Democracy Paradox
Is it possible for a democracy to govern undemocratically? Can the people elect an undemocratic leader? Is it possible for democracy to bring about authoritarianism? And if so, what does this say about democracy? My name is Justin Kempf. Every week I talk to the brightest minds on subjects like international relations, political theory, and history to explore democracy from every conceivable angle. Topics like civil resistance, authoritarian successor parties, and the autocratic middle class challenge our ideas about democracy. Join me as we unravel new topics every week.
Democracy Paradox
Saskia Brechenmacher on Promoting Gender Equality Through Democracy Assistance Aid
What does it mean to empower women politically in a context in which the dominant party is engaged in democratic backsliding or other forms of illiberal and exclusionary politics? Would you still want more women to be part of that party?
Saskia Brechenmacher
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Proudly sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Learn more at https://kellogg.nd.edu
Made in partnership with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Learn more at https://carnegieendowment.org
A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.
Saskia Brechenmacher is a fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. Recently, she coauthored a new book with Katherine Mann called Aiding Empowerment: Democracy Promotion and Gender Equality in Politics.
Key Highlights
- Introduction - 0:20
- Democracy Promotion and Gender Equality - 3:13
- Gender Quotas - 12:38
- Challenges - 28:12
- New Ideas and Issues - 44:53
Key Links
Aiding Empowerment: Democracy Promotion and Gender Equality in Politics by Saskia Brechenmacher and Katherine Mann
Learn more about Saskia Brechenmacher at the Carnegie Endowment
Follow Saskia Brechenmacher on X @SaskiaBrech
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Marc Plattner Has Quite a Bit to Say About Democracy
Larry Diamond on Supporting Democracy in the World and at Home
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More Information
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Email the show at jkempf@democracyparadox.com
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100 Books on Democracy
Can you believe it? This is episode 200! It’s been an incredible journey. For nearly four years this podcast had explored a wide range of topics on democracy and democratization. During this time, the podcast has established relationships, sponsorships, and partnerships with organizations and institutions such as the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, International IDEA, the Andrea Mitchell Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the Journal of Democracy, and Freedom House. Thank you to all the organizations and guests so far.
This week’s guest is Saskia Brechenmacher. She is a fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. Recently, she coauthored a new book with Katherine Mann called Aiding Empowerment: Democracy Promotion and Gender Equality in Politics.
Our conversation explores the evolution of democracy programs designed to encourage gender equality. Most of our focus is on ways to increase female representation through gender quotas, candidate recruitment, and candidate training. However, we also discuss the limitations and failures of these strategies. We also discuss the tensions that exist when female politicians become roadblocks to reform or even contribute to democratic erosion. But are efforts to encourage gender equality really part of a democracy promotion program? This is where my conversation with Saskia Brechenmacher begins.
This episode was made in partnership with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Their Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program is a leading source of research and ideas about supporting democracy globally. You can learn more at ceip.org/programs/democracy.
The podcast is also sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website.
Like always you can send questions or comments to me at jkempf@democracyparadox.com. But for now… This is my conversation with Saskia Brechenmacher…
jmk
Saskia Brechenmacher, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Saskia Brechenmacher
Thank you for having me.
jmk
Well, Saskia, I loved your most recent book, a book you wrote along with Catherine Mann, Aiding Empowerment: Democracy Promotion, and Gender Equality in Politics. It's a topic that I've been reading a lot about, efforts to ensure gender equality while at the same time promoting democratization. In fact, a lot of people feel the two go side by side. The idea that gender equality efforts actually contribute to democratization. But I also see others that feel that it might be a little bit of a distraction. So, I wanted to get your thoughts. Whenever we promote democracy, do you feel that efforts to promote gender equality actually contribute to democratization or do you think that they get in the way of those efforts and become a distraction, like another accomplishment that we're trying to do on top of democratization?
Saskia Brechenmacher
Thank you for that question. I think it goes to the core of many of the issues inherent to this field of international assistance and foreign policy. What we noticed when we started our research for this book is that there was definitely a sense among advocates who've been working on women's rights and women's political participation for a long time that efforts to promote democracy do not automatically empower women politically. I think we can look back to the 1990s to understand this phenomenon. This was a time when a lot of countries were undergoing a process of political liberalization. Democracy promotion was a growing industry among many Western democracies who had the sense that this is the time for us to share our principles and values with the world now that the end of the Cold War had come about.
But what we saw in many countries is as they shifted to holding multi-party elections and civil society had more space to operate and advocate, we didn't automatically see an increase in women's political participation. In fact, in some places we even saw a decline in women's political participation as countries democratized because it was autocratic states who had implemented gender quotas to have women in political office. We saw that in some of the Eastern European communist states once they democratized and got rid of those quotas, women's representation, in fact, went down.
So, seeing that democratization on its own did not necessarily ensure broad-based inclusion that led to then initial efforts to say we need more concerted efforts to make politics more inclusive, to have women at the decision-making table based on the recognition that you can have a thin version of democracy in which you have free and fair elections, you have an independent judiciary, you have this whole society that can operate, but you still have institutions that in some ways reflect the dominant power relations in a society, which in many places are characterized by some form of patriarchy or other forms of social stratification. Those then end up being reflected in politics. That led to more intentional efforts to promote women's political empowerment.
Now, whether efforts to promote gender equality automatically result in democratization, I think that's also an open question. Because you definitely see some autocratic regimes passing gender equality reforms and sometimes passing gender quotas, but also other types of reforms, reforms to prevent domestic violence and redistribute land, etc. Those reforms, even if they have positive effects, are not automatically democratizing. I think the two do not necessarily go in hand, even though they are very closely related.
jmk
I think it depends on what we mean by democratization. Because if we think of it purely from a procedural level, the idea of democracy being just about elections and transfers of power between incumbents and an opposition, then whether women are involved is kind of irrelevant - if that's the minimalist conception of democracy that we're thinking about. But if we're thinking of a thicker version of democracy that involves actual representation where it listens to different voices that exist within society and that we're actually trying to empower individuals to make choices about their own lives, then it's almost necessary to have women involved in politics.
It's almost an incomplete form of democratization if women are left out of the political process, unless we think of men in those positions actually representing women's interests, which I think brings us to a different topic about democracy and actually empowering women, which is whether women actually make that substantive difference in politics. Because we assume if we bring women to the table that they're going to push forward interests for women. Is that what really happens or do we get disappointed when we bring women to the table?
Saskia Brechenmacher
So, we have a lot of empirical evidence showing that in fact, it does make a difference. As you say, women have different life experiences, different backgrounds They often bring different issues and priorities to the table and we see that across political contexts when we look at the types of legislation they introduce, the types of policies that they prioritize there is a meaningful difference. That being said, it's not necessarily a totally straightforward relationship because there are factors that mediate that relationship between descriptive representation, so who's in political office, and substantive representation, what issues do they bring to the table, and do those get passed, which is a whole other question.
Just to briefly touch on some of the factors that mediate that relationship, one is, how much influence do women have within these institutions? We know from some legislatures, there might be a lot of women in the legislature, but they might not hold leadership positions. Leadership is really crucial in determining which bills get discussed and end up getting passed. Another question is how much collective power do women wield? If you only have a few women in the legislature, they might have different policy priorities, but might not have enough power to actually make their voices heard. Then a question is also how do they get into the legislature? Who are these women who are serving in these positions of power?
Of course, women are not a homogenous group. So, you might have women who actually just represent a small faction of women in society. So, they represent the interests of that faction, but not necessarily the interests of diverse women in society. That's where you have to look at intersecting aspects of their identity, including which political party they belong to. What did they have to do to get into these positions? In some places, you might have to demonstrate a lot of party loyalty in order even to get into parliament. Then within parliament, you're quite constrained by what your political party wants. You might not have that much room to push back against your party's priorities.
So, to summarize, I think there is a very clear substantive difference that women make in terms of legislation and policymaking. We have some evidence that there are broader effects in terms of their symbolic representation. It's important for women citizens and for citizens in general to see diversity in their political institutions that encourages trust and feelings of legitimacy in many places, but it's not a straightforward relationship. So, we need to look at these additional factors that mediate.
jmk
What I'm hearing from you in terms of substantive level is that, on the one hand, women do bring different interests to the bargaining table. They do bring different priorities and they do bring different life experiences that contribute to the debate. But at the same time, it matters a lot about the dynamics of the relationship in terms of where they sit in terms of power. For instance, if somebody's mayor, that makes a significant difference between whether they're deputy mayor. I mean, if they're actually the one who actually has the majority of the power and is at the head of the table, they're going to be able to set the agenda very differently than if you're somebody who might be in a more symbolic role rather than a more substantive role with actual meaningful decision-making power at the end of the day.
I think that sounds like a really important difference between how we think about just providing women's representation as opposed to expecting results just from giving them some form of representation.
Saskia Brechenmacher
That's correct. Anyone who's ever been in a room where you're the only one belonging to a certain group, it's not that easy to speak out. You might face pushback. I think we have increasing evidence showing that. You know, women and other underrepresented groups, when they enter these traditionally fairly exclusionary institutions, they face a lot of resistance, both overt resistance, sometimes in the form of harassment and direct pushback, but also more subtle forms of exclusion where you're not in the room where the actual decisions get made which are sometimes these informal negotiations that happen after work or outside of the formal parliamentary spaces or political party meetings. I think we need to look at who's empowered to speak and also who's part of the negotiations where the actual decisions get made.
jmk
Let's talk a little bit about gender quotas because the easiest way to be able to get women into the political process is just to require a certain number of women to have official political positions. You've already hinted at the fact that it depends on what those positions are. So, talk a little bit about gender quotas, what they are, the positives that they've been able to produce, and maybe some of the drawbacks.
Saskia Brechenmacher
Yeah, so gender quotas are actually one of the most common types of electoral reforms implemented over the past three decades. Almost every country around the world now has some form of gender quotas, whether that's a voluntary quota within a political party or mandatory legislative or constitutional quota. They take different forms. In some, it depends a lot on the electoral system. In some countries, it's a party list quota, a candidate quota, where parties are required to include a certain percentage of women on their candidate lists. Other countries, typically countries with majoritarian electoral systems, have reserved seat quotas where a certain set of seats in the legislature or local government is set aside for women, sometimes for other marginalized groups in the population as well.
So, in terms of the cross-national empirical evidence, we see that they are quite effective at increasing women's descriptive representation, particularly when they're designed in a way that fits the electoral system. That's requirement number one. If they have mechanisms to ensure compliance, to make sure that parties actually comply with these measures, then they tend to be fairly effective. Of course, it depends what kind of threshold for representation the quota sets in some cases it might only be 20%, in some cases 30%, in some countries it's now 50%. So, these are quite far-reaching quotas, changing the face of representation in these places. I think that's generally the sort of number one finding.
Another finding is that gender quotas have become more effective over time as advocates and reformers have learned what types of quotas work well and what are some of the common pitfalls. For example, we've learned that in some countries, if there's simply a small fee that parties have to pay if they don't abide by the quota, then you often see parties simply not complying because it's not necessarily in their interest or they see it as a bothersome interference in their candidate selection process. You have to have certain mechanisms to ensure compliance. That's number one.
You also asked about the benefits and drawbacks. I think the number one benefit is really just it is a mechanism to jumpstart women's political representation, particularly in places where it's just very difficult to change how political parties operate. It's difficult to change norms around women's political participation. There's a lot of structural barriers that we know take a long time to overcome. Part of the idea behind gender quotas is there are these very direct and tangible benefits that we just talked about to having a more diverse set of political representatives. Quotas are a direct way of getting there and acknowledging that the existing system is not meritocratic. It is built on all these exclusionary norms and structures that have existed over decades. I think there's a strong justice argument for these measures in terms of ensuring fairer access to positions of power.
Then there's this argument about substantive representation. That it does change what issues get heard and put forward in the political sphere. In terms of the drawbacks, it kind of depends on the design, again, of the gender quota, because it's difficult to generalize, because they take different shapes and different forms and different quotas have different advantages and disadvantages. I think one of the common challenges we see, and this is true in some of the countries that we looked at in the book, for example, in Kenya, there can be a problem where quotas end up stigmatizing the representatives that access political office through the quota measure.
So, to look at the Kenyan example it's basically a reserved seat quota that the country has implemented. A lot of the women who access political office through quotas, particularly in subnational government are not directly elected by constituents. Instead, the elections take place without any quota measure. Then after the elections, political parties nominate candidates based on internal party lists to then serve in the subnational legislature to fill the one third quota threshold that's been set by the law. What that means in practice is that the women elected through the quota measure access political office through a different channel than the majority of men who are directly elected by constituents and have direct constituencies. So you are de facto creating a silo that women find themselves in where they don't have the same form of electoral legitimacy and that gets held against them.
When you speak to a lot of Kenyan voters, they don't quite understand, first of all, how the quota system works and then also have the sense that these women are not totally legitimate representatives. People didn't vote for them. They don't really understand how the political parties chose them. Then some political actors who oppose women's political participation also instrumentalize those narratives and say those women aren't qualified, for example. Now, we don't have a ton of evidence showing that that's necessarily true.
But it obviously can be used against women who access political office through quota mechanisms, these ideas that women are unqualified, that they're just the relatives of politicians. Those are the stigmatizing narratives you hear a lot and whether they're true or not, it ends up being a barrier that women face once they're in political office, that they have to fend off these accusations that somehow, they're not legitimately elected, that it was not a meritocratic process how they got there. So, I think that's one of the drawbacks.
A second drawback I'll just briefly talk about is that one could say that quotas, because they circumvent some of the structural barriers is there is a risk that they don't end up actually addressing those barriers. You have this separate mechanism that's effective at getting women into political office, but then once you remove the quota measure, will those changes actually stick. Do we see these longer-term changes in norms and attitudes so then at some point you don't need the quota measure anymore? I think that's an open question.
We have some evidence that when quota measures get withdrawn, sometimes women's representation goes back down, which suggests that the systemic problems haven't fully been addressed. So, I think that's another drawback one might point to: How do we get at some of these systemic obstacles so that in the long run, access to political office is more equal for everyone?
jmk
One of the most interesting articles I've read about gender quotas recently was actually in the Routledge Handbook on Elections in the Middle East and North Africa. It was by a scholar named Meriem Aissa, I'm probably mispronouncing the name, but the article was called “Gender Quotas, Constituency Service and Women's Empowerment.” What she finds is that in Algeria specifically, women provide not just a different form of representation for other women, that in an Islamic society where it's difficult for women to approach men, that women representatives actually touch base with constituents that are other women and provide services for them. But that even other men find that some of the women are helpful because the women aren't as corrupt and aren't as focused on just trying to get something out of their service in government. This might be just based on the experience of the moment within Algeria.
But it was a fascinating article that emphasized the fact that bringing women into these positions completely changes the dynamics and the way that people start to think about representation and constituency and everything else. It's fascinating to me that some of those biggest changes happen in some of the societies that we think of as most patriarchal because I think it's most eye opening to citizens who live in those societies.
Saskia Brechenmacher
That sounds like a very interesting study and it definitely echoes things I've read and seen in my own research. It's not just the fact that women put forward different legislative proposals or have different issue priorities. In many places, especially at the local level and local government, representatives play a variety of roles. They help citizens access certain services. It's often a mechanism to make claims vis a vis the government and they're the direct access point for people to demand certain kinds of services.
So, you can see why that would be much easier for women to make some of those claims to access some of those services, if they have someone who's a woman in that position it might be easier to take meetings with them. It might be more comfortable to raise certain issues, whether that's gender-based violence or other issues that are particular concerns to women. You're absolutely right that it's not just a question of legislation. It's actually also about whether you are able to access government. Is there someone there that you feel comfortable speaking to or turning to when you have a problem?
jmk
When we're talking about gender quotas, we're talking about what you describe as first-generation forms of democracy aid or gender equality aid. Can you explain the differences between what you refer to as a first-generation like gender quotas and more modern second-generation forms of aid?
Saskia Brechenmacher
So, in the book, we draw a distinction between first-generation efforts to promote women's political empowerment and then more recent second-generation efforts. So, the first-generation emerged during the 1990s during this process of political liberalization when a lot of countries were becoming more democratic. But as I noted earlier, you didn't automatically see gains in women's political representation. The priority for a lot of international actors, but also local advocates who were trying to get more women into positions of power was just to ensure access. Gender quotas became one of the most common mechanisms for doing so and international actors were really instrumental in spreading gender quotas by collecting information about them, sharing information about them through this process of international norm building and norm diffusion, but then often through direct support to quota campaigns and quota advocates as well.
In some post-conflict countries where the UN, for example, played a really dominant role, they actually really strongly advocated and pushed for gender quotas as well in post-conflict governments. So, you saw this really rapid spread of gender quotas around the world with international actors playing a really important role. There were other types of efforts that were part of that first-generation of aid activities. In the book, we talk about training for women candidates and politicians as another very common form of support. Again, the idea here was we need more women to step forward to take up these positions of power.
There's a sense that a lot of women didn't have a lot of political experience, so we need to increase the quote unquote supply of women with the skills and knowledge and interest to participate in politics. We need to train them, give them the skills, give them the networks, give them the confidence to engage in politics. So, you saw this dual focus. On the one hand, you have gender quotas to encourage the demand for women in politics and then let's have a lot of training and exchanges, network building to encourage women to go forward. But what quickly became clear is these mechanisms were to some degree successful, particularly the gender quotas spreading very quickly around the world.
But they also seemed somewhat insufficient because of some of the limitations we talked about earlier. So, in some places you saw gender quotas being implemented, but political actors were quite astute at circumventing them, weakening them, subverting them in various ways, so the quota thresholds weren't actually met or maybe the threshold was met, but then women didn't feel like they had a lot of influence. They were in Parliament, but didn't have a say in determining what the political agenda was or the women who were being channeled in these positions were not necessarily feminist advocates or women who had a strong backing in civil society, but instead were women who were closely allied to the existing political elites. There was a sense that somehow those changes were not going quite far enough.
There was also recognition that a lot of the structural institutional obstacles hadn't really changed. So, for example, you still saw a gender gap in voting in many places with women being less engaged in elections and other forms of political activities. They were still completely underrepresented in political parties. Then in a number of places, as I noted earlier, you saw this uptick and pushback and violence against women who were engaging in politics, which, again, indicates that we have a change in representation, but somehow the norms around women's political leadership haven't really changed.
So, over the past decade, we've seen this emergence of a quote unquote second-generation of aid activities that try to get at some of those more entrenched institutional and norm-based obstacles to gender equality in politics. That's not really a radical shift from the first-generation, so we still see a lot of efforts to promote or strengthen gender quotas. We still see a lot of training activities, for example, but we also see that there are newer initiatives that try different entry points. A lot more focus on political parties, for example, because we recognize now that in many places political parties are a huge roadblock. They're slow to change. They're often not representative institutions. In some places, they're quite weakly institutionalized and based on informal power relations and they're just difficult spaces for newcomers to navigate.
There's been a lot more focus in recent years on not only training women within political parties or setting up separate women's wings, but actually engaging party leaders on how to implement internal party reforms to make leadership and decision making within political parties more inclusive. Similarly, within the realm of elections, we now see a broader focus not just on having a gender quota integrated into existing legislation, but integrating gender consideration to all aspects of an electoral cycle. That starts with voter registration activities (Who's even registered to vote?), voter education (Who knows about elections?), election management (Who's actually managing election day, the polling stations, et cetera?), and election observation, so at each stage of the election cycle, we have a more diverse set of people involved and have these gender considerations built into existing reform initiatives.
Then we also see increasingly some efforts to get at some of these gender norms that seem to be such an obstacle. Over the past decade, there's been a lot of effort, both at the international level, but also within specific countries to try and get at this problem of violence and harassment of women candidates and politicians and activists to try and highlight that this is not just some isolated set of incidents, but it's actually a systemic problem.
That ends up being a huge obstacle for women and other underrepresented groups who try to engage in politics and is often particularly acute for women who are from marginalized backgrounds, so kind of the intersection of different forms of discrimination and increasingly we see those problems also in the online sphere. That's another area where a lot of activities now are starting to emerge to try and raise awareness of these problems, but also start to design some initiatives and reforms that might either prevent or provide some mechanisms for redress.
jmk
One of the things that you mentioned was that some of the women who were elected weren't necessarily pushing forward pro-women policies. It raises one of the challenges behind getting women involved in politics is that when you have two different political parties, one might represent an ideology that is more favorable to feminism, towards pro-women policies, and another party might not. It might be much more hesitant to make reforms that are considered more favorable towards women's empowerment.
But at the same time, we do want to have women involved in both of those political parties. It's actually a step forward to have women engaged in far more conservative parties because at the end of the day, that's going to make it so that the potential for women to be involved in politics is spread throughout the political spectrum rather than just all bunched up on one ideological side. Is that something that's really on the mind of people? How do we get women involved in all of the different political parties throughout the spectrum, even ones that might not be favorable towards women's empowerment in the long-term?
Saskia Brechenmacher
Yes, I think that's a very tricky question. If we look at the international aid side of things and democracy assistance in particular, there's of course a lot of emphasis on not taking sides because the last thing you want is the perception that the United Nations or the US government is favoring one political party over another. So, a lot of the assistance efforts are framed as multiparty assistance efforts. We work with all parties across the political spectrum. We work with women candidates across the political spectrum. The goal is to, as you say, increase women's representation overall, no matter their specific political partisan background.
There are some exceptions to that. You have some political party foundations, for example, the German political party foundations that are traditionally affiliated with a particular set, a political party and a particular ideology. So, you have the more leftwing Social Democratic Party foundations, the more Conservative Christian Democratic Party foundation. They have more freedom to choose which political parties they work with because they have a particular sister party model where they then choose partnerships with parties that they see as ideologically aligned and then in some cases also provide support, mentorship, training, exchanges to women in that political party on an explicitly partisan basis. That would be the exception, although these efforts are fairly small. But the majority of assistance efforts are framed in this multi-partisan, multiparty way about strengthening democratic processes and institutions in general.
But I think the tension you speak to is a very real tension and it plays out in two different ways. One tension that we saw in our research is that women's organizations in many places who've been very actively involved in training women candidates, providing support, often with international funding, in some places get frustrated with women's representatives that don't feel like they're truly feminist advocates. There's a sense of friction sometimes between women's organizations and civil society who are advocating for meaningful reforms to gender equality laws, to other issues that are of concern for women, and then don't feel like they have real partners in the women in government, who in a way it’s not surprising are just politicians who have political interests and have political parties and sometimes prioritize their own career advancement just like male representatives would do.
So, there can be a sense of tension there. In our research in Kenya and Nepal, some women's rights advocates express the desire to have a more explicit feminist approach to the support they provide. Instead, of providing support to all women legislators, they wanted to work with women or prioritize working with women who had these commitments and connections to women's movements in civil society and felt like true allies to their cause. That creates some tension with international actors who want to work across the political spectrum.
There's another set of tensions that emerges in contexts experiencing democratic erosion particularly when democratic erosion is being driven by one political party, a dominant political party that creates a whole new set of dilemmas for actors who are trying to get more women into politics because suddenly the question emerges what does it mean to empower women politically in a context in which the dominant party is engaged in democratic backsliding or other forms of illiberal and exclusionary politics? Would you still want more women to be part of that party? Would you still want more representation in that government that maybe has a very exclusionary ethnic agenda or is otherwise hostile to democratic processes and institutions? I think for international actors engaged in these contexts, there's still a lot of uncertainty in how to engage.
There might be contexts like Myanmar, which we look at in our book, where democratic breakdown is very sudden and abrupt. You have a military coup and it's very clear that existing democratic institutions are not continuing in the way that they were working beforehand. It makes the environment extremely difficult to work in. But it also makes the choice a little bit easier because it's clearer that a lot of the women representatives that you previously may have supported are no longer in those positions. But what about those places where there's a gradual process of democratic erosion and institutions becoming increasingly corroded, taken over by one faction becoming increasingly corrupt? I think it's a lot less clear how to engage and whether there's still an interest in promoting women into these institutions.
That's where some would say that a more intersectional approach is necessary because if you're just focusing on gender, but not focusing on other aspects of inclusion, whether that's political inclusion, ethnic, regional, et cetera, you might actually be feeding into some of these cleavages in society because then the women advancing in those systems are likely the women associated with the dominant political project, which may be a very exclusionary and illiberal political project. You end up creating or feeding these grievances within society because some women end up being extremely excluded and marginalized.
So, I think that's a whole set of dilemmas that I think international democracy providers and practitioners working in this space are still grappling with and still trying to figure out how to relate and whether it makes sense and when it makes sense to continue working with these formal institutions as opposed to maybe pivoting more to women's mobilization in civil society.
jmk
Myanmar is such a fascinating country to think about, particularly in terms of gender equality, because it's still a very patriarchal society and yet the most popular leader within the country is a woman. It's Aung San Suu Kyi and many of us have thought of her for decades as truly just a democratic icon. Somebody who's been pushing for democratization. And yet when she came to power, there were real democratic issues within the country due to her specifically. Particularly what many people called the genocide of the Rohingya people. Aung San Suu Kyi actually represented the country in defending the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. It really changed the mindset of the way that a lot of people thought of her specifically.
It just really brings to light how some of these figures are really complicated and you might think of them as being democratic in some aspects and pushing forward women's empowerment in other aspects, but then in other ways they can be very problematic as well.
Saskia Brechenmacher
Absolutely. I think it reminds us to also take a broad view of women's political inclusion and not put too much weight on a single figure or a small set of elites who may have positions of power but are certainly not representative of all women or people in society. Instead, we need to look at what's happening to women's political representation at the highest levels of power, but then also what's happening more broadly in society. What we saw in Myanmar during this fragile political opening that the country had is that, on the one hand, yes, there were more opportunities for women to mobilize politically and you did see an uptick in women's representation, although it was maybe not as much as people had hoped for who had hoped that she would be more of a promoter of women's leadership than she ended up being. But there was an opening for women, especially in civil society, to advocate for certain kinds of reforms.
But at the same time this was a period with ongoing conflict in which women belonging to ethnic minority groups experienced a lot of violence at the hands of the military. A lot of women remain completely excluded from all forms of political representation. So, I think it reminds us to take a broader view as opposed to just paying too much attention to a single leader who might be prominent internationally, but certainly is not representative of what's going on in the country.
jmk
One of the parts of your research that I thought was most fascinating was where you talked about how certain types of women tend to benefit from these forms of aid than others. The fact that if women are coming from more socioeconomic advantageous positions, if they're coming from more urban settings, they tend to be the ones stepping up and finding opportunities to get the benefits of these policies from aid, while some of the other voices within society that represent different experiences of women sometimes get lost in the mix. Can you talk a little bit about how that works in practice?
Saskia Brechenmacher
Yes. So, if you look at international assistance, a lot of it gets channeled through major international organizations, INGOs, who then end up partnering with local organizations, sometimes with state institutions. So the first question to ask is who are these institutions, who are these organizations that international actors are funding and partnering with and not surprisingly, in many cases, those organizations that are able to access international funding are those that are already more professionalized that have the capacity to do grant applications, to do all the necessary compliance that you have to do.
To get USAID money, for example, is an incredibly complicated process and you have to clear a lot of hurdles in order to do so. The amounts of money are often quite large, so you need to have the capacity to even absorb that much money, which a small grassroots group is not necessarily positioned to do. You need to speak English to be able to communicate with international partners, who often don't speak the local language. So, there are all these things that set up certain groups to navigate that system better than others. Those tend to be groups that are based in the capital or in larger cities that are run by more educated elites who have international exposure and training and also have the networks to even know what kind of funding is available, who to partner with, what meetings to go to, etc.
The same is not necessarily true with state institutions. Who's in those institutions? It's people who have already made it to certain positions of power. Now it's not necessarily a problem in all cases. We see in our own society, the organizations that are doing legislative, policy advocacy, are specialized groups. They are groups that have specialized expertise to understand legal background, the policy background of certain issues. So, there's certainly a role for those groups to play.
But at the same time, what we see in many places and what we definitely saw in our research is then that there are entire groups of women and women's organizations that operate more at the grassroots, in more remote areas, that often have larger constituencies in terms of the women they interact with and serve, but have a much harder time accessing those resources and networks and funding because they lack all of the characteristics I just described.
If they access international funding, they often have to undergo quite extensive changes in order to do so, because the system is really not set up to support these smaller groups. So that creates certain disparities in terms of who has resources, but also in terms of what actors, international organizations are exposed to, what issues they're exposed to, because the priorities of groups in the capital who are run by more educated elites might look very different than the priorities of women in more rural or marginalized areas. I think the same is true if you think about work with women legislators or women in political parties. Again, these are not necessarily women who are representative of all of society, particularly if it's a society like Nepal, for example, that has a lot of internal divisions, caste-based divisions, socioeconomic divisions, et cetera.
So, what we're seeing in the international aid world in recent years is that there's definitely recognition of this problem. There've been some efforts to diversify the actors that receive international aid. If you speak at all to aid officials in the US government, they often talk about the need for localization. So, having more money go to local actors as opposed to big US organizations. There's definitely rising awareness of the problem. We also increasingly in our research found that a lot of aid strategies reference intersectionality. They reference terms like, ‘Oh, we need to reach marginalized women.’ There's a sense that we cannot just work with elite actors because there are all these other women that maybe we're not reaching or we're not even hearing what their priorities are.
That being said, when we spoke to a lot of practitioners and aid officials, they also mentioned that there's still a lot of obstacles and a long way to go to addressing some of these problems. I think part of it is just the way the funding system is set up, that the big aid organizations and bilateral aid providers don't have the capacity to give out thousands of tiny grants. They want big grants to big organizations that get the money out of the door. Which organizations can absorb that large amount of money, it's usually US organizations, big INGOs like Oxfam, et cetera. So, that's already a structural problem. Then those organizations may be in a better position to give out smaller grants, but not always.
So, there's ways in which the whole aid system is set up that makes it difficult to work differently. But we also found that there hasn't been a lot of careful thinking about what it would actually mean to take concepts like intersectionality to use a fashionable word seriously, particularly in the democracy assistance field. People might be using that word, but I think in many cases of specific programs we looked at what it meant in practice was let's have a training program, for example, which is the same as we've always had, but then let's just make sure we carry it out in a more rural area, expand it to places where we haven't been before, maybe target a particular marginalized community.
But there wasn't really a lot of thinking about how our whole assumptions and starting points about this work shift and what would it actually look like to maybe not just expand our existing approaches to new areas, but rethink what those approaches are to begin with. There are some international actors that are starting to do that. In the book, we mentioned an example from the Netherlands. They have a new program called Leading from the South, which is unique in that it actually hands over money to feminist funds based in the Global South. So, these are funds that are completely run by feminist actors based in countries that are aid recipient countries. These are the funds that are then not just receiving the money, but actually making decisions about how to allocate it, who to give it to, what priorities.
So, the decision-making power is entirely given over to these funds as opposed to still being held at the donor headquarters in the capital. That's still quite unusual. You know, when we look across the aid world, there's a lot of risk aversion. There's a feeling that we don't want to give up that power, but also, we're worried about corruption. We're worried about taxpayer money. There's a lot of sense that we need to control who the funding goes to, what priorities are being funded, and there's still a lot of reluctance to actually shift, not just the resources, but also the decision-making power into the hands of those that are actually receiving the resources.
jmk
I also got the sense from your book that there's a lot of complacency where you write about a lot of women complaining that they feel like there's a ceiling to the support that they receive meaning that they reach a certain level of accomplishment and then there are no new programs available for them to access. There's only so far that they can really go and then they've graduated and they're completely on their own. They don't feel like they're at a point where they're really able to take off the training wheels, if you will. They're not really feeling completely successful within politics. Still, they feel somewhat stranded once they get to a certain point, like maybe when they get elected into Parliament, maybe it's some point where they don't feel like they really have any more support.
One of the things that I read from your book was that a lot of the programs focus on very entry level needs. Things like telling people about the most basic elements of how to become a candidate, how to do the basic stuff, and they're not necessarily mentoring them. They're just providing seminars and workshops and it's the same one every single time. So, once a person's been to the workshop once or maybe twice, they've pretty much tapped out all of the resources that are available. How are we rethinking that? I mean, should we be thinking that we need to go deeper into providing resources that actually help women further into the process and maybe mentor women better or do we just simply need more resources so that we can do both at the same time?
Saskia Brechenmacher
This was a very common complaint that we heard from women candidates and women politicians. They felt that there were resources available in some cases, but they were targeting political newcomers. Women who'd never really been in politics beforehand who lacked very basic information and networks and a sense of solidarity. In places like Morocco and Kenya, where there'd been gender quotas implemented and that for the first time, a lot of women were engaging in politics. Those efforts could be helpful and some of them found them helpful, not necessarily even to acquire knowledge, but just to meet other women candidates and have a space to share their experiences and get some advice. But as you say, there's a limit to that. I think part of the problem was, or still is, that some of the candidate training programs come very late in the process.
So, a lot of funding related to women's political participation is very closely tied to elections. You might have elections next year, then the funding gets made available the year before. It takes a while to get the program running and so you end up having seminars in the maybe eight months leading up to the election. Now, in many cases, the decision to run for political office, all the steps you need to take, they happen way earlier in the process. So, you're already missing out on a whole pathway that women have to take to either build local name recognition and funding to run their campaigns. If it's a primary based system, they need local visibility in order to win primaries. If candidate selection happens in political parties, they need networks within political parties.
All of that can't really happen four months before an election. It has to happen several years beforehand, so there's already the sense that the training is mismatched to the actual timeline that people are on. But then there's the additional challenge. What you mentioned is that if the training is very technical, like let's bring you to a hotel conference room, talk through some issues that could still be useful, but in some cases, it is very divorced from the messy realities of actually running a campaign. So, when we spoke to women politicians, what they found most helpful was more of the mentorship or accompaniment approach where they had a set of people that they could go to on a recurring basis to get advice as they were navigating the different steps of the process.
They felt that that was in some ways more practically useful than getting abstract information about the rules of the electoral system, for example, particularly in places in which the formal rules are not really what governs how campaigns are actually run. So, you need to learn a lot of the informal rules of how things actually work on the ground, as opposed to just the formal framework. That's one set of challenges. But then in places like Kenya, for example, where a lot of women are no longer political newcomers, they've run for election multiple times, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. They don't really need that information anymore.
So, there was a lot of frustration among these women. ‘We don't really want another training seminar. What we want is media coverage. We want media to write about us so that we get our name out. We want funding.’ In Nepal and Kenya, elections are incredibly expensive. The candidates are paying for most of it themselves. It's also not just the formal campaign expenses. You also expect it to give a lot of handouts to voters to convince them that you're a viable politician. That's part of what that entails. So, they were really struggling with funding and that's something that international aid programs generally don't provide at all because there's a lot of restrictions on what international funding can and cannot be used for and usually it cannot be used to fund campaigns.
There were some programs that were trying to get around that. They were saying, ‘Okay, we can’t provide funding, but we can provide you with tangible goods, like campaign posters, for example, just to get your face out in the community or meetings, constituency meetings where you have a chance to speak to people, speak to community leaders.’ So, those things were often quite helpful because they were concrete things that help women gain political visibility. It wasn't just a seminar that draws them away from the campaign trail into a conference room far away from their voters, which a lot of them felt like wasn't actually useful.
Then there's the additional challenge that you mentioned. If they are successfully elected, what happens then? There's definitely less support. There's some support in some cases for women who are elected in the form of women's caucuses or networks that are provided for them. But often not to the same degree because once elections have occurred, international attention moves away and focuses on other issues. So, the day-to-day governance aspects, I think a lot of women politicians felt that they had somewhat less support with that aspect of it. Also, you know, not just what happens in the legislature, but how can they continue to do constituency work, like go back out in their communities, make sure the voters see what they're doing for them to also help their reelection chances in the future.
I think there's definitely a gap in support in terms of mentorship, accompaniment that happens after. But I would also know that generally, the whole aspect of training, providing support to women, it's all based on the assumption that something's wrong or something's missing on the side of women. That somehow, they lack skills or lack resources or lack networks. I think in many cases, that's just not true. These are very qualified people. They have, in some cases, even more qualifications than their male opponents, so that's not necessarily the problem. In some ways, all the focus on supporting women reinforces this narrative that it's somehow women's job to fix the problems with the system as opposed to we need to change the way the institution operates and also how the male gatekeepers in those institutions operate.
So, I think that's another shift we're seeing now in some places. A recognition that actually not just focusing only on women, but if we focus on women candidates and politicians, let's do it in relation to the people around them and that might in some places be their families, their husbands. Are they supportive of women's campaigns? Because what we heard in Nepal, for example, it's incredibly hard for women to run for office if her husband is not supportive. So, to what extent are they being brought into it? - Male community leaders, male politicians, of course. So, there's a whole set of other gatekeepers that matter and that have received less attention than the women themselves.
jmk
So, does that mean that you think that we need to get to a third generation of aid, that we need to continue to evolve and continue to rethink how we're going about democracy aid with an aim towards gender equality or do you think that those ideas, those ways of doing things that you just described are really just a part of the second generation of aid that already is moving forward right now?
Saskia Brechenmacher
We argue in the book that in some ways the second generation, is based on the right instincts in the sense that it recognizes that it's the political ecosystem that matters and that includes the institutions, the formal frameworks, but also the informal practices, the norms, the informal institutions. All of it is part of it and so that's the right instinct. The question is, is it actually getting realized? Is it getting implemented? A lot of what we talk about in the book is how to deepen and realize those approaches and practice. Because in some ways, the thinking about it has outstripped the actual aid practices, which tend to fall back on the same old models as opposed to looking for new entry points.
I think that's increasingly important, particularly given the new challenges we're facing. So, whether that's democratic erosion, whether that's, in some places, a more concerted backlash against progressive gender equality norms and gender equality change. Also, in many places, a disconnect between the formal legal frameworks that are quite progressive thanks to the work of activists and reformers, but then the actual practices seem to lag behind. So given those realities, I think what is needed is really taking the insights of the second generation seriously, implementing them more and more consistently. For that, as we talked about, the actual aid system needs to change in important ways.
The way the funding flows needs to change in important ways to make it more equitable, more accessible to reach a more diverse set of actors as well and actually enable those activists that are fighting for all of those changes, which will take a long time. That won't happen over the course of a single project to empower them also to set their own priorities.
jmk
Well Saskia, thank you so much for joining me today. I want to plug the book one more time. It's called Aiding Empowerment: Democracy Promotion, and Gender Equality in Politics. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for writing the book.
Saskia Brechenmacher
Thank you so much for the conversation.