Defending the Status Quo

Defending the Status Quo explores political elites' resistance to electoral gender quota reforms. In order to explain this phenomenon, Cecilia Josefsson develops an original theoretical framework that she calls the Resistance Stage Framework.

Anchored in feminist institutionalism and mapped onto the policy process, Josefsson outlines how status quo defenders adapt their resistance strategies to accommodate institutional and ideational changes across agenda setting, policy formulation, decision-making, and implementation phases. She bolsters her theory with a thick description of a 30-year-long process to adopt and implement electoral gender quotas in Uruguay. While Uruguay has been a vanguard in the women's rights movement, men's political dominance has been pervasive in this country. The struggle to introduce a gender quota has been marked by repeated reform attempts, persistent resistance, and a wide variation in the responses of the Uruguayan political parties, making this case apt for developing theory and shedding light on the adaptive nature of resistance.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Uruguayan political elites, three quota debates, and party electoral lists, Josefsson carefully examines the power struggle over gender quota reform. She shows how powerful status quo defenders, seeking to ignore, stall, and undermine gendered institutional change, adapt their resistance strategies across different political parties and over time, as quota advocates make advances and manage to change the institutional and ideational context.