Negotiating agency, sustaining resistance and navigating cooptation : ǂb analyzing the substantive representation of women by women cabinet ministers across sub-Saharan Africa
Date
2016
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The cabinet across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is the most powerful site of decision-making in the state, and presents huge opportunity for advancing, directing and controlling policy and programmatic agendas. This creates opportunity for the substantive representation in terms of pursuing gender-informed changes that will benefit women; and encouraging them to participate more in politics – should a minister choose to do so. The expectation that when in power, women will represent other women through changing the form and content of governance brings into sharp focus women’s increasing inclusion into cabinets across the region, and animates the overarching question of this dissertation: Does women’s participation in the executive as cabinet ministers make any substantive difference in women’s lives? I measure substantive impacts using women’s health indicators. I employ an integrative mixed methods comprising qualitative case studies of Nigeria and South Africa, and statistical methods using time-series cross sectional data analysis. I utilize primary semi-structured interview data conducted with both male and female ministers in both countries, and secondary archival data for the qualitative case studies. I utilize secondary panel gender-based data from World Bank database for forty-six countries across twenty-four years to specify three models (OLS, Random Effects and Fixed Effects) to investigate substantive impacts on women’s health. I find evidence to suggest that women ministers’ substantively represent women’s interests but that the effectiveness and impacts of said representation is mediated by the constraints placed on their agency by the institutional embeddedness of the cabinet across SSA. Because I ultimately argue the cabinet is a historically and culturally embedded institution of power, and that women’s inclusion does not dislodge its underlying gender norms and regimes, I interrogate women’s navigation of power within the cabinet in representing and responding to women’s issues and interests, and what implications it has for women ministers’ representation effectiveness. In light of the challenges to women’s political representation, if and when substantive representation occurs, it might be explained by the individual ministerial willingness and commitment to gender representation, and her access to a dense network of civil society and political actors. Additionally, because political phenomenon is contextual, more so, as contextual analysis is emphasized as one of the tenets of the sub-field, I argue that we need to rethink the predominant and somewhat Eurocentric understanding through which we study and measure substantive representation particularly for present study of sub-Sahara African women ministers’ representation of women’s interest. A blanket application of said mainstream notions and measures of substantive representation risks reproducing marginalization of women ministers by discounting their agency in women’s representation based on a dominant scholarly dominant discourse.
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Keywords
Women ministers, Substantive representation, Sub-Saharan Africa, Political representation, Governance, Gender inequality