Contribution to dialogue on “The Systematic Study of Women’s Movements”

Abstract

The comparison and change of social movement strength is of great interest not only to social movement scholars, but also to comparative sociologists and political scientists. Mazur et al. (2015) present a rigorous strategy to compare the strength of women’s movement mobilisation and institutionalisation across 13 Western democracies (Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, USA) and over time (1970s to early 2000s). Their definition of women’s movements - ‘women act[ing] collectively to present public claims based on their gendered identities as women’ - has two dimensions: first, the discourse or claims of women and second, efforts of women to insert these claims in public life. The strength of women’s movements also has two dimensions: mobilisation or formal and informal structures of women’s activism and institutionalisation or the inclusion of women’s movement actors in government and quasi-government institutions. Women’s movement actors are distinguished from other women in government by their connections to formal or informal women’s organisations. The data revealed that mobilisation tended to be higher in the 1970s and that institutionalisation became stronger over time. Variations for both dimensions were found but no clear regional pattern for either mobilization or institutionalisation nor the relationship between both. Mazur et al. (2015) provide an impressive set of conceptual tools and data which is useful not just for scholars of women’s movements, but also for social movement scholars more generally. The question how mobilisation and institutionalisation are related is important for all social movements and it would be helpful to have a framework that allows to compare different movements with each other. The following comments are aimed at pushing this research agenda and to elaborate on some of the caveats that Mazur et al. (2015) have already identified.

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ORCID for Silke Roth: orcid.org/0000-0002-8760-0505

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