The Roots of Resistance: How Different Party Logics Shape Resistance towards Gender Equitable Policy Change

Why do gender equitable institutional change fail? While resistance has become a buzzword in gender and politics research, resistance aimed at protecting the institutional status quo is still an undertheorized factor as we seek to understand why policies fail in terms of both adoption and implementation. In order to understand why strong and persistent resistance towards specific gender equitable policies emerges, this paper explores the roots of resistance aimed at protecting the status quo and what implications different motives underlying resistance have for the prospects of gendered institutional change. In particular, I theorize how party characteristics shape the motives underlying resistance against gender quota policies. The vast gender quota literature has not engaged with questions of why persistent resistance against this reform emerges in some places but not in others. In this paper, I suggest that party characteristics (such as whether a political party is primarily programmatic as opposed to clientelist) matters for resistance motives, for how resistance is exercised, and for how resistance can be overturned. I exemplify my theoretical arguments with a case study on gender quota resistance in two very different political collectives in Uruguay. Drawing on a large number of interviews with key actors, I show how resistance in the conservative and clientelist-based Partido Nacional and the radical leftwing and idea-based MPP is targeted to protect two very different types of status quo. These two political organizations are held together by two very different types of glue: an ideological, idea-based glue based on class inequality as the only politically relevant form of oppression in the case of MPP, and a clientelist type of glue based on trust and loyalty between men leaders in Partido Nacional. While a gender quota policy poses a challenge to both these logics, it does so in different ways. While resistance in MPP mainly has been idea-based, resistance in Partido Nacional have been aimed at protecting the clientelist structure through which power is reproduced in the party (what I label a patronal form of resistance) and a male logic of doing politics (what I label patriarchal resistance). Taken together, I suggest that the different logics through which parties operate has implications for the underlying motivations of quota resistance in these two collectives, but also for the leadership’s ability to resist the policy, and how this resistance can be challenged and ultimately overturned. The aim with this theory building exercise is to shed further light on our understanding of why quota resistance has – perhaps unexpectedly – been so strong and persistent in Uruguay. In a broader perspective, these theoretical generalizations aim to spur future research in this area in order to increase our understanding of why persistent resistance to gender equitable institutional change emerges in some contexts.