From Past to Present: Women’s Political Mobilization and its Policy Impact

Session Submission Type: Featured Paper Panel: 30-minute Paper Presentations

Session Description

This panel brings together papers that explore various channels of women’s political mobilization. Scholarly attention is paid to women’s electoral participation, women’s mobilization for shared policy preferences, and the channels that link women’s mobilization with policy impact. Drawing on empirical data that span the 20th and 21st centuries in Germany, Sweden and India, all papers employ rigorous within-country designs. The papers collectively contribute to our understanding of the development of women’s mobilization as well as the various ways in which women’s mobilization shapes policy outcomes. In the first paper, Carissa Tudor explores the extent of women’s mobilization for suffrage in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. Carefully implementing various designs, Carissa finds that the level of women’s political mobilization is depressed by a forceful adoption of the French Civil Code that favored fathers over husbands, a finding that is further supported with cross-national evidence in Europe. In the second paper, Mona Morgan-Collins and Grace Natusch explore the channels of women’s electoral mobilization upon women’s formal inclusion to the voting public in the interwar Sweden. Drawing on original, individual level, data in Swedish municipalities, the authors demonstrate that early women voters were mobilized by social context of their local communities, while no such effects are found for men. In the third paper, Soledad Prillaman explores how the structure of women’s political networks affects the policy impact of women in contemporary India. Drawing on original surveys and recording from public meetings, Soledad demonstrates that women’s links to traditional patronage networks limit the potential of women to shape and improve local governance.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 31: Women and Politics Research

Individual Presentations

• How Were Early Women Voters Mobilized? - Grace Natusch, London School of Economics and Political Science; Mona Morgan-Collins, University of Pennsylvania

• Civil Law and Suffrage Organization, A Natural Experiment Approach - Carissa L. Tudor, Princeton University

• Female Leaders and Foreign Aid: The Role of Party Preferences - Ulkar Imamverdiyeva, University of Houston

Chair

• Ana Catalano Weeks University of Bath

Discussants

• Volha Charnysh Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Agustina S. Paglayan UCSD

• Dawn L. Teele University of Pennsylvania