Lisa Baldez, “Women's Movements and Democratic Transition in Chile, Brazil, East Germany, and Poland”
In democratic transitions, when will women mobilize on the basis of gender identity? While women in many countries have responded to transitions to democracy by mobilizing along gender lines, in most of the transitions in Central and East Europe women who participated in dissident movements did not. There are three significant causes of women’s mobilization: resources, framing of issues, and inclusion or exclusion from the agenda-setting process within the opposition. Women’s preexisting formal or informal networks lead to gender-based organizing. Direct contact with the international feminist community allows women to frame their situation as women and to organize separately from men. And exclusion from the agenda-setting process affords them an opportunity to unite along shared gender identity.
Sheri Kunovich, “The Representation of Polish and Czech Women in National Politics: Predicting Electoral List Position”
In both Poland and the Czech Republic women are significantly less likely than men to obtain the first or top positions on electoral lists, even when political experience as candidates and elected officials is controlled, but particular types of parties are more likely to place women in top positions on electoral lists. The likelihood of women to secure a top position on electoral lists is examined through logistic regression. Political experience, characteristics of political parties, and district magnitude are controlled. Differences in the effects of political experience, party, and district characteristics on the likelihood of securing a top position on electoral lists are compared.
Islamist parties in Jordan and Yemen have become the most female-friendly in the Middle East since the initiation of political liberalization. Why has women’s participation in two highly conservative Islamist parties increased so dramatically over a relatively short period of time? Expanded women’s participation is not the result of a strong, articulated women’s movement within each party or of the triumph of moderates over hardliners. Rather, Islamist women have found greater voice when male party leaders recognize the utility of mobilizing female voters and when tensions within the parties largely unrelated to women create space that women can seize. In particular, intraparty fissures along two issue axes—commitment to democratization and interpretation of sacred texts—create structural openings for Islamist women. While the openings often disappear as conflicts are resolved, women advance incrementally within the parties.
Janine Astrid Clark and Jillian Schwedler, “Who Opened the Window? Women's Activism in Islamist Parties”
Heather L. Tafel and Dexter S. Boniface, “Old Carrots, New Sticks: Explaining Labor Strategies toward Economic Reform in Eastern Europe and Latin America”
Governmental inducements, that is, organizational benefits conferred on labor organizations, are a necessary condition of support for economic reforms because of the high costs reforms impose on workers. However, the provision of governmental inducements is not sufficient. Labor organizations must also consider strategic constraints—accountability to the rank and file and horizontal competition among unions—that can undermine support for economic reforms. This framework to analyze contemporary labor strategies toward economic reform is applied to Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Poland.
Moisés Arce, “The Sustainability of Economic Reform in a Most Likely Case: Peru”
Peru under Fujimori was a most likely candidate to deepen economic reforms because it had a dominant chief executive with a lengthy tenure, a rubber stamp legislature, and close collaboration between business and government. Nevertheless, its record of reform was mixed. Social interests play an important role in such market transitions. The move from crisis-induced reforms to the consolidation of reform is affected by shifting governing coalitions and changes in the interactions between state and business. The dominance of different groups across different phases of the economic restructuring process helps account for the slowdown of the market agenda.
Review Article: Stephen E. Hanson, “From Culture to Ideology in Comparative Politics”
Four recent books focus on the importance of the subjective orientations of social actors in empirical political outcomes, but they attempt to overcome the methodological and conceptual problems of research in the culturalist tradition in different ways. There has been a move toward greater specificity in defining the particular kinds of belief systems that can serve as independent variables. This welcome trend indicates the importance of distinguishing more clearly between ideologies—formal, explicit, relatively consistent definitions of political community articulated by political elites—and cultures—informal, implicit, relatively inconsistent understandings of political community held by people within a given institutional setting.