Navigating Institutional Access and Political Agency: A Comparative Typology of Women’s Advocacy Groups in European Democracies

Drawing on novel empirical research conducted within the framework of the QUALREP (The Quality of Women’s Representation) project, this article examines how institutional architectures and political opportunity structures shape the form, function, and representative capacity of women’s advocacy organizations in Europe. Through a comparative sketch of feminist organizational ecosystems in Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and the UK, we offer a snapshot of the scale, scope, and issue focus of advocacy actors in each national context. By bringing traditional questions associated with women’s civil society/movement organization to concerns relating to representative democracy, the study makes an important contribution to ongoing debates about the quality of women’s representation and engages with longstanding debates regarding state feminism, co-optation, and movement autonomy. We propose a two-dimensional typology of women’s advocacy organizations based on: (i) their degree of formal institutional access; and (ii) their capacity for intersectional political agency, particularly in representing marginalized groups. By positioning organizations within this typology, this study identifies cross-national patterns that show when institutional architectures enable or constrain the intersectional representative capacity of women’s advocacy, offering a comparative framework for evaluating feminist representation under evolving democratic pressures. Please note that the paper is also co-authored with fellow researchers from the QUALREP-project team (i.e. Bjorn Boman, Nadja Fagrell Trygg, Larissa Peixoto Vale Gomes, Alexandra Polak & Clare Rice) reflecting the collaborative and comparative nature of the study.