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ID:
128859
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Does women's empowerment strengthen global good citizenship? We test theories of democratic foreign policy and feminist international relations that suggest that more deeply democratic countries with greater gender equity will be stronger international human rights promoters. First, the direct empowerment of women as policymakers and civil society constituencies may shift states' incentives and ability to pursue international human rights initiatives. Second, greater sexual equality may lead to feminist socialization of the wider society to promote human rights values. We test these predictions by measuring the relationship between five different measures of sexual equality and a country's propensity to support 30 international human rights outcomes, including legal commitments, humanitarian assistance, and sanctions, controlling for previously established contributing factors such as level of development and democratic regime type. We find that more sexually equal countries are more likely to support international commitments to constrain state violence against individuals, international measures to combat gender and sexual orientation discrimination, and more and higher quality development assistance. However, sexual equality appears to yield less benefit for more costly human rights initiatives: yielding sovereignty to international legal institutions, promoting economic rights through concessionary trade policies, or adopting diplomatic sanctions against pariah states. These effects are stronger in democratic states, where citizen empowerment translates more readily into foreign policy, and are also found in a sample that excludes the Western powers.
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| 2 |
ID:
141762
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article contributes to the debate in this journal about the state of British democracy. I criticise the tendency to use a ‘demand–supply’ dichotomy in interpreting the strong distrust experienced by institutions and politicians, and especially the idea that all the blame for current problems is to be attributed to the inadequateness of the British political tradition (BPT). By referring to international data on democracy and to recent British trends in both public attitudes and institutional innovations, a more nuanced picture on the state of democracy emerges. I argue that the BPT is not incompatible with incremental changes that have already introduced innovations in the way politics works in Britain today, and that the task of empowering citizens is one of the most delicate aspects in this process of innovation.
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