Nailing that bias?! New analytical and methodological approaches to studying gendered institutions

Abstract

This panel offers new, creative tools – both analytical and methodological – for generating valid and nuanced knowledge about the gendered nature of political institutions. Taking inspiration from Dorothy Smith’s pathbreaking work, Elizabeth Ablett demonstrates how Institutional Ethnography (IE) can fruitfully be used to study political work, institutions, and inequalities. IE, Ablett argues, is more than merely a method: it is a wholesome onto-methodological approach with a capacity to capture how people’s everyday lives are caught up with institutional and global processes. In a similar vein, Michal Smrek presents a feminist version of Critical Realist Ethnography (CRE), which – in [their] view – can help us to capture which exact norms and which exact actors are responsible for a particular gendered behavior through the means of immersion of abductive theory testing. Rosalyn Cooperman demonstrates the usefulness of ’feminist’ process tracing (PT) as a means of reconstructing and analyzing the legislative effort and outcome, which – in [their] case – is the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) by the Virginia General Assembly. On analytical front, Cecilia Josefsson, presents [their] new, pathbreaking theoretical/analytical approach for capturing the heterogeneities of resistance to gender equitable institutional change. [They] illustrate the fecundity of this approach, also featured in [their] upcoming book, with the help of original data from Uruguayan political parties. Last by not least, Silvia Erzeel launches [their] novel way of measuring substantive representation, an index dubbed the Substantive Representation Index.

Title	Details
Measuring Women’s Substantive Representation across Parties, Parliaments and Governments: Introducing the Substantive Representation Index	View Paper Details
Nailing that bias: A critical realist ethnographic approach to generating knowledge about gendered informal rules	View Paper Details
The Roots of Resistance: How Different Party Logics Shape Resistance towards Gender Equitable Policy Change	View Paper Details
Using Institutional Ethnography to research political work, institutions, and inequalities	View Paper Details
Better Late Than Never: Virginia's 2020 Ratification of the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment	View Paper Details