Norms and inequality in international society: Global politics of women and the state

This study asks how states world-wide have changed from fully excluding women from its institutions to including them during the past century. Two practices have gained virtually universal acceptance: women's suffrage and the establishment of state bureaucracies charged with advancing the status of women. A third practice, the active incorporation of women into national legislatures through quotas, is rapidly gaining ground.; Drawing upon the international relations (IR) tradition of social constructivism, I demonstrate that the transformation of norms and identities in international society are centrally at stake in the world-wide proliferation of these state institutions. However, some of the forces pivotal for their dissemination remain underdeveloped or entirely overlooked in the constructivist IR literature. The role of norms in simultaneously making similar and stratifying the identities of international society and the discursive tensions and instability of norms are central to the characterization and explanation of the three phenomena under study. Yet the conceptual frameworks of IR largely discourage the identification of these connected heterogenizing and homogenizing dynamics of norms and identities. In studying the global proliferation of suffrage, women's bureaucracies and legislature quotas, the dissertation is thereby simultaneously engaged in the conceptual and empirical development of constructivist scholarship.; Chapter 1 provides a critical review of three strands of constructivist IR scholarship—world polity institutionalism, international norms and critical constructivism—and then sets out a framework that emphasizes the homogenizing and stratifying dynamics of norms. Chapter 2 asks about developments in international society that came prior to the calls for political empowerment of women, namely the whole-sale legal exclusion of women from the state in 19th century ‘civilized society.’ Chapter 3 considers the state reform that came earliest and which is best known, that of suffrage. Chapter 4 moves to the issue that has received the least amount of scholarly attention, the world-wide proliferation of state bureaucracies for the advancement of women between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. Chapter 5 looks at a phenomenon that is rather recent in its latest materialization, the proliferation of legislature sex quotas during the past fifteen years. Chapter 6 provides a summary and conclusions.