QoG lunch seminar with Laurel Weldon

Authors: S.L. Weldon and Jessica Burch

Abstract:

In 2022, democratic freedom in the world declined for the 17^th straight year, and for the first time in 50 years, the number of countries losing democratic ground (35) edged out the number of countries gaining ground (34) (Freedom House 2023). As Pippa Norris (2022) recently observed, “democratic erosion is widespread, including growing powers by authoritarian states” and “The third reverse wave is a global phenomenon.” (p.96)

This trend clearly has gendered elements:  The “revenge of the patriarchs” (Chenoweth and Marks 2022)-especially in the form of dismantling gender equality policies- undermines democracy (Roggeband and Krizsan 2018).  Feminist mobilization has been critical to the advance of such gender equality policies (Htun and Weldon 2018; Weldon 2011; Weldon 2002; Weldon 2023). But we do not have a clear picture of how gender equality, feminist mobilization and democracy relate to each other.  Can feminist mobilization prevent or moderate democratic backsliding? Does democratic backsliding weaken feminism? What are the implications for gender equality policy? And how do gender regimes shape democracy?

This paper cannot fully answer these big questions, but our brief analysis begins to unpack these relationships and to sketch out some theoretical reasons and global patterns that would inform our discussion. This paper outlines a theory of the role of feminism in the development of egalitarian gender regimes and sketches out how these phenomena relate to democracy. The paper then provides an overview of global patterns over the period of 1975 to 2015, using a new measure of feminist mobilization, the Feminist Mobilization Index (FMI).   Our analysis confirms that feminist mobilization and democracy strengthen and shape each other in complex ways- and that strong autonomous feminist movements are negatively associated with authoritarianism. Further, the form of democracy in one period shapes the strength and autonomy of feminism in the next, which in turn shapes the gender regime: Specifically, feminism is associated with egalitarian democracy and gender regimes that promote equality in material terms as well as in terms of status and identity.   We compare trends in feminist mobilization, egalitarian democracy and liberal democracy in East and West Europe to illustrate these arguments.