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Public Opinion and Women’s Rights in Autocracies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2023

Yuree Noh Open the ORCID record for Yuree Noh [Opens in a new window]
Yuree Noh*
Affiliation:
Rhode Island College, USA
*
Email: yureenoh@gmail.com
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Extract

Authoritarian regimes around the world have increasingly implemented policies and reforms to strengthen women’s rights, ranging from adopting gender quotas to penalizing gender-based violence. Recent literature highlights that authoritarian leaders are at the forefront of these initiatives, often aiming to strengthen their rule rather than advance women’s rights (e.g., Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2016; Bush and Zetterberg 2021; Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2021). While we cannot ignore the contributions of grassroots activism in advancing gender equality (e.g., Kang and Tripp 2018; Krook 2009), authoritarian regimes, by nature, have less incentive to pay attention to popular demands. Thus, women’s rights reforms in autocracies tend to be top-down: initiated by the leadership, with a lack of citizen involvement in the design process. This essay considers how top-down gender reforms may be viewed by the public, and as a consequence, how the public’s perceptions of them may affect women’s status in the broader society.

Type
Critical Perspectives Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2024 , pp. 241 - 245
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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