Organizational Repertoires for Advancing Women's Rights. An Analysis of Structures, Groups, and Policies in National Legislatures in Latin America

RODRÍGUEZ GUSTÁ, ANA LAURA; MADERA, NANCY

Women, Politics and Democracy in Latin America

Palgrave

Lugar: New York; Año: 2017; p. 89 - 116

Under the premise that the proportion of female representatives does not translate linearly into an agenda on women´s rights, examining the construction and actual operation of this gendered political opportunity structure. If the relationship between the number of women and an agenda on women´s rights, as Dodson (2006) asserts, is probabilistic, we should avoid simplistic causal arguments based on the demographic composition of the Legislature. Consequently, we must turn our attention to broader relational structures that enable collective action. Therefore, the legislative agendas on women´s rights do not respond exclusively neither to the dynamics of formal politics nor the mere presence of women, though these are important conditions affecting the interests of policy communities and thus deserve attention. These agendas also emerge because there are links and interactions between actors both in social and institutional arenas of power, advocating for these rights (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008).The article shows how national and supranational networks get intertwined for advancing women´s rights legislation.Empirically, this chapter looks at how legislators create and expand legislative organizational structures, groups and policies on women´s human rights, called organizational repertoires (Clemens 1993). To summarize, the gendered political opportunity structure has three dimensions explored in this chapter: an organizational, a discursive, and a relational dimension. The first one is given by the existence of women?s caucuses, commissions for gender equality, gender technical units, and gender policies for the legislative work. These are managed, mainly, by female legislators. The discursive dimension refers to conceptions regarding the recognition and full exercise of rights embodied in these organizational repertoires. Finally, the relational dimension refers to the links that these repertoires allow and through which legislators engage with political and social actors including national and global players. These links constitute interactions that may serve to translate public problems into an actual agenda. Nonetheless, depending on the organizational repertoires at hand, the gendered political opportunity structures may be more or less open or restrictive, according to the their features, the interactions that these allow, and the actors they reach.