Scholars recognize a worldwide increase in decentralization as well as the prevalence of multilevel governance in Europe. This article examines the advantages and disadvantages that meso-level institutions present for women's political representation in three European Union member-states that are decentralized, unitary states. Using the framework of the triangle of women's empowerment, we ask whether women are represented in meso-level legislatures, women's policy agencies, and women's movements in Italy, Spain, and Poland. We find that gains in meso-level legislatures are slow, but meso-level women's policy agencies and movements provide important access for women to politics. Like scholars studying women and federalism, we conclude that decentralized institutions in unitary states offer both opportunities for and impediments to feminist policy and activism.

Political scientists who have conducted research abroad experience excitement as well as great disappointment. Meeting and utilizing the help of knowledgeable, responsive interviewees can be exhilarating; yet a cancelled interview, illness, and lack of funds dampens the social scientific enterprise. In this symposium, we discuss the nuts and bolts of field research and we explore the constraints and opportunities that arise from the interaction of researchers' personal identities (gender, race, class, religion, nationality, and age) and their research context. We contend that most training received before fieldwork focuses little, if at all, on the personal consequences of leaving one's home for a year, trying to integrate into another culture, and facing (mis)perceptions based on one's identity. As the quotations above indicate, the symposium hopes to demonstrate how a researcher can be gutsy in the uncharted waters of fieldwork, especially with interactions pertaining to one's identities. Although we acknowledge that no preparation will entirely eradicate disappointing days in the field and misperceptions of identity, we encourage new field researchers and graduate students to be aware that the process of accessing data abroad is an intensely personal one. The symposium contributors are comparativists, mainly at the career stages of assistant professor and recently tenured professor, who have researched in Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Ethiopia, France, India, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

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The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is "the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women." The continued success of the CSW's mission is critical. Under the guise of needing competent male leaders to protect them, women and girls in many countries nonetheless suffer dire consequences from international conflict and war. While females may send mostly male loved ones into armed conflict, women and girls themselves face economic sanctions, poverty, displacement, and heightened risk of sexual violence, in an environment that already fails to respect their equal human rights with men. It is no accident that in most countries, females are de facto excluded from positions of power where they could try to prevent such conflict (Enloe, 2014), and the CSW is actively working to overcome this reality. In this article, we use a mixed-method approach to evaluate the level of United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) representation and responsiveness to diverse women populations as reflected in (a) state delegations' participation in formal session, (b) NGO participation, and (c) NGO priorities. We find that the CSW displays a high level of representation and responsiveness to diverse state delegations across UN regions in terms of their speaking time in formal session. The CSW is at best moderately representative of women's NGOs through regional advance consultations, and the level of responsiveness to women's NGOs is low. This is due to: costly barriers to entry to gain ECOSOC status, large underrepresentation of some UN Regions, and the fact that during formal session, women's NGOs participate primarily at parallel offsite events. Although the CSW passed important resolutions, its representation and responsiveness to women's NGO priorities is lower than it should be. We base our evaluation by comparing our surveys of attending and non-attending women's NGOs that showed top priorities that the 2010 CSW did not discuss or pass resolutions on such as: land rights, sex trafficking, internet access for women, and the effects of climate change on women. We contend that during 1970-1994, when World Conferences on Women occurred, parallel transnational advance consultations among women's NGOs in tandem with CSW regional consultations created a broadening of the CSW's agenda. Rincker et al. Evaluating the United Nations CSW The CSW rationally anticipated different kinds of feminism beyond liberal feminism and a broader set of priority issues for diverse women populations. We therefore argue for a Fifth World Conference on Women to increase the representativeness and responsiveness of the CSW.

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