In going about the investigation of the four women presidents, the book utilizes a progressing topical analysis, with the first chapter examining the biographies of each of the presidents and the last chapter examining the substantive representations of each president. Early on, the reader is warned about the sparse primary materials available in the field of women’s executive studies, a recently emerging field at the intersection of women’s studies and political science. Therefore, Jalalzai is dependent on the use of a mix of primary and secondary materials, including interviews with the presidents themselves, close presidential advisors, politicians in the president’s party, politicians in opposition parties, and with Latin American scholars. This reliance on interviews is mitigated using election data, government sources, media articles, and opinion poll/survey data including prominent polling organizations such as Latino Barometro. Additionally, the book is lent a stronger foundation from the fieldwork conducted in the various countries examined that shows the perspectives of people outside the political and scholarly elite. While the overall research design is largely qualitative compared to quantitative, this synthesis of various qualitative sources nevertheless presents a comprehensive look at the cases of Latin American women presidents that serves to advance the study of women presidents forward.
Now, I turn to a closer examination of the book’s findings and assumptions. As aforementioned, the book is organized in a topical fashion, with each chapter focusing on the examination of various sub-questions related to the main question of why Latin America has produced the most powerful democratically elected women presidents and if this trend is still dependent on familial ties. While there are many different sub-questions addressed throughout the narrative, the more important questions for me as a reader were: Do women presidents provide different kinds of leadership (especially in terms of policy) than their male counterparts? In addition, are women executives still constrained by limited paths to power (i.e. through close familial ties and in atmospheres of political instability) or does the case of Latin America open new avenues of political opportunities for women?
Jalalzai provides a foundation to answer these central questions by focusing the first few chapters on the global trends involving women executives before examining the unique political context of Latin America. This provides a backdrop in which to explore the rise of these women presidents (or presidentas). While this made the book relatively slow-going, the background chapters proved helpful for readers with little familiarity with the scholarly work in the field. From the first few chapters, Jalalzai finds that these presidentas came to power in democratic systems with highly exclusive party-centered nomination processes and some degree of familial ties to political leaders in ruling and opposition parties leftover from rebel coalitions. While not overly dependent on familial ties, the women were still constrained by traditional gender roles in how they governed once in office (especially in terms of policy leadership), despite these countries allowing executives significant legislative authority. Often, the presidentas blended “masculine” and “feminine” styles of leadership whereby alternating between a hierarchical and collaborative leadership style, with the exception being Cristina Fernandez, who utilized more of a “masculine” style (Jalalzai, 2015, p. 147). However, using traditional gender binaries in relation to expected governance styles proves slightly problematic in terms of reinforcing harmful stereotypes about women politicians.
Continuing through the book, this highly engaging regional case study was at is best when looking at the policy objectives of the presidentas in the last chapters. Jalalzai finds that contrary to previous assumptions, the presidentas did not always promote women’s descriptive or substantive representation as much as symbolic representation. Descriptive representation relates to whether representatives in a government body are proportional to the represented population, whereas substantive representation goes a step further in asking to what extent representatives advocate the policy priorities of their constituencies. A mixed picture emerges in that the presidentas seemed to offer more significant levels of symbolic representation rather than descriptive or substantive forms of representation for women, in which half of the presidents made gender parity in their cabinets a priority without reaching the parity benchmark due to constraints such as public opinion or party opposition. Overall, political dynasties continue to have smaller, yet lingering influences on how women govern.
Overall, it is the variation uncovered in the presidentas’ leadership styles and policy priorities that truly was a strength of the book in its challenging of the assumptions of the traditional gender binary as it relates to governance or leadership style. However, this proves methodologically challenging for the field going forward. Therefore, the development and incorporation of a wider variety of indicators for measuring the different types of representation would be important for future study, as acknowledged by the author. Essentially, it remains difficult to develop a robust set of criteria for analysis and testing of the interactions of gender with politics. However, this book presents rigorous analysis criteria that can be improved by other scholars in the field. Moreover, like previous works, Jalalzai does not include non-democratic contexts in the evaluation of womens’ paths to power and their actions once in office. I feel like the book could have enhanced its comparative study by examining countries in Latin America that are not classified as democratic to further test the robustness of central tenets of the field in a case study of a region that seems to already be exhibiting anomalous patterns challenging the established literature. Additionally, it would be interesting to see if a woman’s ability to gain office is helped or hindered by non-democratic political systems. Lastly, because the field of women’s executive studies is relatively new, the book had to rely on blending findings of research from the politics, gender studies, and psychology fields.
In conclusion, Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties? provides a critical and important systematic contribution to the field of women’s executive studies despite the methodological challenges outlined above. In effect, this means that the book’s questions were not definitively answered or solutions to the issues it raised presented. Rather, the book merely contributed to an ongoing debate among gender and politics scholars. However, this did not make the book any less instructive or intellectually satisfying, as Jalalzai wrote in a way that was accessible for general as well as scholarly audiences interested in the women’s executive studies field. In the end, Jalalzai’s case study of Latin American presidentas will provide an essential cornerstone of the field as it continues to mature.
Works Cited:
Jalalzai, Farida. (2015). Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties? New York: Taylor & Francis.
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