How Development Matters: A Research Note on the Relationship between Development, Democracy, and Women's Political Representation

Most studies find that the substantial cross-national variation in women's legislative representation is not explained by cross-national differences in socioeconomic development. By contrast, this note demonstrates that economic development does matter. Rather than looking for across-the-board general effects, we follow Matland (1998), and analyze developed and developing nations separately. We find that accepted explanations fit rich nations better than poor nations, and obscure the effects of democracy on women's representation in the developing world. We call for new theoretical models that better explain women's political representation within developing nations, and we suggest that democracy should be central to future models.Slavic Languages and Literature

Pulled, Pushed and Persuaded: Explaining Women’s Mobilization into the Salvadoran Guerrilla Army

Using a rare representative sample of grassroots activists and nonactivists, this study identifies three paths that consistently led Salvadoran women to involvement in the FMLM guerrilla army: politicized guerillas, reluctant guerillas, and recruited guerillas. These mobilization paths arose from the patterned intersections of individual‐level biographies, networks, and situational contexts. The implications of these findings extend beyond studies of revolutionary activism to analyses of microlevel mobilization in general. Activists are heterogeneous and often follow multiple paths to the same participation outcome. Capturing these multiple paths is imperative for generating theoretically sound explanations of mobilization that are also empirically effective in distinguishing activists from nonactivists.Sociolog

Framing the Narrative: Female Fighters, External Audience Attitudes, and Transnational Support for Armed Rebellions

Female combatants play a central role in rebel efforts to cultivate and disseminate positive narratives regarding the movement and its political goals. Yet, the effectiveness of such strategies in shaping audience attitudes or generating tangible benefits for the group remains unclear. We propose and test a theory regarding the channels through which female fighters advance rebel goals. We argue that female fighters positively influence audience attitudes toward rebel groups by strengthening observers’ beliefs about their legitimacy and their decision to use armed tactics. We further contend that these effects directly help them secure support from transnational non-state actors and indirectly promote state support. We assess our arguments by combining a novel survey experiment in two countries with analyses of new cross-national data on female combatants and information about transnational support for rebels. The empirical results support our arguments and demonstrate the impact of gender framing on rebel efforts to secure support

The Left and “Life” in El Salvador

Throughout the past decade, governments across Latin America have experienced an unprecedented swing to the left. In this essay, I ask: Does the rise of the Left promote women's equality? Or in contrast, could women's continued subordination be an important factor promoting the rise of the Left? Using the case of El Salvador, I demonstrate how the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) deradicalized its public image—away from “guerrilla insurgents” and toward a viable political party—at least in part by converting its 1980s support for reproductive rights into present-day support for one of the most restrictive abortion policies in the world. I conclude that reversing the causal question about gender and left-leaning political parties may not only extend our understanding of the complicated relationship between gender and the Left but also improve our understanding of the factors moving Latin America from right to left, and from “red” to “pink.”Sociolog

Radical or Righteous? Using Gender to Shape Public Perceptions of Political Violence

Sociolog

How Uniform is ‘Standardization?’: Variation Within and Across Survey Centers Regarding Protocols for Interviewing

Sociolog

Global social protection : setting the agenda

In todays' world, more than 220 million people live in a country that is not their own. Many people live transnational lives but the social contract between citizen and state is national. How are people on the move protected and provided for in this new global context? Have institutional sources of social welfare begun to cross borders to meet the needs of transnational individuals? This paper proposes a new Global Social Protection (GSP) research agenda, summarizing what we know and what we need to do moving forward. What protections exist for migrants, how are the organized across borders, who can access them and who gets left out? This working paper defines GSP; introduces the idea of a “resource environment” as a heuristic tool with which to map and analyze variations in GSP over time, through space, and across individuals; and provides empirical examples demonstrating the centrality of GSP for scholars of states, social welfare, development, and migration

Political Demands, Political Opportunities: Explaining the Differential Success of Left-Libertarian Parties

Using qualitative comparative analysis, we examine why left-libertarian parties, associated with environmental and other "new social movements," have been relatively successful in some western democracies but not others. We conceptualize the parties as products of new citizen demands on the one hand, and of political opportunity structures, which govern party supply, on the other. We show that supply-side factors, such as a strong left and the existence of proportional representation, tend to work together to facilitate party innovation. A strong left appears more likely to downplay left-libertarian issues and push new-left activists to form separate parties, while proportional representation eases entry into the party system. Demand-side factors play a significant but lesser role. The theoretical and methodological strategies employed here have the potential to help political sociologists explain the variable success of other types of party innovators.Sociolog