Introduction: Informal Politics and the Gender Equality Paradox

Abstract

Johnson synthesizes the current state of feminist political science as pointing to a worldwide gender equality paradox, a bait and switch in which gender equality is promised but not realized. Drawing together feminist institutionalism and the study of post-Soviet regime dynamics, the chapter argues that, just as women have broken into formal politics, power has been informalized. In other words, power has shifted to informal institutions, enforced through unwritten rules by male-dominated informal elite networks. This chapter lays out a blueprint for collecting data on and analyzing such gendered informal politics and then applies it to a most different systems comparison of Russia and Iceland from the 1990s through 2016.