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W ith the recent wave of democratization across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, scholars have begun to explore how democratic changes affect women. Like other analyses of gender and the state (Brush 2003;Eisenstein 1988;MacKinnon 1989;Orloff 1996;Pateman 1988), these studies examine how states create and govern gender relations among their citizens through institutions, laws, and legal discourses (Jaquette and Wolchick 1998;Stephen 1997;Waylen 1994Waylen , 2000. Importantly, they extend previous gendered state literature by asking what happens to the political institutionalization of gender when a state is transformed by democratic transition.There are strong theoretical reasons to anticipate that democratic transitions will create more gender equitable states. First, democratic transitions provide women (and men) with new opportunities for political participation. Second, new participatory opportunities typically coincide with the negotiation and implementation of new state institutions and policies.There is a rich collection of case studies examining the relationship between democratization, women's movements, and gendered state outcomes, but the variation across cases is still poorly understood. In response, this article develops a theoreticallygrounded comparative framework to evaluate and explain cross-national variations in the gendered outcomes of democratic transitions. The framework highlights four theoretical factors-the context of the transition, the legacy of women's previous mobilizations, political parties, and international influences-that together shape the political openings and ideologies available to women's movements in transitional states. Applying the framework to four test cases, we conclude that women's movements are most effective at targeting democratizing states when transitions are complete, when women's movements develop cohesive coalitions, when the ideology behind the transition (rather than the ideology of the winning regime) aligns easily with feminist frames, and when women's past activism legitimates present-day feminist demands. These findings challenge current conceptualizations of how democratic transitions affect gender in state institutions and provide a comparative framework for evaluating variation across additional cases.

At the close of World War II, “development” began to evolve along two paths. On the first path, scholars aimed to generate theoretical understandings of social change, especially at the national level (development studies). On the second path, policy makers in governments and other development-focused organizations initiated actions to promote positive social change, especially in poor or war-torn nations (development practice). In this article, we review the recent trajectory of “development” in sociology, paying close attention to the intersections between development studies and development practice. Through explicit comparisons to economics and political science, we demonstrate how the prominence of development sociology has varied historically in relation to its proposed policy prescriptions. We conclude by highlighting five uniquely sociological contributions that could powerfully improve contemporary interdisciplinary development conversations, and by calling for greater sociological attention to the complex ways in which a growing transnational field of development practitioners is shaping a multiplicity of development outcomes.

Increasing levels of democratic freedoms should, in theory, improve women's access to political positions. Yet studies demonstrate that democracy does little to improve women's legislative representation. To resolve this paradox, we investigate how variations in the democratization process-including pre-transition legacies, historical experiences with elections, the global context of transition, and post-transition democratic freedoms and quotas-affect women's representation in developing nations. We find that democratization's effect is curvilinear. Women in non-democratic regimes often have high levels of legislative representation but little real political power. When democratization occurs, women's representation initially drops, but with increasing democratic freedoms and additional elections, it increases again. The historical context of transition further moderates these effects. Prior to 1995, women's representation increased most rapidly in countries transitioning from civil strife-but only when accompanied by gender quotas. After 1995 and the Beijing Conference on Women, the effectiveness of quotas becomes more universal, with the exception of postcommunist countries. In these nations, quotas continue to do little to improve women's representation. Our results, based on pooled time series analysis from 1975 to 2009, demonstrate that it is not democracy-as measured by a nation's level of democratic freedoms at a particular moment in time-but rather the democratization process that matters for women's legislative representation.