Women's movements and state feminism

The main purposes of this study of the politics of political representation decisions are, first, to determine and explain variations in the success of women's movements in opening democratic processes to women's participation and concerns, and, second, to explore whether the state, as a result of effective WPA activities, has intervened to achieve such success. Let us now return to our original questions, the questions that framed this comparative study. Do women's policy agencies matter? And if so, why? Have WPAs made democracies more representative and democratic? Have WPAs advanced the demands of the women's movements in a way that has indeed improved representation in both descriptive and substantive terms?

In this chapter we combine the evidence from the eleven countries to answer our core research questions. We make a comparative analysis of the results of the country studies that have been presented in a more detailed and discursive manner in the individual chapters by applying the model presented in chapter 1. There are costs and benefits to this approach. Inevitably and regrettably our comparative analysis loses much of the wealth of detail and insight provided by the authors of the country chapters. But with comparison we gain the ability to detect trends in the capacity of women's policy agencies to help women's movements and women in general to participate in and influence decisions about policy on political representation.

Introduction

The Belgian understanding of representation is intimately related to the conception of citizenship, which itself is connected to the specific history of the Belgian state. In 1830 Belgium became a unitary constitutional monarchy, but Belgian society has never been homogeneous. Its political and institutional landscape is characterised by a segmented pluralism, reflecting basic social cleavages. Religious and economic divisions played a predominant role until the 1960s when the cleavage between the Flemish and the Francophone language groups gained priority. Although both the economic and religious cleavages led to descriptive representation, it was above all the increasingly salient linguistic cleavage that led to a redefinition of the institutions of political representation. The federalisation of the Belgian political system, a process that started in the 1960s, led to an institutionalisation of the prevailing interpretation of citizenship (on the Belgian political system see Deschouwer 2002, 2004).

Belgian citizenship is believed to be embedded in its social groups. Like the Netherlands, Belgium is a consociational society that integrates social groups into processes of decision-making. Such recognition supports provision for descriptive representation according to which the membership of public bodies and elected assemblies should mirror the society by containing the salient groups, although not necessarily in proportional terms. Whereas segmentation of political and civil society is decreasing, the balanced representation of key social groups continues to be seen as an essential legitimising feature of the political system (Paye 1997).