Women and Politics in France 1958-2000 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781134667697
Google: 52SFAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2002-01-04T22:35:00+00:00

5 Explaining women’s absence from politics

As early as the 1950s, the newly emerging political science was investigating its own version of the woman question: why did women participate less than men? Participation was measured according to certain criteria, commonly arranged on an ascending scale of time and effort. Activities which were included were political interest (defined as discussing politics with friends, following politics in the media etc.), voting, membership of a political party, activism within the party, standing for election, and attaining political office. In France, however, the groundbreaking studies by Duverger (1955), and Dogan and Narbonne (1955) stand out as exceptions rather than the beginning of a trend. Andrée Michel and Geneviève Texier’s (1964) detailed critical rereading of the relation between women and politics was the only other significant contribution to this area of research until the much later work of Mariette Sineau and Janine Mossuz-Lavau. However, while individual academics specialising in this area were few and far between, it is a subject which has periodically roused media interest and, at times, provoked detailed analyses in serious newspapers. These provide valuable evidence of the changing nature of the debate around women’s political participation and will be examined here along with the academic studies mentioned above.

During the first few years in which women had the right to vote, there was tremendous interest in the difference it would make. First, would women exercise this right and, second, would their electoral choices be influenced by the Church, by their husbands, by the personality of individual politicians…? When it became clear that women’s voting behaviour was in fact very similar to men’s, especially once age had been taken into account, attention began to focus on other forms of participation, where women were apparently no more visible than they had been when they gained the right to vote and to stand for election. This disparity was already evident in 1955 when Maurice Duverger (1955: 125–6) drew the following conclusion from the UNESCO study of women and politics:

A very clear disparity can be observed between women’s participation in elections and their participation in the circle of government

... At the electoral level, women’s participation is high: it does not differ significantly from that of men either in terms of content or of the rate of participation… At the level of government (in the broadest sense), the situation is quite different. Here women’s political participation is very low, and it declines even more as one approaches the core of the inner circle. There are few women candidates in elections; even fewer women in parliament; even fewer women ministers and no women heads of government

In discussing the absence of women from politics, feminist political scientists have found it useful to categorise explanatory factors as those relating to the ‘supply side’ on the one hand and to the ‘demand side’ on the other hand (Norris 1993: 308–30).

Supply side refers to those factors which enable and motivate individuals to pursue a political career. They include access to the resources necessary

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.