The impact of the territorial distribution of power on equality policies in Spain

Abstract

The combination of studies on federalism and gender studies has fueled a burgeoning research that examines the impact of the territorial distribution of power on equality policies and on the strategies of the women’s movement. This article explores how the main territorial dynamics of the State of Autonomies have affected three key areas of public action on gender equality, namely gender mainstreaming, electoral quotas and policies against gender violence. The results of the empirical analysis align with the so-called “conditional approach” recently adopted by the literature that avoids oversimplifying the multilevel structure as either positive or negative for equality policies and identifies instead the specific characteristics of the institutional configuration that promote or limit them. In the Spanish case, inter-regional competitive dynamics have stimulated policy diffusion through learning processes and women’s agency has often taken advantage of the multilevel opportunity structure. Nonetheless, a high degree of decentralization coupled with weak intergovernmental cooperation mechanisms has led to fragmentation and diversity in policy making in some areas.