Deliberation or Jurisdiction? Testing the effectiveness of different routes towards gender equality

Abstract

The point of departure for this paper is current debates in feminist research on hindering and enabling factors for the transformation of society in women-friendly directions. I develop two theoretically founded routes that both might lead to gender equality: the route of deliberation versus the route of jurisdiction. Cultural explanations are frequent in crosscountry comparative research that attempts to explain variations in everyday life situations for women and men. However, this approach has been criticized for being unable to capture short-term changes and for being almost a tautology. The routes, or explanatory themes, developed in this paper focus on factors easier to “engineer” than beliefs deeply embedded in society (the cultural approach). In the empirical part of the paper the number of women elected to the national parliament is used as and indicator of the route of deliberation and an index over the institutionalization of women’s rights in a country’s constitution or law is used as an indicator on the route of jurisdiction. The paper ends with a suggestion on how to classify countries along these dimensions. The ambition is however to continue this research and make a fully developed test of the effectiveness of different routes.