The Role of Ideas in the Construction of Gendered Policy Regimes: the relationship between the national

This paper deals with one of the perennial problems of feminist writing on gender and the state – how do we explain both the continuity of women’s subordinate political position in Western democracies and also the process of ‘gender regime change ’ that has undoubtedly occurred in those democracies? Intuitively it also appears that not only do we have to explain the ‘why ’ and ‘how ’ of change in individual states but we also have to explain why when change occurs it seems to be such an international affair. States do not appear to experience a significant renegotiation of their gender regime in isolation, instead change occurs as part of international experience of a common critique of existing gender paradigms and a reassessment of gendered public policy outcomes. Political science writing in general has also had to confront the problem of how policy regimes change when institutional theory would predict continuity. As a result in recent years there has been a renewed interest in the role of ideas in the negotiation and maintenance of policy paradigms as a means of explaining why political institutions tend to produce continuity and also why the process of change, when it occurs, takes the form it does.1 For these reasons an ideational and historic institutional framework provides a useful starting point to explore the nature of ‘gender regime ’ change