Abstract
Focus on quotas has shifted attention away from other, more comprehensive and strategic reforms aimed at furthering gender equality in political parties. This article concentrates on the gender action plans adopted by three Spanish parties. Using a gendered and institutional approach, it examines the conditions that led to the layering of these plans alongside existing party rules and assesses the outcome of such a gradual change. The results of the empirical analysis suggest that gender action plans have contributed not only to feminize the organization in terms of women’s numerical representation but also increasingly to regender it, thereby setting in motion a more profound change that challenges the foundations of gendered opportunities for political participation. The article also identifies the measures that have been less effective and pinpoints the reasons for the differential impact of gender equity institutional change across the various components of the party gender regime.
Keywords
Introduction
Political parties play a key role in the (re)production of gender effects in politics (Lovenduski, 2011: viii). As Kenny and Verge (2016: 357–359) argue, ‘gender makes parties’ by reflecting and reinforcing existing inequalities, and ‘parties make gender’ through male-centred practices that discriminate against women either overtly or indirectly. This, notwithstanding, equality laws barely mention political parties, and party regulation rarely includes mandates to promote gender equality (Childs, 2013), with the exception of statutory quotas. While positive action can address the unequal patterns of office distribution, it may still fail to subvert the gendered norms and practices that sustain male power in the party organization (Verge and de la Fuente, 2014). Scholarship focus on quotas has shifted attention away from other, more comprehensive and strategic reforms aimed at regendering political parties, such as the ones recommended by international organizations in their compendia of good practices (OSCE, 2014; Ballington, 2012).
This is the case of gender action plans, which ‘provide a clear roadmap for political parties to further increase women’s political participation and sensitize internal policies and procedures’ (OSCE, 2016: 50). A few countries have made gender action plans statutory – Slovenia in 2002, Croatia in 2003 and Serbia in 2009 – and, more recently, under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE, 2014), some Armenian, Georgian and Tajikistani parties have introduced them. Applying a gendered and institutional approach, this article focuses on three Spanish parties that voluntarily adopted gender action plans in the early 2000s, a decade before such policy tool was sponsored by international organizations. In particular, it examines how these plans were introduced and the extent to which they have produced gender equitable outcomes.
While extending the discussion of the policies that further gender equality in the party organization, this research contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on processes of gradual institutional change by testing the causal propositions or conditions identified in the literature. In doing so, the role played by intraparty gender power dynamics is factored in. The results of the empirical analysis suggest that gender action plans have contributed not only to feminize the organization in terms of women’s numerical presence but also to increasingly regender it, thereby setting in motion a more profound change that challenges the foundations of gendered opportunities for political participation. The article also identifies the measures that have been less effective and pinpoints the reasons for the differential impact of gender equity institutional change across the various components of the party gender regime.
Gender equitable institutional change in political parties
Gender is inherently political because it is routinely enacted in institutional contexts through ‘complex, interlocking practices and processes’ that reproduce existing inequalities (Acker, 2006: 200) and constitute a ‘gender regime’ in itself (Connell, 1987). Political parties have a distinctive gender regime that encompasses personnel, policy and organizational arrangements: (i) women’s presence at all levels of the organization is characterized by segregation, exclusion and hierarchies patterned through gender; (ii) women’s perspectives and needs are largely neglected in party policy and (iii) organizational arrangements are biased towards certain kinds of masculinity, including recruitment practices, the gendered division of labour and ideas of gender-appropriate behaviour (Lovenduski, 2005: 52–55).
Progress with numbers through quotas does not entail the end of gendering in institutions because newcomers may still be disadvantaged (Kenney, 1996: 462). Gender power relations are ubiquitous in political parties, and they are predominantly played out through several informal – that is, non-written – norms and practices that structure their daily functioning (Bjarnegård and Kenny, 2015; Verge, 2015). These include gender norms about ‘good’ candidates, double binds for female leaders, the vertical and horizontal segregation of offices, gendered rituals in party practices (Verge and de la Fuente, 2014) and the crucial influence of ‘male homosocial capital’ in the generation of ‘expressive’ resources such as trust and likeability among men and in the distribution of ‘instrumental’ resources such as male in-group networking and privileged linkage to party selectors (Bjarnegård, 2013). As a result, women party officers enjoy fewer opportunities for advancing their political careers than their male peers (Verge and Claveria, 2016), and many women members are pushed out of party politics (Verge, 2015: 755).
As highlighted by feminist institutionalist scholars, gender policy reforms are motivated and shaped by the (gendered) power-distributional implications of institutions (Waylen, 2014: 216). In this vein, change actors mobilize to challenge, negotiate and eventually subvert the differential impact that resource allocation, structures and policies make upon women and men (Beckwith, 2005; Chappell, 2006). In the case of gender reforms, layering tends to be the most common form of institutional change (Waylen, 2014: 219), whereby new rules are attached onto or alongside the existing ones through amendments, revisions or additions (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010: 15). Although veto players can protect old rules, they may not be able to prevent the incorporation of new elements that alter the reproduction of the institution’s logic and yield an incremental, yet eventually substantial, change (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010: 17).
Empirically tracing gradual institutional change is, nonetheless, more complex than shifts produced by external pressure (Rocco and Thurston, 2014). In operationalizing how gender action plans are layered onto the existing party rules, I draw on recent institutionalist works that identified several conditions. First, formal rule change through layering is endogenous, so it is crucial to identify who the change agents are (Waylen, 2014: 214). Typically, gender reforms in parties are driven by feminist actors whose goals are to transform formal rules and processes and to bring about incremental changes in informal norms and practices (cf. Kittilson, 2013: 546). Change is very often promoted by the women’s sections, regardless of their being party subunits or collateral organizations. They can be conceived of as ‘quasi-women’s policy agencies’ that seek to further women’s status and promote gender equality (McBride and Mazur, 2010: 29; see also Childs and Kittilson, 2016: 599).
Second, layering happens in institutional contexts with sufficiently malleable rules, so that change agents can dispute established rules to recast or reinterpret institutional and policy goals (Rocco and Thurston, 2014: 41). The assumption of parity as a party goal – that is, equal gender representation – through the adoption of quotas establishes a tension not only with existing recruitment processes and practices but also with women’s actual experience in party and public office, which is shaped by several biases towards male interests and assumptions regarding gender-appropriate behaviour (Lovenduski, 2005; Verge, 2015). This tension might enable change agents to propose new, more comprehensive rules to guarantee an effective political participation for women that go beyond increasing their presence through quotas.
Third, layering takes place when actors are afforded new opportunities to instil changes through the emergence of new institutional alternatives that directly contest an existing institution (Rocco and Thurston, 2014: 44; see also Mahoney and Thelen, 2010: 22). Political party gender action plans challenge the ingrained ‘institutional sexism’ or male bias – that is, an organizational culture based on traditional masculinity and biased against women and femininity (Lovenduski, 2005: 52–53). This policy tool builds on gender mainstreaming, an overarching strategy for the transformation of the unequal structure of gender relations. It involves ‘the (re)organization, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes’ through the incorporation of a gender equality perspective (Council of Europe, 1998: 15).
Fourth, layering entails that change agents must possess enabling material or discursive resources to either propose a new institution or persuade other agents of its necessity (Rocco and Thurston, 2014: 46). The more institutionalized and highly ranked women’s sections are within the party structure, the more successful they can be in seizing the windows of opportunity opened by leadership changes or electoral dynamics (Kittilson, 2013: 541). As for discursive resources, successful policy adoption depends on the extent to which gender equality claims resonate within existing institutions (Ferree, 2012). If gender equality enters the agenda not as a women’s demand but as a major party issue (cf. Sainsbury, 2004: 70), a strategic framing or ‘discursive turn’ might alter the broader institutional environment and allow change to take off (Freidenvall and Krook, 2011).
Concerning the outcome of gradual institutional change, empirical analyses must keep its focus on how the gender power dynamics at play in a given institutional context determine whether new formal rules will be diluted or distorted by the gender norms upholding old rules (Mackay, 2011: 184). For one thing, gender equity actors do not have enough power to displace completely existing or emerging (formal or informal) institutions that may undermine institutional reform efforts and protect established gender norms (Waylen, 2014: 217; see also Chappell and Waylen, 2013). As a matter of fact, gender equitable reforms must frequently contend with actors ‘remembering the old’ and ‘forgetting the new’, which constitute informal mechanisms of resistance to changes in gender regimes (Mackay, 2014: 550; see also Lovenduski, 2005: 164).
Resistance to the new rules’ enactment in practice can be widely expected because gender reforms touch upon male privilege and the targets of change are the very same organizational norms and practices (Benschop and Verloo, 2011: 286). Resistance can take active forms, such as decisions directly contravening the gender reform, or more passive forms, such as non-decisions or non-actions such as poor funding or inadequate staff training (Lombardo and Mergaert, 2013). Empirical analyses must then identify the types of resistance that emerge in processes of gradual institutional change as well as the gendered and apparently gender-neutral norms underpinning them (Lowndes, 2014).
New institutions are more likely to be filtered out in the implementation chain when insufficient resources are assigned, when rule-makers are not the rule-enforcers, when (formal or informal) coordinating mechanisms that can minimize the gaps and ambiguity in formal rules are absent, when sanctions for non-compliance are non-effective or non-existent or when there is little institutional knowledge about the actual implementation of the new institutions (Waylen, 2014: 219–221).
Lastly, empirical analyses must also pay attention to the differential outcomes produced by institutional change efforts. Such differences can be expected to rest on the various components of the gender regime challenged by the new rules. Specifically, the measures of the gender action plans affecting the core of the party gender regime are likely to be less effective.
Data and methods
Hitherto very little is known about the capacity of gender action plans to achieve effective change in political parties. Insufficient time has passed to assess the impact of the plans recently sponsored by OSCE. As far as countries where such plans are statutory, parties have got away with non-compliance – that is, non-adoption or non-implementation – due to lack of public supervision, as stated by Sonja Lokar, executive director of the Central and Eastern European Network for Gender Issues (personal interview) and contributor to the Handbook on Promoting Women’s Participation in Political Parties (OSCE, 2014).
The study of the Spanish case is intriguing because gender actions plans were voluntarily adopted by three parties in the early 2000s and they have been enacted in practice. This gives us a sufficient time span to assess the extent to which gender equality has been furthered in the party organization. Given the generalized absence of gender mandates in political party regulatory frameworks, identifying the successful strategies used by gender equity actors to achieve the adoption and implementation of such plans provides relevant insights for the international diffusion of this policy tool. The Spanish case is also intriguing because of the observed cross-party diffusion, with almost all left-wing parties – including both statewide and regional parties – having introduced gender action plans in the past few years.
The three pioneering parties examined here are the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE), the Party of the Catalan Socialists (Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya, PSC), which substitutes organizationally for the PSOE in Catalonia through a federal agreement, and Initiative for Catalonia Greens (Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds, ICV). These parties had already led the promotion of women’s representation through the effective implementation of party quotas. This allowed Spain to achieve high levels of women MPs in the absence of legislative quotas, which were only introduced in 2007 (Verge, 2012).
The first gender action plan was introduced by the PSC in 2001. The PSOE and ICV followed suit in 2002 – in 2010, ICV’s plan broadened its scope. As summarized in Table 1, measures target both women and men, and they tackle not only women’s (numerical) representation but also party policy (including both content and process) and organizational arrangements. The PSC extended in 2007 its gender action plan with the Uses of Time Pact, a set of measures aimed at furthering intraparty work–life balance, such as increasing the use of new technologies to reduce the number of face-to-face interactions; providing childcare during meetings and alternating the time when meetings are held to facilitate the attendance of individuals with caring responsibilities; fixing the start and end times of meetings to avoid them being unnecessarily long; and rotating participation in public events to guarantee that public and party officers enjoy at least one free weekend per month.
Political party gender action plans: Sample of measures.
Note: PSC: Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya; PSOE: Partido Socialista Obrero Español; ICV: Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds.
aMeasure not explicitly mentioned in the plan but regularly undertaken.
The in-depth analysis of these three cases draws on field-intensive process tracing, in order to determine how the decisions of actors and the importance of events explain outcomes (Collier, 2011; Tansey, 2007). I carried out 11 semi-structured interviews with key party informants, namely the current and former leaders of the women’s sections – the party departments that played a leading role in the adoption of the gender action plans – along with support staff and gender experts involved in the drafting and/or monitoring of the plans (see Online Appendix). 1 These interviews have helped me evaluate the operation of the causal propositions, shaping the layering of the plans alongside existing rules as well as the facilitating and constraining factors encountered in the implementation phase.
In examining the outcomes of gender equitable institutional change, given that none of the parties has fully evaluated its plan yet, interview data were triangulated with primary source documents such as party statutes, ethical codes, conference resolutions, declarations, annual reports issued by party executive bodies, leaflets of the political training programmes run by parties, electoral manifestos and coalition agreements and party publications and websites. This archival work – covering the period between the date of adoption of the plans and 2016 – has allowed me to refine the assessment of the degree of implementation of the plans. I also draw on the insights obtained from a focus group run by the PSC’s women’s section as part of the ongoing internal evaluation of the plan. 2 This enabled me to gauge the degree of institutional knowledge about the plan possessed by the various levels of the organization.
The adoption of new rules
Gender equity institutional change was internally driven in the three parties, particularly by their long-standing women’s sections. In the PSOE and the PSC, the Secretariat for Equality and the Secretariat for Women’s Policies, respectively, are departments on their own right of the highest executive body. Within ICV, Women with Initiative is an autonomous organization that operates de facto as the Secretariat for Women. The PSC also has an Equality Council, a party subunit presided over by the leader of the women’s section that provides policy advice and facilitates women’s networking.
Despite the remarkable increases in women’s representation in party and public office attained through the adoption and gradual extension of quotas (Verge, 2012), the women’s sections identified several instances of discrimination, such as gendered turnover patterns, super-surveillance of (s)elected women or male dominance of formal and informal decision-making processes. This led the women’s sections to recast the meaning of gender equality in representation and to urge parties to provide more tangible evidence of it (interview no. 9). Gendering the debate on political participation established a tension between formal parity rules and party performance in practice, which allowed broadening the scope of reforms beyond quotas (interview no. 11).
In the two Social Democratic parties, the reinterpretation of equal gender representation was built on the concept of ‘parity democracy’, a term embraced at their previous conferences and conceived of as encompassing a ‘new social contract’ as regards waged labour, work–life balance and, most crucially, power. 3 This implied the fundamental brokers between political institutions and citizens should become ‘parity organizations’ themselves. 4 Similarly, Women with Initiative pushed ICV to shift the focus from why women participate less than men to why women are disincentivized to participate in male-dominated organizations (interview no. 1). Thus, the policy problem was reframed from ‘what is wrong with women’ to ‘what is wrong with politics and political parties’. 5
Were there any available institutional alternatives capable of addressing the gendered institutional logics underpinning both recruitment processes and much broader organizational dynamics? Through participation in the Fourth UN World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995), the women’s sections learnt about gender action plans, a policy tool for gender mainstreaming (interview no. 5). The latter entailed a new strategy defined by the international women’s movement to eradicate inequality that puts emphasis on ‘fixing’ institutions, not women. In applying this policy approach, the women’s sections argued that, instead of merely tackling the symptom (women’s under-representation) through quotas, the root problem (parties’ gender regimes) should be addressed with more comprehensive measures. For that matter, women’s participation must entail ‘contributing to and not just adapting to organizations built throughout the years in disregard of women, their diversity and their conception of politics’. 6
To justify the adoption of gender action plans, party feminists strategically framed feminizing the organization and making participation more attractive to women as a means to improve intraparty democracy (interview nos 3 and 6), as also found elsewhere (Bradbury et al., 2000; Sainsbury, 2004: 75). Party leadership change presented a window of opportunity in the PSC and the PSOE, whose new leaders envisioned the renewal of the organization and the ways of doing politics as crucial for enhancing the quality of intraparty democracy and enlarging the rank and file. 7
Similarly, mainstreaming gender into party policy was presented as a means to attract more female voters, in a context where both national and regional politics were dominated by right-wing and liberal parties (interview nos 2 and 9). Beyond purely instrumental reasoning, party feminists argued that the foundations of the gender order needed to be addressed simultaneously with new rules at the party level and with advanced gender equality policies at the institutional level (interview nos 1 and 11).
With a view to paving the way for the introduction of the new rules and minimize opposition to formal rule change, the women’s sections developed various strategies. On the one hand, they used the international organizations their parties are affiliated with. PSC and PSOE female party officers occupied top positions in the Socialist International Women (SIW) – including the presidency (1999–2003) – when its Bureau Meeting resolutions called on Socialist International member parties to make parity democracy effective by adopting equality plans, strengthening positive action, mainstreaming gender into party policy and advancing intraparty work–life balance measures. 8 On its part, Women with Initiative seized the opportunity presented by the fact that ICV strategically chose to bolster youth and gender policies when seeking to gain full membership of the newly created European Green Party (Online Appendix, interview no. 1). 9 Women with Initiative took on the coordination of the European Greens Gender Observatory and issued in the party foundation press the White Paper on the Participation of Men and Women in European Green Parties (Martínez, 2007), which urged Green parties to engender their organizations.
On the other hand, to bolster support for the new rules, the women’s sections, with the support of the respective party leaders, set up a task force to draft the gender action plan that included the Secretary for Organization, the party officer with the strongest positional power because it coordinates the remaining party secretariats (interview nos 1, 2 and 5). Thirdly, an extensive and inclusive participatory gender audit allowed countering resistant party officers with empirical evidence of how gender inequality was deep-rooted in party processes and outcomes (interview nos 2, 6 and 9). Lastly, before submitting the plans for approval to central party bodies, the women’s sections identified some male party officers willing to pioneer the implementation of the plan at the local level, thereby setting an example and putting pressure on less enthusiastic party actors (interview no. 6).
The outcome of institutional change
This section is devoted to examining whether gender action plans have produced any gradual institutional change across the different components of the party gender regime, namely personnel, policy and organizational arrangements. In doing so, attention is paid to the facilitating and constraining factors that have shaped the implementation of the new rules. It should be noted that because the rule-makers are also the rule-enforcers, no specific budget has been allocated to the implementation of the plans, which is assigned to the various party secretariats, as shown below.
Personnel
Because the relative exclusion of women results in the persistence of male-centred institutional practices (Lovenduski, 2005: 27), gender-balanced representation has remained a strategic axis of gender action plans. The scope of party quotas has been expanded, as summarized in Table 2, and reports on party performance are regularly presented before the parties’ highest executive bodies. On the one hand, the three parties have adopted and effectively implemented zipping whereby women and men alternate through candidate tickets. Zipping is also applied horizontally, with an equal share of women and men heading district-level party lists. The application of parity in the composition of party executive bodies is also taken for granted (Verge and Espírito-Santo, 2016: 430).
Evolution of party quotas.
Note: Quotas codified in party statutes. PSC: Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya; PSOE: Partido Socialista Obrero Español; ICV: Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds.
aFemale membership share at the time.
bA minimum proportion of 40% for either sex.
On the other hand, at the executive level, in the period 2004–2011, the PSOE produced the first parity cabinet in the Spanish history, including several women in traditionally masculinized portfolios, such as defence or economy. Coalescing with other parties, though, has loosened parties’ commitment. For example, the PSC and ICV failed to meet parity in the Catalan government when they integrated a tripartite cabinet (2003–2010). As for mayoral offices, the women’s sections have worked in coordination with the Secretariat for Local Politics to increase the number of female mayors (interview nos 3 and 5); even so, their proportion is still rather low (around 20%). To help local branches ‘find’ more women to run, the PSC’s equality plan included detailed recruitment guidelines. The three parties have also organized political skills courses for prospective female candidates and public officers to reinforce their self-confidence (Verge, 2012: endnote 5).
Concerning top positions, ICV instituted the dual presidency in 2013, requiring at least one of the two party chairs to be a woman (Article 38, ICV party statutes), following the European Greens’ standing orders for the representation of member parties in their Secretariat. This measure also applies to spokespersons and committee chairs, which has significantly boosted the amount of female leaders across all party levels (interview no. 3). The PSC and the PSOE have also increased the presence of women in visible positions such as the party and parliamentary spokespersons or the deputy secretary general.
These advances have a remarkable symbolic impact since an increased visibility for women politicians challenges the idea of politics as a male business. Gains in women’s political presence have been facilitated by the pressing social demand for an overhaul of politics, including both new faces and leadership styles, and by the relatively close monitoring by the media on the issue of women’s numerical representation, which the women’s sections have used to their advantage on various occasions to push their parties to outperform their prior records (see Verge and Espírito-Santo, 2016: 433).
In the two Social Democratic parties, in order to promote men’s presence in traditionally feminized portfolios and provide them with new leadership styles workshops on new masculinities have been organized. Within the PSC, participation to the Equality Council was extended to men in 2011. Additionally, the Egalitarian Socialist Men group, sponsored and mentored by the women’s section, recently became a party current and one representative of this group now holds the vice presidency of this body (Article 100, PSC party statutes). The PSOE also invited men to join the Guarantees Committee for Equality, a body set up in 2013 (not formalized in the party statutes yet) that is composed of female and male party and public officers with expertise on gender equality (interview no. 10). Conversely, while ICV’s plan included specific actions in this regard, such linkage has not been established probably due to the fact that difference feminism is predominant in this party (interview no. 1).
Policy
Gender equity institutional change has been reflected on the values parties claim to stand for in their formal rules. The PSC’s Statement of Principles (2008) unequivocally declares: ‘We are feminists. We are committed to guaranteeing that both genders share, on equal terms, waged work and leisure; family, political and civic responsibilities; commitment and reward’. Leaflets have also been issued to foster feminist identity among party members – for example, the leaflet on ‘why socialists are feminists’. The party statutes have included parity democracy and the reconciliation between political activities and personal and family life among the party’s organizational principles (Article 1). The public recognization of female members’ work is also mandated (Article 21). ICV’s statutes define feminism as integral to the party’s identity (Article 1) and establish the promotion of a gender equity culture (Article 5) and of women’s participation (Article 48j) as organizational duties.
Change is also reflected in party leaders’ public speeches, which have increasingly incorporated references to gender equality and feminism. This has facilitated the embracement of gender equality policy as nuclear to party policy throughout the organization and prevented active resistance from surfacing. As one interviewee noted, ‘who would dare to defy the leader?’ (interview no. 9). A paradigmatic example is that of the former president of the Spanish government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, presenting himself as a ‘radical feminist’ in his first interview given to the international press (New York Times, 2004).
The women’s sections have also issued several publications on gender equality issues, very often in collaboration with the party’s foundation, such as ICV’s Green New Deal with a gender perspective (2010) or PSOE’s Women’s recipes for political practice (2007). Yet it is the specific training on gender equality and feminism provided to all party members that has been more effective in raising awareness about gender inequality (interview no. 11). This training has been carried out by the respective Secretariats for Political Education, a party department that integrates the task force in charge of implementing the gender action plans (interview nos 3, 5 and 10). The fact that the three parties have a tradition of providing political education to members through their own schools 10 and their having been led for a certain period by feminist party officers (interview no. 1) have been facilitating factors. According to the women’s sections, gender training, along with women’s networking, has also led many female public officers to openly declare that they represent women as feminists (interview nos 4 and 7).
While the task of mainstreaming gender into party and public policy was initially handled by the women’s sections after documents – that is, electoral manifestos or bills – had already been drafted, the different party secretariats have gradually learnt how to do so in their own sectoral areas, thanks to the gender mainstreaming courses specifically targeting party and public officers (interview nos 10 and 11). On top of this, an informal coordination through periodical meetings has been established between the women’s sections and the different party secretariats (interviews nos 3, 5 and 10). On other occasions, such coordination has been formalized through specific task forces integrated by the women’s section, party and public officers and external advisors. 11
Indeed, equal opportunities, gender-based violence and caring policies have figured prominently in party manifestos and been at the core of the three parties’ governing platforms (see Bustelo, 2016). 12 When integrating coalition governments, the women’s sections have established informal coordination mechanisms to secure their parties’ upholding of their commitment with gender equality (interviews nos 1, 2 and 6). 13 According to the PSC women’s section, emphasizing in membership campaigns the ways in which the party works for gender equality in the fields of welfare, health, family policy, education or gender-based violence has led to a 50% increase rate in female membership (interviews nos 3 and 5). In the PSOE, the commitment with the eradication of gender-based violence has also been incorporated in the ethical code. Party and public officers indicted for gender-based violence shall be suspended from party membership and, if found guilty, expelled from the party (Article 5.2).
Organizational arrangements
The women’s sections have gained more positional power within the party, including sitting in candidate selection committees. After all, an effective mainstreaming of gender across all areas largely rests on counting with a strong, specialized equality infrastructure (Woodward, 2003). In the PSC, local executive bodies must now include at least the Secretary General, the Secretariat for Organization and the Secretariat for Women’s Policies. In all three parties, gender training and mentoring are offered to encourage female members to take on the leadership of the women’s section in their towns. In both the PSC and ICV, networks of women’s section leaders across party levels have been created (interviews nos 3 and 6). In the PSC, female members’ networking is mainly articulated through the Equality Council, where participation was restricted to women party and public officers when created in 1997. This body has recently gained a seat in the party’s highest executive body.
The alliance between the women’s sections and the Secretariats for Organization has been crucial in shutting off active resistance to gender reforms, but ineffective monitoring on behalf of central party bodies has paved the way for passive resistance to arise, especially at the local level. Resistance derives to a large extent from failure by central party bodies to build adequate institutional knowledge across the organization about the new rules. The implementation of the plans rarely makes it to the minutes of party meetings, as pointed out by participants in the PSC focus group, which prevents not only the public recognition of those party officers who may be leading change in their daily political work but also, most importantly, new party members and officers are not updated on the new rules they should comply with.
Furthermore, none of the gender action plans has been fully evaluated yet, although over a decade has passed since their adoption. The monitoring of the plans should be undertaken by both the Secretariat for Organization and the women’s section along with invited gender experts. The high workload of the former (running electoral campaigns, preparing party conferences, etc.) entails that several indicators are not monitored in practice, and local branches have received no specific guidelines on how to systematically collect the data for the evaluation of the plan (interview nos 3 and 5).
Concerning time arrangements, interviewees from the PSOE and ICV noted that these rules are not even followed at the central party level (interview nos 1, 4 and 9). In the PSC, the central level tends to comply with these measures, particularly those affecting the scheduling meetings and childcare provisions, but local branches have not been allocated resources to set these services up (interview nos 6, 7 and 11). Failure to provide adequate resources can be seen as an institutional resistance underpinned by several informal norms and practices that reinforce existing social gender norms. The pervasive sexual division of waged and unwaged (domestic and care responsibilities) labour entails that women enjoy less spare time than men, which constrains their political engagement. This interacts with the informal intensive dedication norm to party work that demands excessive face-to-face interactions. Furthermore, the times at which party meetings are held, late in the evening, especially at the local level, further limit caregivers’ chances of participating. Such practice is extremely consequential for gender dynamics (Verge and de la Fuente, 2014: 76).
Interviewees also pinpointed that male informal networking has not been eradicated, and it is especially prevalent at the local level (interview nos 1, 5 and 7). Several works have noted that it is precisely at the local level where ‘male power monopolies’ are more entrenched (Bjarnegård and Kenny, 2016; Hinojosa, 2012; Johnson, 2016). Formal meetings are often continued by individuals with wifely support – that is, mostly by men – outside the party headquarters, in bars and restaurants, which indicates that this type of networking builds on as well as produces ‘male homosocial capital’ (Bjarnegård, 2013: 24; Verge, 2015: 758). While some measures have been introduced in the PSC to tackle this gendered informal practice, such as making it mandatory to take the minutes of all meetings, this rule is not monitored (interview no. 5) and is thus rendered ineffective. Male homosocial capital is also to be blamed for the pervasive gendered rituals that keep men conversationally dominant in party meetings (interview nos 1 and 4). Proposals to alternate women’s and men’s turns during discussions in meetings have failed to gain approval. 14
Conclusion
This article has extended the discussion of the policies that advance gender equality in political parties through the evaluation of the institutional change brought about by gender action plans. Layering prevails in this case, as proved by the confirmation of several conditions associated with this mechanism of institutional change. The women’s sections internally drove change. They managed to recast institutional goals by shifting the meaning of equal gender participation in a manner that it encompassed not just increasing women’s numerical representation but also subverting gendered institutional logics such as women’s unequal access to resources, organizational gender blindness and the multiple male biases entrenched in the daily functioning of parties. The development of gender mainstreaming in the global arena provided change actors with a new institutional alternative, namely gender action plans. The women’s sections presented the need for change as beneficial for the whole organization regarding quality of intraparty democracy and electoral performance, which persuaded party leaders, and they managed to build support coalitions within and outside their parties.
Commitment to gender reform has not been merely symbolic but has truly taken root in the three parties under examination. Party statutes and statements of principles reflect an institutionalized engagement with gender, and coordinating mechanisms have been set up to reduce the gaps in the implementation of formal rules. Gender equity outcomes are remarkable in some areas, such as the taken-for-grantedness of parity in candidate tickets and executive bodies, the mainstreaming of gender in party and public policy, the gender training provided to members and officers, increased women’s networking and the strengthening of the positional power of the women’s sections. In addition, the number of female party and public offices claiming to act for women as feminists has augmented and male politicians have increasingly included feminist stances in their discourses.
While no active resistance to gender reforms has been found out, failure to build adequate institutional knowledge about the new rules across the organization and ineffective monitoring on behalf of central party bodies has enabled passive resistance to emerge. As a result, some measures have been far from successful, such as those addressing men’s conversational dominance in party meetings, gender blindness in the agendas of party meetings, male-centred uses of time and male informal networking. Overall, the differential outcomes yielded by the gender action plans can be explained by which aspect of the party gender regime is challenged by the new rules. The areas where gender equitable change has been less effective constitute the core of the party gender regime, where male privilege is more ingrained.
This article makes various contributions to the party politics literature. On the one hand, it illustrates that incorporating gender dynamics into analyses of political parties provides new insights on the power-distributional tensions embodied in a myriad of informal norms and practices. By failing to recognize that the oppositional and hierarchical character of gender shapes the experience of participants in the party organization, researchers risk explaining away the production and reproduction of gender inequality in political participation. A similar argument can be made about other forms of discrimination – such as ethnicity/race, age, ableness or sexuality – which also structure privilege and power dynamics within institutions and organizations (Acker, 2006). On the other hand, this research shows that analysing the ways in which internally driven gradual institutional change may reduce gender inequality improves our understanding of how political parties themselves may be transformed. Besides broadening the identification of change and opposing actors as well as the type of resources they possess to initiate, support or resist reforms, this approach suggests new variables to be included in studies of party change, such as the malleable rules that can be disputed, the emergence of institutional alternatives, the existence or absence of coordination mechanisms to guarantee the effective implementation of the new rule or the degree of awareness about the reform across the party organization.
Several practical lessons can also be drawn out from this research. First, the promotion of gender action plans needs to be accompanied with advice on the facilitating and constraining factors that shape their adoption and enactment in practice. Second, to secure an effective implementation, international organizations should also recommend that specific resources are assigned to the monitoring of the plans and incentives for compliance are introduced. Lastly, as Lovenduski (cf. 2005: 180) reminds us, feminizing politics is a result as well as a cause of change. Therefore, while this policy tool can be introduced in all parties, regardless of their ideology, it is more likely to be adopted and to be successfully implemented by those parties with an already good record on women’s political presence and strong women’s sections.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.