Gender State Machineries under left and right governments in Latin America

RODRÍGUEZ GUSTÁ, ANA LAURA; MADERA, NANCY; CAMINOTTI, MARIANA

Lima

Congreso; XXXV International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) (Diálogos de Saberes).; 2017

Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

To a large extent, initial policy adoption of gender state machineries in Latin American countries stemmed from global influences related to international human rights instruments and women?s movements activism. The Beijing Platform for Action, for instance, exerted strong effects on the region?s national patterns of gender state architecture. In light of these homogenizing pressures, scholars have noted the similarity among the institutions in charge of developing gender equality policies. However, government ideology may be an important and overlooked differentiating factor in the type of and institutional strength granted to these state machineries. . The experience of the last fifteen years of the pink tide in Latin America provides an opportunity to examine whether and how government ideology matters on institutional design, strength and embeddedness. Drawing on sociological (and political science?) literature, we examine institutional power and social embeddedness of gender equality state machineries in nine countries with left governments (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela) and compare them to those under right-wing governments. To address this puzzle, our empirical strategy entails three comparisons. First, we analyse whether pink tide governments actually strengthened the existing gender state machineries, by granting them more resources and jurisdictional scope as well as enabling them to develop ties with women?s movements. Second, we compare the status of gender state machineries in these governments vis-à-vis those in other Latin American countries, to rule out possible regional and global effects that may confound how pink governments act towards gender state machineries. Lastly, because pink governments are not all of one piece, we end up examining if any of the nine cases reflects the ?transformative model? for gender policy developments proposed by Squires (2005).