminism and women’s movements (Lovenduski 2008). Although Lovenduski’s research takes a unique approach to the study of women’s mobilization and politics by reflecting on the results of the Research Network on Gender and the State project, the dataset only includes a small number of European nations.

  8. 8.

    Htun and Weldon created an original dataset of feminist movements from 70 nations between 1975–2005 by gathering data on activities and organizations and coding historical and other narrative accounts as well as other documents including dictionaries of organizations, web-based materials, and human rights reports on the women’s movement in each country. The authors defined a women’s movement as a social movement comprised primarily of women and women in leadership positions, where women organize as women. While most feminist movements are women’s movements, Htun and Weldon defined a feminist movement as a collective rooted in the idea of improving women’s status, and/or promoting equality, and/or ending patriarchy.

  9. 9.

    Of note, as part of a project with the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem), researchers created an index for civil society participation. This variable measures if women are prevented from participating in civil society organizations (such as NGOs) and if such organizations pursuing women’s concerns are prevented from taking part in the larger associational sphere. Although this does not serve as a proxy for women’s movements, it does capture the general social environment, which helps to determine whether movements can form. Additionally, Sundtröm et al. (2017) created a Women’s Political Empowerment Index (WPEI), which captures women’s civil liberties, civil society participation, and political participation from the V-Dem dataset. Again, although this does not capture all the needed women’s movement assessments as outlined in the qualitative literature, it might serve as an alternative proxy in future works.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    Kathleen M. Fallon & Heidi E. Rademacher

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  1. Kathleen M. Fallon
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Amy C. Alexander

  2. University of California, Irvine, California, USA

    Catherine Bolzendahl

  3. Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA

    Farida Jalalzai

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Fallon, K.M., Rademacher, H.E. (2018). Social Movements as Women’s Political Empowerment: The Case for Measurement. In: Alexander, A., Bolzendahl, C., Jalalzai, F. (eds) Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment across the Globe. Gender and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64006-8_5

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