A01=Cecilia Josefsson
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Author_Cecilia Josefsson
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Product details
- ISBN 9780197788592
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 226mm
- Publication Date: 13 Jan 2025
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Defending the Status Quo explores political elites' resistance to electoral gender quota reforms. In order to explain this phenomenon, Cecilia Josefsson develops an original theoretical framework that she calls the Resistance Stage Framework.
Anchored in feminist institutionalism and mapped onto the policy process, Josefsson outlines how status quo defenders adapt their resistance strategies to accommodate institutional and ideational changes across agenda setting, policy formulation, decision-making, and implementation phases. She bolsters her theory with a thick description of a 30-year-long process to adopt and implement electoral gender quotas in Uruguay. While Uruguay has been a vanguard in the women's rights movement, men's political dominance has been pervasive in this country. The struggle to introduce a gender quota has been marked by repeated reform attempts, persistent resistance, and a wide variation in the responses of the Uruguayan political parties, making this case apt for developing theory and shedding light on the adaptive nature of resistance.
Drawing on extensive interviews with Uruguayan political elites, three quota debates, and party electoral lists, Josefsson carefully examines the power struggle over gender quota reform. She shows how powerful status quo defenders, seeking to ignore, stall, and undermine gendered institutional change, adapt their resistance strategies across different political parties and over time, as quota advocates make advances and manage to change the institutional and ideational context.
Cecilia Josefsson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on political institutions and representation from a gender perspective. She received her PhD from the Department of Government at Uppsala University in 2020. Her dissertation "Adaptive Resistance: Power Struggles over Gender Quotas in Uruguay" was awarded the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Joni Lovenduski PhD Prize in Gender and Politics in 2023. Currently, she is researching gendered working conditions and leadership in parliament, resistance to gender-equitable institutional change, and political representation in times of crisis.
