POL 344/ INS 344/ GSS 344 Gender and Politics

PRIMARY SOURCES

Is / was a LEFT Party in power in the LEGISLATIVE BRANCH? The International Parliamentary Union's Parline Database can tell you. Go here: http://ipu.org/parline-e/parlinesearch.asp and select the country of interest (if it is a parliamentary system you will want to choose the lower house of parliament; if presidential you'll want to check both houses if there are more than 1). Then if your policy was recently passed, go to the "General Information" or "Last Election" tabs to learn more. If your policy was passed a while ago, click on "Election Archive" and then select the right time period. In many instances this source will also tell you the PERCENT WOMEN in the parliament.

If you want to know about a LEFT PARTY in the EXECUTIVE BRANCH of a contemporary case, see the CIA's World Leadership Database:https://www.cia.gov/resources/world-leaders/. For historical cases see the IPUâs Election Archive to determine who won a given election.

If you want to see how your country stacks up internationally in terms of the % WOMEN IN THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH go to the IPU's Women in Parliaments Database (http://ipu.org/wmn-e/world.htm). From there you can either select the % women in each parliament link if your topic is contemporary. If your topic is historical click on the "Archive of Statistical Data" link and get the appropriate month/year.

If you want to know about the LEVEL OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT in a country between 1980 and the present (i.e., whether it is agrarian "low human development," industrial, or post-industrial "very high human development") you can use the UN's Human Development Index: https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI.  You can also learn more about the country's contemporary economy from the CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/)

The UN also keeps GENDER RELATED DEVELOPMENT INDICES: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/table-4-gender-development-index including measures of how much schooling girls get: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/expected-years-schooling-females-years

To measure GENDER OPPORUNITY STRUCTURES you can use the UN's GENDER INEQUALITY INDEX: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/table-5-gender-inequality-index-gii

To measure THE LEVEL OF ECONOMIC INEQUALITY in a country: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/income-gini-coefficient

The World Bank keeps other economic statistics: http://datatopics.worldbank.org/gender/

To get public opinion data about people's BELIEFS AND VALUES about gender and other issues you can use the World Values Survey data like Inglehart and Norris did: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSOnline.jsp

To get data on the major religion in your country go to https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/religions/. 

”If you want to find out HOW DEMOCRATIC your country is, see the Freedom House website: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2019
 
If you want to locate PAST VERSIONS OF WEBSITES see the Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/web/ (Enter the group’s website into the address bar and it will show you snapshots of its website over time)
 
Database of GENDER QUOTAS in parliaments worldwide: https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/gender-quotas
 
POLITICAL PARTY PLATFORMS from many major countries are available here: https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/  (To access the data create a free account, click on “Data” and “Explore” and then you can search by country, year, and party family to find the name of parties belonging to various party families and their most recent party platforms.)

Is there a STRONG, AUTONOMOUS FEMINIST MOVEMENT in the country? Mala Htun and Laurel Weldon have researched this issue and given scores to different countries in different years here: https://malahtun.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/htun-weldon-apsr-2012-supp-materials.pdf