Research

Disputing Women's Rights:  Religious Actors, Women's Rights Activists and the State in Africa--My dissertation project examines what happens when both women's rights activists and religious actors conflict over the same policy.  More on this to come!

The Global Impact of Quotas on Women's Representation--In this study, Professor Aili Tripp and I examine the impact of gender quotas on women's representation in unicameral or lower house legislatures around the world.  Previous cross-national research that incorporates quotas as an explanatory variable use data from the early 1990s, which is before the widespread introduction of quotas.  Our study, in contrast, uses data on representation and quotas as of 2006.  Our findings will be published in 2008 in Comparative Political Studies. Click here for the paper 

Our data will be posted shortly on this page.

Regional Advocacy Networks and the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa--In this study, Professor Melinda Adams and I identify the importance of regional advocacy networks (RANs) and identify the conditions under which they are influential.  Our claims are explored through a case study of an African RAN that helped create what is arguably the most progressive international treaty on women’s rights, the African Union’s (AU) Protocol to the Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. Our analysis is empirically relevant because intra-regional coalitions of women’s rights activists are trying a new strategy of regionalizing global norms in Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Theoretically, our emphasis on regional networks refines international relations research on transnational actors and the uptake of international norms.  Scholars seeking to understand the creation of women’s rights commitments, the diffusion of women’s rights norms, and compliance with women’s rights treaties need to look beyond the international and domestic levels of action and include the regional level in their analyses.  Forthcoming in Politics & Gender.