Fiona Mackay

• University of Edinburgh

Available at: https://www.gender.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/5_Gender-and-Global-Health_FINAL.pdf ____This briefing provides a simplified and abridged summary of over four decades of learning that has taken place within social science approaches to health as well as the development sector, about the relevance of gender in global health. I...

While still rare, women are achieving important leadership roles as managers inside universities. This article explores the practical and theoretical dilemmas posed for academic feminists who enter such positions in the age of the rise of the ‘neoliberal academy’. These are familiar dilemmas for feminist bureaucrats – femocrats – working inside pol...

This article advances the concept of ‘feminist critical friends’ as a descriptor for those studying the efforts of ‘insider’ gender justice advocates working to transform governance structures and advance gender reform agendas within political, social, economic and military institutions. In refining the concept of feminist critical friendship, we r...

Taking women and gender seriously fundamentally transforms how we understand and approach the study of politics. Feminist approaches are both corrective – in that they have sought to rectify the gendered ‘blinkersand biases’ of mainstream political science – and transformative – in that they aim not only to expose gender power inequalities, but als...

Challenging and transforming political institutions has long been recognized as central to feminist projects of change. Existing institutions can be reformed and/or new institutions created. Over several decades, feminist political scientists, activists, and equality-seeking states have addressed questions of how the existing institutions of govern...

Opportunities for innovation are created by broad restructuring processes and by the chance to be in at the start of new or substantially revised political institutions. These intuitions have animated the efforts of women's movement activists and their allies in processes of political transition and constitutional or institutional engineering (and...

Devolution in the UK in the 1990s resulted in newly gendered political opportunity structures for feminists seeking to influence the political agenda and pursue women-friendly' policy outcomes. There is, however, little work that compares jurisdictions across the UK. This paper provides a preliminary comparison of the politics of a classic feminist...

Research on the ‘contagion effect’ suggests that the dynamics of party competition explain the adoption of party gender quotas. However, there is little systematic evidence as to the conditions under which contagion occurs. Based upon analysis of trends in women's political representation in Scotland 1992–2011, we ask how intra-party factors and mu...

This article seeks to identify, map and understand the ways in which the everyday beliefs and practices of British central government departments embed social constructions of masculinity and femininity. It draws on observational fieldwork and repeat interviews conducted between 2002 and 2004 to analyse the everyday practices of departmental courts...

This article analyzes the impact of restructuring processes on the organizational structure and lobbying strategies of women’s movement organizations (WMOs) in Belgium (Flanders) and the UK (Scotland). We argue that devolution/federalization and the resultant creation of new, intermediary levels of governance offers a devolution/federalism advantag...

Modest levels of female representation at the House of Commons are in sharp contrast to the Nordic‐levels of representation achieved in the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales since devolution in 1999. One apparent advantage of devolution is the opportunity that it provides for lesson‐learning across jurisdictions. This article...

This concluding chapter takes up points in the introductory one about the popular component of constitutional democracy since wider participation had a high profile in devolution politics in the UK – most fully developed in arguments in Scotland for reform. But effective and meaningful participation can be far from easy to achieve. This chapter out...

Whilst devolution heralded a 'new dawn' in women's representation - with Nordic levels of women MSPs elected to the first Scottish Parliament (Brown 1999) - the story has remained very different at local government level. The percentage of women councillors has flat-lined, hovering at around 22 per cent overall, since the creation of unitary author...

The starting point of this essay is that the emerging literature on gender politics and state architecture needs to take seriously the insights from devolving multilevel states, as well as from formal federations and classic unitary states. The formal components of state architecture, and the dynamics of scale, are important-but hitherto neglected-...

Political institutions profoundly shape political life and are also gendered. This groundbreaking collection synthesises new institutionalism and gendered analysis using a new approach -- feminist institutionalism -- in order to answer crucial questions about power inequalities, mechanisms of continuity, and the gendered limits of change.

Institutions – the formal and informal ‘rules of the game’ – profoundly shape political life. Political institutions are also inescapably gendered. In this groundbreaking collection we have set out what feminist institutionalism (FI) – a new approach that centres on these twin insights – might mean in conceptual terms and in practice. The goal has...

Gender, Politics, and Institutions – and the international network of scholars involved in this collaborative enterprise1 – is animated by the desire to find new tools and analytical frameworks to help us to answer some of the big questions and real-world puzzles about gendered power inequalities in public and political life. For example, how are f...

New institutionalism (NI) may no longer qualify as being ‘new’, but since re-emphasizing institutions as a central explanatory variable in political analysis over two decades ago, it continues to provide scholars with a useful perspective through which to analyse political dynamics and outcomes that shape everyday life. The renewed focus on institu...

The new Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales elected in May 1999 were notable for the high levels of women's representation amongst their membership. This article examines the decisions taken by the main political parties about candidate selection and specifically the promotion of women candidates, exploring some of the inter and int...

Scotland bears many hallmarks of a case of successful feminist constitutional activism: high levels of women's descriptive representation in the devolved parliament and a gender-inclusive institutional design mutually reinforced one another, opening up the political process. In this article domestic violence policy is examined in order to address t...

This chapter presents a preliminary account of women in the Scottish National Party (SNP) — an under-researched group in an under-researched party. It concentrates on candidate trends and electoral trends post-1999 as a foundation for future research. It also reports the Scottish Parliament elections 1999–2007, focusing on trends of candidate selec...

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has played a significant role in the politics of Scotland in the last forty years. In particular, it has contributed to and shaped the impact and dynamics of devolution. This collection brings together academics, writers, commentators and analysts of Scottish politics to address the nature of the SNP: its position...

Fiona Mackay is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She researches and writes on women's political representation, and gender and constitutional change in the United Kingdom. She founded and co-directs the new Feminism and Institutionalism International Network (www.femfiin.com). Publications include Love and Polit...

On the face of it, there is considerable potential for productive dialogue between sociological institutionalism (SI) and institutionally oriented feminist political science (FPS). Both approaches employ broad conceptions of the political and its interconnection with the social: Each is concerned with the interaction between actors and institutions...

Understanding and analysing the complexity and contingency of what is 'going on' with the substantive representation of women (SRW) requires a 'thick' contextual framework comprising a whole-system approach rather than a narrow focus on whether or not female political representatives 'act for' women. A new schema is presented which enables us to lo...

Devolution offers the potential for women’s organisations to participate more widely in policy making processes and thus exercise influence: but what impact have they had so far? This project seeks to examine the access, voice and influence of women’s organisations in post-devolution Scotland. It focuses upon the main generic feminist organisation...

The 2003 elections to the devolved institutions in Wales and Scotland confirmed the female face of post-devolution politics. This world first thrust the National Assembly for Wales into the international limelight. Meanwhile, in Scotland, there was more modest progress. This article examines the second devolved elections from the perspective of wom...

This chapter analyzes the changing role and status of women in the Scottish Labour Party. It asks how the Labour Party, once characterized as stereotypically masculine, got to this point, and what the prospects are for the future. After giving some historical context, the chapter summarizes some of the key developments since 1979. It distinguishes...

Scottish Labour has been the dominant political party in Scotland for over 40 years. This book considers the contemporary party, analysing it in the context of Scottish politics, Scotland, and the UK, as well as drawing international comparisons. A range of areas are covered: the chronology of events over the life of the party; the party's internal...

Constitutional change has transformed the political voice and role of women in Scotland. One of the most striking features of the post-1997 restructuring of the British state has been the creation of a devolved Scottish parliament with initially 37 and now 39.5 per cent female elected members — one of the highest proportions in the world.1 Furtherm...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Edinburgh, 1996.

Abstract Local policy responses to the ‘problem’ of prostitution in Glasgow and Edinburgh are strikingly different. Whereas Glasgow tends to take an abolitionist approach to prostitution, Edinburgh favours regulation. In this paper, we present some preliminary findings from our initial mapping exercise in these two Scottish cities. To account for a...

Constitutional change and state restructuring in the UK in the 1990s offered opportunities and constraints for feminist activists in the struggle to convert women's formal citizenship into the equal exercise of political and social citizenship rights. In Scotland, many women mobilised around feminist and gender identities - sometimes across other s...