While there are many threats to democracy these days (including rising populism, political party polarization, and income inequality), excessive executive branch powers tend to pose as great a threat as the latter factors. Many in America (myself included at one point) may think that ultra-powerful presidents or prime ministers only exist in the developing world and that democracy in the United States is unshakably stable and strong (and could never falter). However, Jane Mayer illustrates in her 2009 book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals that this assumption is not the rule by examining the case of 9/11 and how the United States nearly undermined its own constitution (and perhaps the War on Terror itself) in its governments' response to the terrorist attacks in 2001. In this book, Mayer offers a cautionary tale that even the strongest democracies are vulnerable when responding far outside the law in an atmosphere of fear and anger present in crisis situations.
In crisis situations, governments tend to respond with force in order to broadcast an image of reassuring strength to its fearful citizens at home and abroad. President Bush's declaration of a global "War on Terror" to be fought by the free world, with the United States at the spearhead, is a textbook example of this phenomenon. Such a brazen attack on any country, let alone a country considered a great power in the international system, puts great pressures upon government (from the political elite to the citizens) to do whatever it takes to prevent a similar atrocity from taking place in the future. Combating and preventing terrorism by itself can be seen as a noble pursuit, especially for a democracy like the United States that prides itself upon upholding and expanding the values of freedom and liberty around the world, values that terrorism tends to suppress. However, this suppression of important law-and-constitution-based values on the part of terrorism goes both ways, as Mayer reveals in her account of how the intelligence community and the executive branch responded to 9/11.
The powers that be within the Bush administration at the time, especially President Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney, faced in terrorism in all its difficulty: an enemy not present in a unified army underneath the recognized authority of a nation-state but rather pockets transcending state borders, no clear leader/formal power structure, and the use of tactics that routinely violate the internationally agreed upon rules of militarized conflict set out in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The fateful decision was made for the United States to conduct this global campaign outside of the perceived-to-be cumbersome rules of both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions in executive permissions allowing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to gather the all-important intelligence guiding the War on Terror through what were termed as "enhanced interrogation" methods (Mayer, 2009, p. 142). In other words, many terrorist suspects were transferred around extralegal CIA prisons around the world, including the most notable and infamous of them all, Guantanamo, and subject to horrific torture through methods like simulated drowning (i.e. waterboarding) at the behest of the executive branch.
Besides the obvious moral lines that were crossed in this authorization of extralegal methods of interrogation, imprisonment, and intelligence gathering from executive branch-designated "unlawful enemy combatants" (i.e. making humans feel subhuman) were the all important political and militaristic ramifications: these techniques (originally part of the government-sanctioned SERE program where trained medical professionals oversaw military training designed to protect soldiers against torture as POWs) were not only unlawful under established sources of domestic and international law and gave the executive more powers than is safe, but jeopardized the military in the fact that the information gathered under the use of torturous interrogation proved to be unreliable. Why? If you're being subjected to these methods, you probably would say anything in order to make it stop. Also, those within the intelligence community who may have had expertise in say, terrorism, Middle Eastern culture, and the Geneva Conventions were often alienated by the CIA's practices, producing a harmful divide among domestic and international government agencies that would be able to more effectively fight terrorism when not involved in bureaucratic schisms.
Ultimately, a program meant to protect soldiers was twisted and abused horrifically by the CIA, damaging the United States' moral standing worldwide and, ironically, harming international efforts to address terrorism by radicalizing populations faster than terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda themselves. However, the taint went up to the highest levels of government, up to the President and Vice President, who unwittingly or not, expanded executive powers beyond what is safe for a democracy based on the rule of law and the checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. As the free world continues to fight against terrorism, Mayer recommends that leaders in the United States and elsewhere heed Friedrich Nietzsche's counsel that "he who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process becomes a monster himself" (Mayer, 2009, p. 261).
Works Cited:
Mayer, J. (2009). The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. New York: Anchor Books.
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Friday, September 15, 2017
Book Review: Farida Jalalzai's "Women Presidents of Latin America"
Why are women executives (prime ministers or presidents) so rare in the world today? Why do many women presidents tend to come to power in Latin America? These questions provide the foundation for women’s executive studies scholar Farida Jalalzai’s book Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties? Specifically, this book focuses on Latin America to understand why more powerful elected women executives have come to power there, contrary to many observations of women presidents coming to power more often as part of a political dynasty. In her systematic analysis, Jalalzai investigates these seemingly unique cases by examining the terms of four Latin American women presidents: Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Dilma Rousseff (Brazil), Cristina Fernandez (Argentina), and Laura Chinchilla (Costa Rica).
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.
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.
Friday, September 8, 2017
On Women Presidents and Prime Ministers
In memory of the 2016 presidential election campaign featuring Democrat Hillary Clinton (the first woman nominated for president by a major political party in the United States) and Republican Donald Trump, I thought I'd share some research I conducted on women executives (presidents and prime ministers) worldwide in the hopes of shedding light on obstacles women in politics still face today.
Politics has long been a masculine domain in which men often populate positions in the various governmental and non-governmental power centers of the world (Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai & Krook, 2010). Thus, commonly held images of presidents and prime ministers often are men, especially in countries of great geopolitical significance, such as the United States (Jalalzai, 2010; Wiliarty, 2008). With the onset of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, feminist groups increasingly put pressure on governments, political parties, and international organizations like the United Nations to more broadly recruit women to legislative and executive posts (Skard, 2014). Despite international, regional, and country-level movements for gender equality, progress has been slow and uneven in getting women involved in politics, especially when considering the number of women achieving the position of president or prime minister starting in the 1960s (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). As of 2014, the world saw 73 women executives, while women’s average representation in legislatures was 18% (Schwindt-Bayer, 2009, p. 5; Skard, 2014, p. 36-37). Parallel to the slow incorporation of women into positions of power around the world is the emerging scholarly study of these women executives (Skard, 2014). Because of the small samples of women executives worldwide and a male-dominated political science discipline, most of the literature tends to focus on case studies and women’s initial recruitment to legislatures and has only recently started to branch out in alternative directions (Skard, 2014). Therefore, this paper will survey the wide variety of literature to shed light on this discipline’s differing perspectives on women executives.
As alluded to, women’s executive studies is a discipline that has struggled to emerge within the mainstream political science and governmental studies fields (Skard, 2014). Therefore, rather than occupying space in a single discipline and due to the relatively recent nature of the field, women’s executive studies has adopted a multidisciplinary approach drawing from the fields of politics, gender studies, and psychology to build a strong core knowledge base from which to engender theoretical maturation (Skard, 2014). Moreover, this multidisciplinary knowledge has mostly drawn from the United States or Western experience, hampering the field’s ability to produce generalizable knowledge applicable to women leaders outside of the Western context (Jalalzai, 2010). To date, most of these approaches have focused on the factors leading to success or hindering success for women candidates and have rarely evaluated these women once attaining office, hinting at a disciplinary priority in boosting women’s representation in high executive positions worldwide by first promoting greater numbers of women in legislatures (Fleschenberg, 2007; Jalalzai, 2010; Krook & Norris, 2014; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2004). The latter strategies to boost women’s representation in government by expanding the pool of women candidates available for office at the legislative level are most clearly presented within the conceptual framework of the “political recruitment model” (Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 5-6). This model explains specific strategies to increase the probability of election for women candidates during the various stages of the election process: “eligible to aspirant” (aspiration for office), “aspirant to candidate” (becoming a candidate for office), and “candidate to elected” (the election campaign) (Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 5-6).
Per the logic of the political recruitment model, for women to advance successfully through the various institutional barriers to achieve representation in an executive office, it is important to enlarge the pool of women candidates (Krook & Norris, 2014). By increasing the pool of women available for political parties in the legislature, there is an increased probability of a woman then being chosen by a party in the future to run for the highest executive seat (Jalalzai, 2010; Krook & Norris, 2014). These strategies are often broken down further into “quota” and “non-quota” strategies (Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 3). Similarly, Buckley (2013) identifies “international party equality strategies” and “external party influences” such as socioeconomic disparities as interacting to create a multiplicity of formal and informal barriers for both aspirant candidates and official candidates. Some of these strategies potentially more successful for promoting women’s legislative representation at the various stages, including targeted policy designed to reduce discrimination against women in institutions like the legislature, gender quotas, and fundraising networks are seen to be most effective when working with different actors across the three stages (Krook & Norris, 2014). The most influential actors in the second and third steps of the political recruitment model, political parties, serve a critical gatekeeper function in candidate recruitment and nomination processes that have the potential to exclude women candidates, divert critical campaign resources from women candidates once selected to run, or more or less support coercive legal measures like gender quotas (Buckley, 2013; Jalalzai, 2004; Jalalzai, 2008; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai, 2015; Reynolds, 1999; Skard, 2014).
For example, it has become a rule of thumb among scholars that left-wing liberal parties are more likely than right-wing conservative parties to support state legal interventions like gender quotas due to the former’s overall ideological preference for gender egalitarianism in society (Buckley, 2013 Krook & Norris, 2014; Skard, 2014). Despite this, the coercive nature of gender quotas remains controversial, provoking many challenges (often from conservative parties), such as in the High Court of Ireland case Mohan v. Ireland & Anor (Mohan, 2016). In Mohan v. Ireland & Anor, Fainna Fáil party member Brian Mohan brought a suit to challenge a 2012 provision mandating that Irish political party candidate lists be composed of at least 30% women (Mohan, 2016). His challenge relied on the argument that legislative measures trying to boost women’s legislative representation in Ireland towards gender parity were hurting the individual rights of citizens like himself to participate in the political process (a woman candidate was chosen to run in his place) while boosting the group rights of historically marginalized groups like women (Mohan, 2016). Generally, like closely related affirmative action policies, gender quotas have been critiqued as contrary to the democratic process as well as related interventions to implement more proportional electoral systems seen to enhance minority group representation (Buckley, 2013; Krook & Norris, 2014; Reynolds, 1999).
Aside from the controversy inherent in gender quotas, these quotas are often most effective when designed to have requirements for a certain number of women on party ballots and where they are placed on ballots along with enforcement mechanisms (Schwindt-Bayer, 2009, p. 13). However, as Krook and Norris (2014) acknowledge, “non-quota” strategies have not “been subject to systematic documentation or research” unlike gender quotas that involve penalties for parties or legislative bodies for not achieving a certain percentage of women within their ranks or on candidate lists (Buckley, 2013; Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 3). In addition, quotas have differential impacts depending on the national context concerned (Krook & Norris, 2014). For example, wide-reaching institutional change like gender quotas are more likely to be put into place in new democracies because of the fluidity of institutional design in the constitution-building stage in comparison to the institutional rigidity of an established democracy like the United States (Buckley, 2013; Krook & Norris, 2014; Schwindt-Bayer, 2009). Also, missing from the literature is a comparative analysis of the long-term trends from the simultaneous use of quota and non-quota strategies in the 100 plus countries that have instituted gender quotas since the adoption of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action for the promotion of gender equality in politics partly because of the relatively recent nature of international efforts to promote quota strategies as a way of achieving gender parity in legislatures (Krook & Norris, 2014).
In practice, achieving a “critical mass” of women or gender parity (50% of representatives being women per women’s presence in a population) in legislatures or electing a women president or prime minister has been difficult due to a host of institutional barriers of a social, economic, and political nature, despite the fact that women who achieve executive office often get there by advancing through the party ranks (Adler, 1996; Jalalzai, 2010; Jacquette, 1997, p. 3; Krook & Norris, 2014; Skard, 2014). This is because socioeconomic factors as well as institutional barriers often go hand in hand, often becoming most salient for the highest political offices, like that of president or prime minister, which requires women to acquire greater qualifications than their male counterparts (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). One of the main parent disciplines of women’s executive studies, gender studies, is one of the primary areas that has generated the most information in the field about women candidates’ social barriers that operate in conjunction with institutional barriers to make this path to office more difficult for women in comparison to men (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). Specifically, gender studies knowledge incorporates feminist insights about how gender roles and stereotypes differentially impact male and female candidates (Jalalzai, 2010). Farida Jalalzai (2010) in the examination of gender stereotypes and their influences on how, why, and if women are elected as presidents or prime ministers, demonstrated the effects of gender stereotyping in the development of a typology of presidential system positions and their degree of powers.
The first typology of presidential systems recognizes four types of political systems: unified presidential, parliamentary-presidential dominance, parliamentary-presidential corrective, and parliamentary with weak or figurehead presidents (Jalalzai, 2010, p. 142). Integrating the degree of powers associated with a presidential position in the latter typology of political systems, Jalalzai (2010) categorizes the degree of powers from most to least powerful in the categories of dominant president, powerful but not dominant president, and a president with minimal powers (p. 142). Of the 20 cases of women presidents examined in the study, Jalalzai (2010) found that women were overrepresented in the political systems with power-sharing presidents and prime ministers (as is the predominant pattern in European political systems) and underrepresented in political systems affording presidents greater powers (such as unified presidential systems). Jalalzai’s (2010) findings were corroborated in Müller-Rommel and Vercesi’s (2016) study of European women prime ministers. The corollary drawn from these conclusions is that women are often elected to prime ministerial positions or as weak presidents in dual presidential-prime minister systems in part due to the perceived advantages women have in a governing environment that requires consensus-building versus unilateral decision-making present in systems with powerful presidents (Jalalzai, 2010; Müller-Rommel & Vercesi, 2016).
This builds off a biologically deterministic argument that posits that women are more collaborative by nature and lack the capacity for adversarial and decisive decision-making that men possess and by implication makes men natural leaders (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai & Krook, 2010). What this kind of biological argument fails to explain is those few women who have achieved executive posts with high levels of power and who are over-represented in Latin America and Asia (Jalalzai, 2004; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai, 2015; Tobar, 2008). What explains their rise in comparison to the rest of the world? Are certain regions of the world predisposed to electing (powerful) women executives? While women presidents and prime ministers overwhelmingly have emerged within Western countries (around 48%) in Europe and the Americas along with a concurrent majority of the literature on women executives, often overlooked are comparative studies of other regions (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). Even when comparative studies have been conducted between world regions, Skard (2014) notes that these analyses have “mainly covered certain aspects of the women’s careers” prior to their ascendance to an executive post in a case-study fashion (p. 3). Some women’s executive scholars have tried to remedy this lack of study of other world regions outside Europe in the increased conduct of comparative or regional studies of world regions (Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002).
In her examination of the Latin American context, Jalalzai (2015) focuses on the terms of five Latin American women presidents: Michelle Bachelet of Chile, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Cristina Fernandez of Argentina, and Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica in trying to understand the factors behind the increased frequency of powerful women national leaders emerging from Latin America (Skard, 2014). These presidentas were analyzed to assess their impacts on symbolic, descriptive and substantive representation, in effect trying to fill the literature gap of comparative studies and lack of focus on the achievements of women leaders once in office while trying to uncover the factors behind the seeming anomaly of more powerful, elected women presidents in the region (Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014). A mixed picture emerged in that the presidentas seemed to offer more significant levels of symbolic representation rather than descriptive or substantive forms of representation for women (women’s proportional representation in legislative and executive bodies and promotion of women’s policy issues, respectively), 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 (Jalalzai, 2015). Additionally, not unlike other women leaders who emerged around the world, these women leaders arose in a democratic political system with exclusive, party-centered nomination processes, uneven levels of socioeconomic development and (to a lesser degree) possessed familial ties to political leaders in ruling and opposition parties leftover from rebel coalitions of democratization movements (Jalalzai, 2015, p. 60, 100-101).
Teasing out these tenuous factors under-girding most of the women leaders’ ascensions to power are further studies on the Asian context, where the second most women leaders have emerged (Skard, 2014). In Asia, not unlike Latin America, women inhabiting political dynasties played critical roles in the leading of democratic transitions from formerly autocratic regimes, even in Islamic majority countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan that tend to negatively regard active female participation in the public sphere (Jalalzai, 2004; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002). Essentially, during these movements these women leverage the gender stereotypes of motherly figures to present a “less threatening” and “weak” persona that does not threaten “ambitious opposition rivals” (p. 538). Rather, these women leaders were perceived as acting upon “their apparent non-partisanship, self- sacrifice and even inexperience” which “emphasized the moral character of the struggle against dictatorship” and recast the women as acting acceptably in the public sphere within their societally-defined roles of mothers and daughters seeking to heal a nation’s wounds and “seeking to win justice for their martyred fathers or husbands” (Thompson, 2002, p. 538, 540). However, the actions of female leaders during the unsettled times of revolution within the frame of the feminine script of moral authority figure are ultimately undermined when the moment of crisis has past and democratic consolidation begins (Jalalzai & Krook, 2010; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002). Perceptions of women being reformers despite their “dynastic origins” begin to fade as women leaders consolidate their power along dynastic lines as well as perceptions of them being merely temporary transitional or symbolic figures increase (Thompson, 2002, p. 540).
Not unlike their counterparts in Latin America, women leaders in Asia, such as former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, faced sentiments that women were merely symbolic leaders carrying on the policies of their fathers or husbands (Thompson, 2002). As Thompson explains, “kinship ties to the male martyr not only helped overcome traditional barriers to political leadership, they also linked female leaders to their husbands’ or fathers’ martyrdoms,” which undermined the agency of the female leaders as patriarchal ideals pressured female leaders to act as symbols while ceding power to a close male relative (Jalalzai & Krook, 2010; Thompson, 2002, p. 546). Thus, while women leaders’ connections to prominent political families, especially in countries where the democratic transitions have involved high levels of clientilism, has proven key to overcoming institutionalized gender stereotyping to propel women into office (Thompson, 2002). However, it has proven to be a short-term benefit and a long-term handicap for women leaders attempting to govern (Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002). In analyzing other contexts from which no or little women executives have emerged, such as the Middle East, the Caribbean, Pacific island states, the United States, and China, other handicaps seem to be a colonial legacy, the weakening of civil society, and religious fundamentalism (Skard, 2014, p. 451-459). These latter factors harm women’s political representation due to the inherent gender inequality in patriarchal societies (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014).
Yet other studies have focused on political-psychological perspectives, analyzing whether certain personality types and family contexts tend to produce women more likely to aspire to and have the necessary characteristics optimal for a demanding political environment (Steinberg, 2001). Steinberg (2001) finds that “first-born women, like first-born men, are overrepresented among political leaders” who came to power in the time-period of 1960-1989 (p. 89). Knowing that most women executives have hailed from countries with relatively high standards of living, Steinberg (2001) posits that women leaders who were first born may have had parents that invested significant time and resources into them and were then “socialized into” aspiring to public sphere professions that required both female and male role models in a male-dominated public sphere (p. 101-102). These women, who are most likely to “identify more strongly” with traditionally masculine ascribed traits of “power and authority” as first-borns then are more likely to go on to take traditionally “male positions” (Steinberg, 2001, p. 95). Skard (2014) corroborates Steinberg’s (2001) study by noting that 90% of women examined within the book (66 presidents and prime ministers) held at least a post-secondary education (if not further tertiary education) and a long-term professional career in positions within or outside political parties as lawyers or university professors before ascending to office (p. 465). Extrapolating this logic, one expects a first-born leader (regardless of gender) to be predisposed towards the use of force rather than diplomacy in a national or international crisis (Steinberg, 2001, p. 107).
Scholars such as Falk and Kenski (2006), Caprioli and Boyer (2001), and Ann Tickner (1999) have pushed the frontiers of women’s executive studies by focusing on the intersections of international relations with women leaders in examining their conduct in times of conflict. Not only do the few existing studies show that women executives face significant obstacles domestically in running a country, but also face significant pressures at the international level as well, especially the rare women leaders ascending to power in socioeconomically more powerful (or G-8) countries with powerful executive positions such as Germany’s Angela Merkel (Jalalzai, 2010; Tickner, 1999; Wiliarty, 2008). These obstacles are often exacerbated when women face crisis decisions during their tenures, including overcoming the gendered and racialized perceptions of scholars like Francis Fukuyama that “women are not able to deal with today’s threats” from nations headed by “aggressive younger men unsocialized in the ways of mature democracies” in Africa or the Middle East (Tickner, 1999, p. 6-7). However, there is no evidence existing suggesting that men are more militaristic in their governing styles than women. In fact, Caprioli and Boyer (2001) find that the pressures women leaders face when trying to prove they belong in the masculine domains of high politics may drive women to respond militaristically when dealing with interstate crises in order to assert their legitimacy.
In their examination of women leaders utilizing the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data set from 1945 to 1994, it was found that women occupying states with less gender equality (as proxied by the legislative representation of women) found that these leaders were more prone to the use of violence during international crises (p. 514). Conversely, those women (and men) leading states with higher levels of gender equality were less likely to use violence and at the very least, showed greater restraint when using violent force compared to diplomacy to resolve a crisis (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001, p. 514). This is thought to be due to the moderating influence of women’s viewpoints on domestic and international crises on the state’s governing apparatus as women achieve more legislative and executive representation in a democratic context, a key result that interventions such as gender quotas seek to achieve simultaneously with the objectives of gender equality, improved quality of democracy, and improved international security (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Schwindt-Bayer, 2009). At a certain point, women achieve a high enough representation (gender parity) to overcome perceptions that a man would be better equipped to handle “terrorism” or “homeland security” crisis situations because of their innately high levels of emotional control, decisiveness, strength, and forcefulness, characteristics typically associated with masculinity (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Falk & Kenski, 2006, p. 1). Ultimately, having more women at the table improves the quality of decision-making, especially when faced with these critical decision-making junctures to respond with either military force or diplomacy, irrespective of the gender of the leader concerned (Falk & Kenski, 2006).
Overall, as this literature review demonstrates, the emerging discipline of women’s executive studies has developed relatively unevenly, depending on the academic disciplines a study draws upon (Skard, 2014). These disciplines, such as political science, psychology, and gender studies, infuse into the disciplinary foundation of women’s executive studies differing methodologies and knowledge bases which produce somewhat of a scholarly dissensus on the best way to study women national leaders or proscribe solutions to these pressing issues outside broad platitudes to change both institutions and culture (Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014; Steinberg, 2001). Nevertheless, the discipline has reached scholarly consensus about favorable conditions that seem to correlate positively with an increase in the amounts of elected women national leaders including democracy, proportional electoral systems, increased standards of living, economic or political crises, high levels of education, extensive professional or political careers, and the support of parents for political careers (Skard, 2014; Steinberg, 2001).
Similarly, as demonstrated above, the discipline has a dearth of studies of a comparative and comprehensive nature (that is, looking at all world regions and the time periods before, during, and after the term of a woman leader) and a concurrent overabundance of case studies analyzing careers of women leaders prior to their election as national leader (Jalalzai, 2004; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014). Thus, overcoming the disciplinary and methodological barriers above will better equip this promising new intersectional discipline to elucidate and provide workable, specific solutions to promote women’s involvement in politics within governmental institutions locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally in coordination with efforts to affect cultural changes more conducive to gender equality (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014).
Works Cited:
Adler, N. (1996). Global Women Political Leaders: An Invisible History, an Increasingly Important Future. The Leadership Quarterly, 7(1), 133-161.
Buckley, F. (2013). Women and Politics in Ireland: The Road to Sex Quotas. Irish Political Studies, 28(3), 341-359.
Caprioli, M., & Boyer, M. (2001). Gender, Violence, and International Crisis. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45(4), 503-518.
Falk, E., & Kenski, K. (2006). Issue Saliency and Gender Stereotypes: Support for Women as Presidents in Times of War and Terrorism. Social Science Quarterly, 87(1), 1-18.
Fleschenberg, A. (2007). The Path to Political Empowerment?: Electoral Gender Quotas in South Asia. Pakistan Journal of Women's Studies, 14(2), 1-25.
Jalalzai, F. (2004). Women Political Leaders. Women & Politics, 26(3-4), 85-108.
Jalalzai, F. (2010). Madam President: Gender, Power, and the Comparative Presidency. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 31(2), 132-165.
Jalalzai, F. (2015). Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties? Florence: Taylor & Francis.
Jalalzai, F., & Krook, M. (2010). Beyond Hillary and Benazir: Women’s Political Leadership Worldwide. International Political Science Review, 31(1), 5-21.
Jaquette, J. (1997). Women in Power: From Tokenism to Critical Mass. Foreign Policy, (108), 23-37.
Krook, M., & Norris, P. (2014). Beyond Quotas: Strategies to Promote Gender Equality in Elected Office. Political Studies, 62(1), 2-20.
Mohan v. Ireland & Anor. 2016 IEHC 35. (2016). Retrieved March 15, 2017, from http://ie.vlex.com/vid/mohan-v-ireland-anor-593012379.
Müller-Rommel, F., and Michelangelo V. (2016). "Prime Ministerial Careers in the European Union: Does Gender Make a Difference?." European Politics and Society, 1(1), 1-18.
Reynolds, A. (1999). Women in the Legislatures and Executives of the World: Knocking at the Highest Glass Ceiling. World Politics, 51(4), 547-572.
Schwindt‐Bayer, L. (2009). Making Quotas Work: The Effect of Gender Quota Laws on the Election of Women. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 34(1), 5-28.
Skard, T. (2014). Women of Power: Half a Century of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers Worldwide. Bristol: Policy Press.
Steinberg, B. (2001). The Making of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers: The Impact of Birth Order, Sex, of Siblings, and Father‐Daughter Dynamics. Political Psychology, 22(1), 89-110.
Thompson, M. (2002). Female Leadership of Democratic Transitions in Asia. Pacific Affairs, 75(4), 535-555.
Tobar, M. (2008). Seizing a Window of Opportunity: The Election of President Bachelet in Chile. Politics & Gender, 4(3), 509-519.
Wiliarty, S. (2008). Chancellor Angela Merkel: A Sign of Hope or the Exception That Proves the Rule? Politics & Gender, 4(3), 485-496.
Politics has long been a masculine domain in which men often populate positions in the various governmental and non-governmental power centers of the world (Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai & Krook, 2010). Thus, commonly held images of presidents and prime ministers often are men, especially in countries of great geopolitical significance, such as the United States (Jalalzai, 2010; Wiliarty, 2008). With the onset of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, feminist groups increasingly put pressure on governments, political parties, and international organizations like the United Nations to more broadly recruit women to legislative and executive posts (Skard, 2014). Despite international, regional, and country-level movements for gender equality, progress has been slow and uneven in getting women involved in politics, especially when considering the number of women achieving the position of president or prime minister starting in the 1960s (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). As of 2014, the world saw 73 women executives, while women’s average representation in legislatures was 18% (Schwindt-Bayer, 2009, p. 5; Skard, 2014, p. 36-37). Parallel to the slow incorporation of women into positions of power around the world is the emerging scholarly study of these women executives (Skard, 2014). Because of the small samples of women executives worldwide and a male-dominated political science discipline, most of the literature tends to focus on case studies and women’s initial recruitment to legislatures and has only recently started to branch out in alternative directions (Skard, 2014). Therefore, this paper will survey the wide variety of literature to shed light on this discipline’s differing perspectives on women executives.
As alluded to, women’s executive studies is a discipline that has struggled to emerge within the mainstream political science and governmental studies fields (Skard, 2014). Therefore, rather than occupying space in a single discipline and due to the relatively recent nature of the field, women’s executive studies has adopted a multidisciplinary approach drawing from the fields of politics, gender studies, and psychology to build a strong core knowledge base from which to engender theoretical maturation (Skard, 2014). Moreover, this multidisciplinary knowledge has mostly drawn from the United States or Western experience, hampering the field’s ability to produce generalizable knowledge applicable to women leaders outside of the Western context (Jalalzai, 2010). To date, most of these approaches have focused on the factors leading to success or hindering success for women candidates and have rarely evaluated these women once attaining office, hinting at a disciplinary priority in boosting women’s representation in high executive positions worldwide by first promoting greater numbers of women in legislatures (Fleschenberg, 2007; Jalalzai, 2010; Krook & Norris, 2014; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2004). The latter strategies to boost women’s representation in government by expanding the pool of women candidates available for office at the legislative level are most clearly presented within the conceptual framework of the “political recruitment model” (Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 5-6). This model explains specific strategies to increase the probability of election for women candidates during the various stages of the election process: “eligible to aspirant” (aspiration for office), “aspirant to candidate” (becoming a candidate for office), and “candidate to elected” (the election campaign) (Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 5-6).
Per the logic of the political recruitment model, for women to advance successfully through the various institutional barriers to achieve representation in an executive office, it is important to enlarge the pool of women candidates (Krook & Norris, 2014). By increasing the pool of women available for political parties in the legislature, there is an increased probability of a woman then being chosen by a party in the future to run for the highest executive seat (Jalalzai, 2010; Krook & Norris, 2014). These strategies are often broken down further into “quota” and “non-quota” strategies (Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 3). Similarly, Buckley (2013) identifies “international party equality strategies” and “external party influences” such as socioeconomic disparities as interacting to create a multiplicity of formal and informal barriers for both aspirant candidates and official candidates. Some of these strategies potentially more successful for promoting women’s legislative representation at the various stages, including targeted policy designed to reduce discrimination against women in institutions like the legislature, gender quotas, and fundraising networks are seen to be most effective when working with different actors across the three stages (Krook & Norris, 2014). The most influential actors in the second and third steps of the political recruitment model, political parties, serve a critical gatekeeper function in candidate recruitment and nomination processes that have the potential to exclude women candidates, divert critical campaign resources from women candidates once selected to run, or more or less support coercive legal measures like gender quotas (Buckley, 2013; Jalalzai, 2004; Jalalzai, 2008; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai, 2015; Reynolds, 1999; Skard, 2014).
For example, it has become a rule of thumb among scholars that left-wing liberal parties are more likely than right-wing conservative parties to support state legal interventions like gender quotas due to the former’s overall ideological preference for gender egalitarianism in society (Buckley, 2013 Krook & Norris, 2014; Skard, 2014). Despite this, the coercive nature of gender quotas remains controversial, provoking many challenges (often from conservative parties), such as in the High Court of Ireland case Mohan v. Ireland & Anor (Mohan, 2016). In Mohan v. Ireland & Anor, Fainna Fáil party member Brian Mohan brought a suit to challenge a 2012 provision mandating that Irish political party candidate lists be composed of at least 30% women (Mohan, 2016). His challenge relied on the argument that legislative measures trying to boost women’s legislative representation in Ireland towards gender parity were hurting the individual rights of citizens like himself to participate in the political process (a woman candidate was chosen to run in his place) while boosting the group rights of historically marginalized groups like women (Mohan, 2016). Generally, like closely related affirmative action policies, gender quotas have been critiqued as contrary to the democratic process as well as related interventions to implement more proportional electoral systems seen to enhance minority group representation (Buckley, 2013; Krook & Norris, 2014; Reynolds, 1999).
Aside from the controversy inherent in gender quotas, these quotas are often most effective when designed to have requirements for a certain number of women on party ballots and where they are placed on ballots along with enforcement mechanisms (Schwindt-Bayer, 2009, p. 13). However, as Krook and Norris (2014) acknowledge, “non-quota” strategies have not “been subject to systematic documentation or research” unlike gender quotas that involve penalties for parties or legislative bodies for not achieving a certain percentage of women within their ranks or on candidate lists (Buckley, 2013; Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 3). In addition, quotas have differential impacts depending on the national context concerned (Krook & Norris, 2014). For example, wide-reaching institutional change like gender quotas are more likely to be put into place in new democracies because of the fluidity of institutional design in the constitution-building stage in comparison to the institutional rigidity of an established democracy like the United States (Buckley, 2013; Krook & Norris, 2014; Schwindt-Bayer, 2009). Also, missing from the literature is a comparative analysis of the long-term trends from the simultaneous use of quota and non-quota strategies in the 100 plus countries that have instituted gender quotas since the adoption of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action for the promotion of gender equality in politics partly because of the relatively recent nature of international efforts to promote quota strategies as a way of achieving gender parity in legislatures (Krook & Norris, 2014).
In practice, achieving a “critical mass” of women or gender parity (50% of representatives being women per women’s presence in a population) in legislatures or electing a women president or prime minister has been difficult due to a host of institutional barriers of a social, economic, and political nature, despite the fact that women who achieve executive office often get there by advancing through the party ranks (Adler, 1996; Jalalzai, 2010; Jacquette, 1997, p. 3; Krook & Norris, 2014; Skard, 2014). This is because socioeconomic factors as well as institutional barriers often go hand in hand, often becoming most salient for the highest political offices, like that of president or prime minister, which requires women to acquire greater qualifications than their male counterparts (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). One of the main parent disciplines of women’s executive studies, gender studies, is one of the primary areas that has generated the most information in the field about women candidates’ social barriers that operate in conjunction with institutional barriers to make this path to office more difficult for women in comparison to men (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). Specifically, gender studies knowledge incorporates feminist insights about how gender roles and stereotypes differentially impact male and female candidates (Jalalzai, 2010). Farida Jalalzai (2010) in the examination of gender stereotypes and their influences on how, why, and if women are elected as presidents or prime ministers, demonstrated the effects of gender stereotyping in the development of a typology of presidential system positions and their degree of powers.
The first typology of presidential systems recognizes four types of political systems: unified presidential, parliamentary-presidential dominance, parliamentary-presidential corrective, and parliamentary with weak or figurehead presidents (Jalalzai, 2010, p. 142). Integrating the degree of powers associated with a presidential position in the latter typology of political systems, Jalalzai (2010) categorizes the degree of powers from most to least powerful in the categories of dominant president, powerful but not dominant president, and a president with minimal powers (p. 142). Of the 20 cases of women presidents examined in the study, Jalalzai (2010) found that women were overrepresented in the political systems with power-sharing presidents and prime ministers (as is the predominant pattern in European political systems) and underrepresented in political systems affording presidents greater powers (such as unified presidential systems). Jalalzai’s (2010) findings were corroborated in Müller-Rommel and Vercesi’s (2016) study of European women prime ministers. The corollary drawn from these conclusions is that women are often elected to prime ministerial positions or as weak presidents in dual presidential-prime minister systems in part due to the perceived advantages women have in a governing environment that requires consensus-building versus unilateral decision-making present in systems with powerful presidents (Jalalzai, 2010; Müller-Rommel & Vercesi, 2016).
This builds off a biologically deterministic argument that posits that women are more collaborative by nature and lack the capacity for adversarial and decisive decision-making that men possess and by implication makes men natural leaders (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai & Krook, 2010). What this kind of biological argument fails to explain is those few women who have achieved executive posts with high levels of power and who are over-represented in Latin America and Asia (Jalalzai, 2004; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai, 2015; Tobar, 2008). What explains their rise in comparison to the rest of the world? Are certain regions of the world predisposed to electing (powerful) women executives? While women presidents and prime ministers overwhelmingly have emerged within Western countries (around 48%) in Europe and the Americas along with a concurrent majority of the literature on women executives, often overlooked are comparative studies of other regions (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). Even when comparative studies have been conducted between world regions, Skard (2014) notes that these analyses have “mainly covered certain aspects of the women’s careers” prior to their ascendance to an executive post in a case-study fashion (p. 3). Some women’s executive scholars have tried to remedy this lack of study of other world regions outside Europe in the increased conduct of comparative or regional studies of world regions (Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002).
In her examination of the Latin American context, Jalalzai (2015) focuses on the terms of five Latin American women presidents: Michelle Bachelet of Chile, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Cristina Fernandez of Argentina, and Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica in trying to understand the factors behind the increased frequency of powerful women national leaders emerging from Latin America (Skard, 2014). These presidentas were analyzed to assess their impacts on symbolic, descriptive and substantive representation, in effect trying to fill the literature gap of comparative studies and lack of focus on the achievements of women leaders once in office while trying to uncover the factors behind the seeming anomaly of more powerful, elected women presidents in the region (Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014). A mixed picture emerged in that the presidentas seemed to offer more significant levels of symbolic representation rather than descriptive or substantive forms of representation for women (women’s proportional representation in legislative and executive bodies and promotion of women’s policy issues, respectively), 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 (Jalalzai, 2015). Additionally, not unlike other women leaders who emerged around the world, these women leaders arose in a democratic political system with exclusive, party-centered nomination processes, uneven levels of socioeconomic development and (to a lesser degree) possessed familial ties to political leaders in ruling and opposition parties leftover from rebel coalitions of democratization movements (Jalalzai, 2015, p. 60, 100-101).
Teasing out these tenuous factors under-girding most of the women leaders’ ascensions to power are further studies on the Asian context, where the second most women leaders have emerged (Skard, 2014). In Asia, not unlike Latin America, women inhabiting political dynasties played critical roles in the leading of democratic transitions from formerly autocratic regimes, even in Islamic majority countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan that tend to negatively regard active female participation in the public sphere (Jalalzai, 2004; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002). Essentially, during these movements these women leverage the gender stereotypes of motherly figures to present a “less threatening” and “weak” persona that does not threaten “ambitious opposition rivals” (p. 538). Rather, these women leaders were perceived as acting upon “their apparent non-partisanship, self- sacrifice and even inexperience” which “emphasized the moral character of the struggle against dictatorship” and recast the women as acting acceptably in the public sphere within their societally-defined roles of mothers and daughters seeking to heal a nation’s wounds and “seeking to win justice for their martyred fathers or husbands” (Thompson, 2002, p. 538, 540). However, the actions of female leaders during the unsettled times of revolution within the frame of the feminine script of moral authority figure are ultimately undermined when the moment of crisis has past and democratic consolidation begins (Jalalzai & Krook, 2010; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002). Perceptions of women being reformers despite their “dynastic origins” begin to fade as women leaders consolidate their power along dynastic lines as well as perceptions of them being merely temporary transitional or symbolic figures increase (Thompson, 2002, p. 540).
Not unlike their counterparts in Latin America, women leaders in Asia, such as former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, faced sentiments that women were merely symbolic leaders carrying on the policies of their fathers or husbands (Thompson, 2002). As Thompson explains, “kinship ties to the male martyr not only helped overcome traditional barriers to political leadership, they also linked female leaders to their husbands’ or fathers’ martyrdoms,” which undermined the agency of the female leaders as patriarchal ideals pressured female leaders to act as symbols while ceding power to a close male relative (Jalalzai & Krook, 2010; Thompson, 2002, p. 546). Thus, while women leaders’ connections to prominent political families, especially in countries where the democratic transitions have involved high levels of clientilism, has proven key to overcoming institutionalized gender stereotyping to propel women into office (Thompson, 2002). However, it has proven to be a short-term benefit and a long-term handicap for women leaders attempting to govern (Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002). In analyzing other contexts from which no or little women executives have emerged, such as the Middle East, the Caribbean, Pacific island states, the United States, and China, other handicaps seem to be a colonial legacy, the weakening of civil society, and religious fundamentalism (Skard, 2014, p. 451-459). These latter factors harm women’s political representation due to the inherent gender inequality in patriarchal societies (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014).
Yet other studies have focused on political-psychological perspectives, analyzing whether certain personality types and family contexts tend to produce women more likely to aspire to and have the necessary characteristics optimal for a demanding political environment (Steinberg, 2001). Steinberg (2001) finds that “first-born women, like first-born men, are overrepresented among political leaders” who came to power in the time-period of 1960-1989 (p. 89). Knowing that most women executives have hailed from countries with relatively high standards of living, Steinberg (2001) posits that women leaders who were first born may have had parents that invested significant time and resources into them and were then “socialized into” aspiring to public sphere professions that required both female and male role models in a male-dominated public sphere (p. 101-102). These women, who are most likely to “identify more strongly” with traditionally masculine ascribed traits of “power and authority” as first-borns then are more likely to go on to take traditionally “male positions” (Steinberg, 2001, p. 95). Skard (2014) corroborates Steinberg’s (2001) study by noting that 90% of women examined within the book (66 presidents and prime ministers) held at least a post-secondary education (if not further tertiary education) and a long-term professional career in positions within or outside political parties as lawyers or university professors before ascending to office (p. 465). Extrapolating this logic, one expects a first-born leader (regardless of gender) to be predisposed towards the use of force rather than diplomacy in a national or international crisis (Steinberg, 2001, p. 107).
Scholars such as Falk and Kenski (2006), Caprioli and Boyer (2001), and Ann Tickner (1999) have pushed the frontiers of women’s executive studies by focusing on the intersections of international relations with women leaders in examining their conduct in times of conflict. Not only do the few existing studies show that women executives face significant obstacles domestically in running a country, but also face significant pressures at the international level as well, especially the rare women leaders ascending to power in socioeconomically more powerful (or G-8) countries with powerful executive positions such as Germany’s Angela Merkel (Jalalzai, 2010; Tickner, 1999; Wiliarty, 2008). These obstacles are often exacerbated when women face crisis decisions during their tenures, including overcoming the gendered and racialized perceptions of scholars like Francis Fukuyama that “women are not able to deal with today’s threats” from nations headed by “aggressive younger men unsocialized in the ways of mature democracies” in Africa or the Middle East (Tickner, 1999, p. 6-7). However, there is no evidence existing suggesting that men are more militaristic in their governing styles than women. In fact, Caprioli and Boyer (2001) find that the pressures women leaders face when trying to prove they belong in the masculine domains of high politics may drive women to respond militaristically when dealing with interstate crises in order to assert their legitimacy.
In their examination of women leaders utilizing the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data set from 1945 to 1994, it was found that women occupying states with less gender equality (as proxied by the legislative representation of women) found that these leaders were more prone to the use of violence during international crises (p. 514). Conversely, those women (and men) leading states with higher levels of gender equality were less likely to use violence and at the very least, showed greater restraint when using violent force compared to diplomacy to resolve a crisis (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001, p. 514). This is thought to be due to the moderating influence of women’s viewpoints on domestic and international crises on the state’s governing apparatus as women achieve more legislative and executive representation in a democratic context, a key result that interventions such as gender quotas seek to achieve simultaneously with the objectives of gender equality, improved quality of democracy, and improved international security (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Schwindt-Bayer, 2009). At a certain point, women achieve a high enough representation (gender parity) to overcome perceptions that a man would be better equipped to handle “terrorism” or “homeland security” crisis situations because of their innately high levels of emotional control, decisiveness, strength, and forcefulness, characteristics typically associated with masculinity (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Falk & Kenski, 2006, p. 1). Ultimately, having more women at the table improves the quality of decision-making, especially when faced with these critical decision-making junctures to respond with either military force or diplomacy, irrespective of the gender of the leader concerned (Falk & Kenski, 2006).
Overall, as this literature review demonstrates, the emerging discipline of women’s executive studies has developed relatively unevenly, depending on the academic disciplines a study draws upon (Skard, 2014). These disciplines, such as political science, psychology, and gender studies, infuse into the disciplinary foundation of women’s executive studies differing methodologies and knowledge bases which produce somewhat of a scholarly dissensus on the best way to study women national leaders or proscribe solutions to these pressing issues outside broad platitudes to change both institutions and culture (Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014; Steinberg, 2001). Nevertheless, the discipline has reached scholarly consensus about favorable conditions that seem to correlate positively with an increase in the amounts of elected women national leaders including democracy, proportional electoral systems, increased standards of living, economic or political crises, high levels of education, extensive professional or political careers, and the support of parents for political careers (Skard, 2014; Steinberg, 2001).
Similarly, as demonstrated above, the discipline has a dearth of studies of a comparative and comprehensive nature (that is, looking at all world regions and the time periods before, during, and after the term of a woman leader) and a concurrent overabundance of case studies analyzing careers of women leaders prior to their election as national leader (Jalalzai, 2004; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014). Thus, overcoming the disciplinary and methodological barriers above will better equip this promising new intersectional discipline to elucidate and provide workable, specific solutions to promote women’s involvement in politics within governmental institutions locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally in coordination with efforts to affect cultural changes more conducive to gender equality (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014).
Works Cited:
Adler, N. (1996). Global Women Political Leaders: An Invisible History, an Increasingly Important Future. The Leadership Quarterly, 7(1), 133-161.
Buckley, F. (2013). Women and Politics in Ireland: The Road to Sex Quotas. Irish Political Studies, 28(3), 341-359.
Caprioli, M., & Boyer, M. (2001). Gender, Violence, and International Crisis. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45(4), 503-518.
Falk, E., & Kenski, K. (2006). Issue Saliency and Gender Stereotypes: Support for Women as Presidents in Times of War and Terrorism. Social Science Quarterly, 87(1), 1-18.
Fleschenberg, A. (2007). The Path to Political Empowerment?: Electoral Gender Quotas in South Asia. Pakistan Journal of Women's Studies, 14(2), 1-25.
Jalalzai, F. (2004). Women Political Leaders. Women & Politics, 26(3-4), 85-108.
Jalalzai, F. (2010). Madam President: Gender, Power, and the Comparative Presidency. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 31(2), 132-165.
Jalalzai, F. (2015). Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties? Florence: Taylor & Francis.
Jalalzai, F., & Krook, M. (2010). Beyond Hillary and Benazir: Women’s Political Leadership Worldwide. International Political Science Review, 31(1), 5-21.
Jaquette, J. (1997). Women in Power: From Tokenism to Critical Mass. Foreign Policy, (108), 23-37.
Krook, M., & Norris, P. (2014). Beyond Quotas: Strategies to Promote Gender Equality in Elected Office. Political Studies, 62(1), 2-20.
Mohan v. Ireland & Anor. 2016 IEHC 35. (2016). Retrieved March 15, 2017, from http://ie.vlex.com/vid/mohan-v-ireland-anor-593012379.
Müller-Rommel, F., and Michelangelo V. (2016). "Prime Ministerial Careers in the European Union: Does Gender Make a Difference?." European Politics and Society, 1(1), 1-18.
Reynolds, A. (1999). Women in the Legislatures and Executives of the World: Knocking at the Highest Glass Ceiling. World Politics, 51(4), 547-572.
Schwindt‐Bayer, L. (2009). Making Quotas Work: The Effect of Gender Quota Laws on the Election of Women. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 34(1), 5-28.
Skard, T. (2014). Women of Power: Half a Century of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers Worldwide. Bristol: Policy Press.
Steinberg, B. (2001). The Making of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers: The Impact of Birth Order, Sex, of Siblings, and Father‐Daughter Dynamics. Political Psychology, 22(1), 89-110.
Thompson, M. (2002). Female Leadership of Democratic Transitions in Asia. Pacific Affairs, 75(4), 535-555.
Tobar, M. (2008). Seizing a Window of Opportunity: The Election of President Bachelet in Chile. Politics & Gender, 4(3), 509-519.
Wiliarty, S. (2008). Chancellor Angela Merkel: A Sign of Hope or the Exception That Proves the Rule? Politics & Gender, 4(3), 485-496.
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Book Review: Jane Mayer's "Dark Money"
In 2010, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in a highly controversial case raising the question of if corporations and their union counterparts had First Amendment rights equal to that of individuals under the Constitution. This case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, had the potential to overturn Progressive era limitations on corporations' and unions' political contributions to candidates of their choice. When the 5-4 ruling in favor of Citizens United came down the news pipeline, it shocked the American political system. Why? Virtually unlimited spending was now allowed by wealthy groups on each side of the political spectrum as long as political contributions were given to groups not directly affiliated with candidates (i.e. political action committees or PACs). How did this come to be? Jane Mayer uncovers the story behind the Citizens United case and its embedded context within a hugely polarized political system in her 2016 book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
{I'll begin with a disclaimer on my summary and analysis of Mayer's book by saying that while both Republicans and Democrats have hugely wealthy donors at their disposal ready to influence election outcomes, the Republicans have used their wealth more to their advantage.}
The story of Citizens United goes back at least a half century. Mayer traces the historical development of a sophisticated network of organizations and institutions largely financed by ultraconservative and ultra-rich donors like the infamous Koch brothers that injected previously fringe libertarian ideas concerning the need for government whose only function would be to provide for the protection of property rights into mainstream discourse at the scholarly and everyday levels. This complex network was largely a mix of charitable foundations and 501(c)4 and 501(c)6 organizations (social welfare groups and business leagues, respectively) that allowed donors both anonymity and tax deductions in their contributions (often from foundations) to these ostensibly nonpartisan groups that pervaded national discussions with previously fringe ideologies.
The peddling of a comprehensive strategy of ultimately stripping government of its power to tax and regulate business (i.e. environmental protection measures like the Clean Air Act to minimize industrial sources of pollution) was disguised as a freedom crusade, given credibility by cloaking these self-serving ideals in a mantle of patriotism. While money is definitely a huge force in politics these days since the watershed Citizens United case, Mayer shows that ideology is more formidable in its ability to affect citizens' thinking (read: voting) on critical issues like business regulation in the long-term. The synergy behind money and ideas thus serves as an amplifier for ideology, allowing it to reach larger audiences, critical in any campaign to change public thinking and thus put into place representatives more likely to contribute toward favorable short and long-term legislative outcomes. For industrial giants like Koch Industries, this includes legislation that limits government's ability to mitigate the effects of everything from dangerous speculative practices in the financial sector to fighting industrial greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change.
Outside of the scary implications Citizens United has for the democratic process in the United States, Mayer's book is doubly scary in her showing that the rich could (and at least with the Republicans, did) supplant traditional political party structures with their own monetary and other political infrastructure (and making it look like their ideology and preferred legislative outcomes are backed by the public). The fact that these ultra-rich (or 1%) could create their own de facto political parties to drown out the voices of traditional parties (which largely are supposed to represent the interests of the little guy) should give people, no matter their party or ideological affiliation, pause.
While it would be interesting to see a similar investigation into like networks on the left as well as the right, Mayer's book is illuminating and thought provoking overall, forcing readers to ask tough questions about the current state of our democracy. Can it still be called a democracy? Or has the U.S. begun to slide towards a plutocracy (i.e. government by the rich and for the rich)? Mayer leaves these questions up to the reader to decide, but ultimately makes a convincing argument for the fact that all is not lost if citizens fight back and can rekindle a flagging sense of civic duty and participation in governmental affairs.
Works Cited:
Mayer, Jane. (2016). Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.
{I'll begin with a disclaimer on my summary and analysis of Mayer's book by saying that while both Republicans and Democrats have hugely wealthy donors at their disposal ready to influence election outcomes, the Republicans have used their wealth more to their advantage.}
The story of Citizens United goes back at least a half century. Mayer traces the historical development of a sophisticated network of organizations and institutions largely financed by ultraconservative and ultra-rich donors like the infamous Koch brothers that injected previously fringe libertarian ideas concerning the need for government whose only function would be to provide for the protection of property rights into mainstream discourse at the scholarly and everyday levels. This complex network was largely a mix of charitable foundations and 501(c)4 and 501(c)6 organizations (social welfare groups and business leagues, respectively) that allowed donors both anonymity and tax deductions in their contributions (often from foundations) to these ostensibly nonpartisan groups that pervaded national discussions with previously fringe ideologies.
The peddling of a comprehensive strategy of ultimately stripping government of its power to tax and regulate business (i.e. environmental protection measures like the Clean Air Act to minimize industrial sources of pollution) was disguised as a freedom crusade, given credibility by cloaking these self-serving ideals in a mantle of patriotism. While money is definitely a huge force in politics these days since the watershed Citizens United case, Mayer shows that ideology is more formidable in its ability to affect citizens' thinking (read: voting) on critical issues like business regulation in the long-term. The synergy behind money and ideas thus serves as an amplifier for ideology, allowing it to reach larger audiences, critical in any campaign to change public thinking and thus put into place representatives more likely to contribute toward favorable short and long-term legislative outcomes. For industrial giants like Koch Industries, this includes legislation that limits government's ability to mitigate the effects of everything from dangerous speculative practices in the financial sector to fighting industrial greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change.
Outside of the scary implications Citizens United has for the democratic process in the United States, Mayer's book is doubly scary in her showing that the rich could (and at least with the Republicans, did) supplant traditional political party structures with their own monetary and other political infrastructure (and making it look like their ideology and preferred legislative outcomes are backed by the public). The fact that these ultra-rich (or 1%) could create their own de facto political parties to drown out the voices of traditional parties (which largely are supposed to represent the interests of the little guy) should give people, no matter their party or ideological affiliation, pause.
While it would be interesting to see a similar investigation into like networks on the left as well as the right, Mayer's book is illuminating and thought provoking overall, forcing readers to ask tough questions about the current state of our democracy. Can it still be called a democracy? Or has the U.S. begun to slide towards a plutocracy (i.e. government by the rich and for the rich)? Mayer leaves these questions up to the reader to decide, but ultimately makes a convincing argument for the fact that all is not lost if citizens fight back and can rekindle a flagging sense of civic duty and participation in governmental affairs.
Works Cited:
Mayer, Jane. (2016). Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.
Thursday, August 24, 2017
Book Review: Graham Allison's "Destined for War"
While many books covering China these days are focused on the future of the international system, Graham Allison's Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? goes a step further in a lucid and down-to-earth examination of the issue in its utilization of the conceptual framework of Thucydides's Trap. This concept highlights the increasingly conflictual dynamics between a rising power (the Greek city-state of Athens being the earliest example) and an established (but possibly declining) power (with Sparta being the earliest example). Allison concisely explains these high-stress Thucydidean dynamics in which even "ordinary flashpoints of foreign affairs...can trigger large-scale conflict" between the two powers during a time when the balance of power seems to be in flux and the established power fears what the ascendance of the rising power means for their interests (p. 29).
After an introduction of one of the cornerstone concepts in international relations, Allison provides a detailed study of the first case of Thucydides's Trap in the devastating war between Athens and Sparta. It is not until later chapters that Allison addresses the more contemporary case of a potential Thucydides's Trap in the maneuverings of China (a rising power) and the United States (an established power). Raising the stakes in a potential conflict between China and the United States are the size of the populations involved in both countries (and in countries around the world who are allies or foes to these powers), the size of their respective economies, the speed of China's economic rise, the scale of worldwide trade (especially the traffic in shipping lanes in the disputed South China Sea) and the fact that militarized conflicts these days involve cyber-warfare and nuclear weapons (as an incredibly destructive last resort).
Allison illustrates these higher stakes in a series of (frighteningly realistic) potential small spats that manage to escalate to hot war when the cost for both sides engaging in diplomacy or otherwise backing out increases concurrently with the need to de-escalate even as the time to de-escalate decreases as each side makes its move. Some of the more worryingly realistic examples Allison highlights relates to a collapse of the regime of Chinese ally North Korea, a Taiwanese move for independence from the mainland, and a trade spat (i.e. the labeling of China as currency-manipulators, economic sanctions, cyber-warfare, etc.) in the light of a bombastic Trump administration. While not naming the hypothetical presidential administration that an escalating trade war between China and the U.S., Allison probably is alluding to Trump's campaign rhetoric of promising to label China a currency manipulator and demanding a reduction in the trade deficit in his larger fight against the international economic establishment.
While these hypothetical scenarios of how China and the U.S. might enter into a potentially world-ending conflict seem frighteningly mundane at the outset, Allison reassures readers that there are ways to avoid the Thucydides's Trap that makes war more likely between two countries. Among some of the more salient proscriptions are accommodation and a renegotiation of the relationship between the two powers. While accommodation is a bitter, nasty word in today's politics (implying total submission to another's desires), this option proves much more realistic because it entails not submission to each other's national interests in totality, but the reaching of a compromise that preserves both powers' interests. Details within such a potential compromise include recognizing the other's respective spheres of influence (i.e. the Western hemisphere versus the contentious South China Sea region) and even arms reductions talks similar to those negotiated between the former Soviet Union and the U.S. Further cementing this relationship, in Allison's eyes, should be the four "mega-threats" of "nuclear Armageddon, nuclear anarchy, global terrorism...and climate change" (p. 228) that are the most likely to prove the most severe threat to each country's very existence (let alone interests).
While 4 out 16 cases of the Thucydides Trap in the last 500 years not ending in a war don't seem like terribly good odds (especially because of domestic pressures adding fuel to the fire), Allison's core message of the book is that war is not unavoidable. If both sides can negotiate pacts that give advantages to both parties while reducing the size of the other's nuclear arsenals (potential domestic political costs for both leaders be damned) and recognizing the greater threats to humanity out there, I believe that we have a chance. However, it does not look good when the publics and leaders of both sides are ratcheting up their rhetoric.
Works Cited:
Allison, Graham T. (2017). Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (1st ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: New York.
After an introduction of one of the cornerstone concepts in international relations, Allison provides a detailed study of the first case of Thucydides's Trap in the devastating war between Athens and Sparta. It is not until later chapters that Allison addresses the more contemporary case of a potential Thucydides's Trap in the maneuverings of China (a rising power) and the United States (an established power). Raising the stakes in a potential conflict between China and the United States are the size of the populations involved in both countries (and in countries around the world who are allies or foes to these powers), the size of their respective economies, the speed of China's economic rise, the scale of worldwide trade (especially the traffic in shipping lanes in the disputed South China Sea) and the fact that militarized conflicts these days involve cyber-warfare and nuclear weapons (as an incredibly destructive last resort).
Allison illustrates these higher stakes in a series of (frighteningly realistic) potential small spats that manage to escalate to hot war when the cost for both sides engaging in diplomacy or otherwise backing out increases concurrently with the need to de-escalate even as the time to de-escalate decreases as each side makes its move. Some of the more worryingly realistic examples Allison highlights relates to a collapse of the regime of Chinese ally North Korea, a Taiwanese move for independence from the mainland, and a trade spat (i.e. the labeling of China as currency-manipulators, economic sanctions, cyber-warfare, etc.) in the light of a bombastic Trump administration. While not naming the hypothetical presidential administration that an escalating trade war between China and the U.S., Allison probably is alluding to Trump's campaign rhetoric of promising to label China a currency manipulator and demanding a reduction in the trade deficit in his larger fight against the international economic establishment.
While these hypothetical scenarios of how China and the U.S. might enter into a potentially world-ending conflict seem frighteningly mundane at the outset, Allison reassures readers that there are ways to avoid the Thucydides's Trap that makes war more likely between two countries. Among some of the more salient proscriptions are accommodation and a renegotiation of the relationship between the two powers. While accommodation is a bitter, nasty word in today's politics (implying total submission to another's desires), this option proves much more realistic because it entails not submission to each other's national interests in totality, but the reaching of a compromise that preserves both powers' interests. Details within such a potential compromise include recognizing the other's respective spheres of influence (i.e. the Western hemisphere versus the contentious South China Sea region) and even arms reductions talks similar to those negotiated between the former Soviet Union and the U.S. Further cementing this relationship, in Allison's eyes, should be the four "mega-threats" of "nuclear Armageddon, nuclear anarchy, global terrorism...and climate change" (p. 228) that are the most likely to prove the most severe threat to each country's very existence (let alone interests).
While 4 out 16 cases of the Thucydides Trap in the last 500 years not ending in a war don't seem like terribly good odds (especially because of domestic pressures adding fuel to the fire), Allison's core message of the book is that war is not unavoidable. If both sides can negotiate pacts that give advantages to both parties while reducing the size of the other's nuclear arsenals (potential domestic political costs for both leaders be damned) and recognizing the greater threats to humanity out there, I believe that we have a chance. However, it does not look good when the publics and leaders of both sides are ratcheting up their rhetoric.
Works Cited:
Allison, Graham T. (2017). Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (1st ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: New York.
Thursday, August 17, 2017
Book Review: David Priess's "The President's Book of Secrets"
Ever been curious about how presidents get their daily dose of intelligence and how that might then influence their decisions in the international arena? David Priess, in his book The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents takes a look at the evolution of what today is known as the President's Daily Briefings (PDB) in the backdrop of various presidential administrations, from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama.
While not revealing the details of classified intelligence in his analysis, Priess traces the development of a distilled collection of classified intelligence from various agencies (the CIA, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Director of National Intelligence (DNI), etc.) to the administration of Lyndon Johnson in 1964. This organization and distillation of intelligence targeted exclusively to the president and other close advisers came in order to try and overcome a complicated workflow between intelligence agencies and a backlog of lengthy intelligence reports that were not getting through to the policymakers that needed them. Back in 1964 (during the Cold War) the first attempt at conveying critical information to the president was known as the Daily Summary, a step taken in order to meet increasing demand for information concerning the Soviet Union's military and economic capabilities.
However, this Daily Summary was not very comprehensive and largely focused on the Soviet Union. Sporadic attention was given to other countries in the Eurasian region, let alone other countries outside of that region. Gradually, as the United States began to realize its position as a world power, with increasing social, political and economic clout, so too did the demand for more and diverse content come into play from administration to administration. This included a need for more regional and country-based intelligence as well as (in some cases) analysis included with the presented facts to provide a much needed context within what evolved into the PDB. Concurrent with more analysis, certain issues began to take increasing prominence within the PDB, especially intelligence relating to terrorism. Examples of the need for this can be seen in the increased attention the Middle East and Asia have been given in American foreign policy, as well as the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, domestic sources of intelligence (mostly from the FBI) began to be included within the PDB's mix of extensive foreign sources to help bolster counter-terrorism efforts against groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Moreover, as technology improved, the hardcover/bound PDB has been presented in more digital forms. For example, President Obama received his PDBs on a specially secured iPad. Priess goes on to speculate that the PDB will evolve fully from paper to digital forms once technological advances such as quantum computing are realized, with future presidents receiving their PDBs as futuristic holograms providing 3D graphics. But, as always, technology has its limits when it comes to the PDB. How a president chooses to receive their daily information about relevant domestic and foreign affairs will always be the predominant factor shaping the scope and method of PDB presentation, from more hands-on formats to more in-depth reports with less graphical aids.
While Priess was not allowed to reveal the specifics of the classified intelligence that shaped each administration's Lyndon Johnson to President Obama or provide a robust critique concerning intelligence gathering practices for the PDB, his book nevertheless provides an intriguing narrative about each president's (and their administration's) personalities and interactions with the PDB (and larger intelligence community). It makes one wonder about the current president's interaction with the PDB and its relationship with the resulting domestic and foreign policy decisions considering the noted animosity and indifference the Trump administration has shown the intelligence community. If this uneasiness persists between presidents and the intelligence community, it would portend a concerning dynamic of administrations making critical policy and other decisions without adequate information. And that's just at the domestic level, excluding the intelligence relationships the U.S. has with its allies.
Sources Cited:
Priess, D. (2017). The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents from Kennedy to Obama. (1st ed.). New York: PublicAffairs.
While not revealing the details of classified intelligence in his analysis, Priess traces the development of a distilled collection of classified intelligence from various agencies (the CIA, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Director of National Intelligence (DNI), etc.) to the administration of Lyndon Johnson in 1964. This organization and distillation of intelligence targeted exclusively to the president and other close advisers came in order to try and overcome a complicated workflow between intelligence agencies and a backlog of lengthy intelligence reports that were not getting through to the policymakers that needed them. Back in 1964 (during the Cold War) the first attempt at conveying critical information to the president was known as the Daily Summary, a step taken in order to meet increasing demand for information concerning the Soviet Union's military and economic capabilities.
However, this Daily Summary was not very comprehensive and largely focused on the Soviet Union. Sporadic attention was given to other countries in the Eurasian region, let alone other countries outside of that region. Gradually, as the United States began to realize its position as a world power, with increasing social, political and economic clout, so too did the demand for more and diverse content come into play from administration to administration. This included a need for more regional and country-based intelligence as well as (in some cases) analysis included with the presented facts to provide a much needed context within what evolved into the PDB. Concurrent with more analysis, certain issues began to take increasing prominence within the PDB, especially intelligence relating to terrorism. Examples of the need for this can be seen in the increased attention the Middle East and Asia have been given in American foreign policy, as well as the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, domestic sources of intelligence (mostly from the FBI) began to be included within the PDB's mix of extensive foreign sources to help bolster counter-terrorism efforts against groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Moreover, as technology improved, the hardcover/bound PDB has been presented in more digital forms. For example, President Obama received his PDBs on a specially secured iPad. Priess goes on to speculate that the PDB will evolve fully from paper to digital forms once technological advances such as quantum computing are realized, with future presidents receiving their PDBs as futuristic holograms providing 3D graphics. But, as always, technology has its limits when it comes to the PDB. How a president chooses to receive their daily information about relevant domestic and foreign affairs will always be the predominant factor shaping the scope and method of PDB presentation, from more hands-on formats to more in-depth reports with less graphical aids.
While Priess was not allowed to reveal the specifics of the classified intelligence that shaped each administration's Lyndon Johnson to President Obama or provide a robust critique concerning intelligence gathering practices for the PDB, his book nevertheless provides an intriguing narrative about each president's (and their administration's) personalities and interactions with the PDB (and larger intelligence community). It makes one wonder about the current president's interaction with the PDB and its relationship with the resulting domestic and foreign policy decisions considering the noted animosity and indifference the Trump administration has shown the intelligence community. If this uneasiness persists between presidents and the intelligence community, it would portend a concerning dynamic of administrations making critical policy and other decisions without adequate information. And that's just at the domestic level, excluding the intelligence relationships the U.S. has with its allies.
Sources Cited:
Priess, D. (2017). The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents from Kennedy to Obama. (1st ed.). New York: PublicAffairs.
Sunday, August 13, 2017
On First Ladies and Their International Roles
Often, when one thinks of the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS), the images that most commonly come to mind are those of her as hostess when a foreign leader or representative comes to the White House. Or hosting their counterparts in luncheons while their husbands may be in meetings discussing at length foreign affairs. If abroad, often we see her on the arm of her husband on trips abroad (as we have seen recently with Melania Trump). To some degree then, FLOTUS has become a very visible international figure. However, domestic rather than international affairs are often associated with FLOTUS, for various reasons I briefly introduce below.
Arguably, while modern first ladies have achieved considerable agency in their informal position as partner of the president, all first ladies have struggled within the constraints of gender stereotyping, traditional gender roles, and (to some extent) the Constitution itself (which is silent on the official role a presidential spouse may play). This produces a dynamic in which the First Lady can be notably restrained when trying to have formal policy influence while still seen as a feminist icon. Extrapolated to the domain of international affairs, this complicated dynamic becomes more readily visible. For example, how does one define international influence? Is it formal or informal, through advocation of policy or taking on social causes?
In the video below, I briefly explore the history of FLOTUS as an international figure and then go on to focus on three first ladies with varying degrees of influence on international affairs or foreign policy: Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama.
Arguably, while modern first ladies have achieved considerable agency in their informal position as partner of the president, all first ladies have struggled within the constraints of gender stereotyping, traditional gender roles, and (to some extent) the Constitution itself (which is silent on the official role a presidential spouse may play). This produces a dynamic in which the First Lady can be notably restrained when trying to have formal policy influence while still seen as a feminist icon. Extrapolated to the domain of international affairs, this complicated dynamic becomes more readily visible. For example, how does one define international influence? Is it formal or informal, through advocation of policy or taking on social causes?
In the video below, I briefly explore the history of FLOTUS as an international figure and then go on to focus on three first ladies with varying degrees of influence on international affairs or foreign policy: Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama.
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