Publicaties

This article presents a reflection on the analytical value of intersectionality for scholars who seek to critically interrogate migration governance in Europe – of which integration measures are an integral part. While there is a growing interest in using gender and feminist theory to investigate the policies and practices that sustain migration governance, there has been little dedicated reflection on the analytical significance of ...

Federal systems tend to have two venues of representation to ensure that both the people as a whole and the constituent units are represented at the federal level. While this double representation is put forward as a basic (normative) feature of federal systems, little to no empirical research has been conducted on this issue. This contribution therefore studies the representation of the people as a whole and of the constituent units in the ...

Belgium is one of the few countries making the full move from a unitary to a federal state in a quarter-century (1970–1993). This transformation was to avoid the country falling apart due to linguistic tensions. Political deadlock required creative compromises to deblock the political situation, compromises building upon former decisions to split institutions, public opinion and the political elite along language groups. The downloading of ...

Through the case study of the Slovak Committee on Gender Equality, a governmental advisory body, this article draws upon the growing literature on “gender ideology” rhetoric in Central and Eastern Europe to study the efforts of advocates of that rhetoric to gain access to policymaking structures. With the aid of narrative research, we examine the Committee’s struggles over appropriate terminology and discourse, data and research, and ultimately ...

This article questions the use of morality frames and gender stereotypes in discoursing about abortion. The morality policy literature puts abortion forward as the paradigmatic example of its object of investigation. Yet, as heated as abortion debates can get, the issue is not always manifest in the spotlight. We argue salience of the issue depends on active politicization through morality frames. This contribution aims to further the ...

In recent years, we have seen a shift towards soft law policy-making within EU gender equality policies, embracing a new rationale of evidence as a promising panacea for the ills of democratic deficit. This shift has been fostered by the establishment of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) and the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), which both promote tools of benchmarking, ranking and good-practice sharing. Focusing on the ...

The European Parliament (EP) as one of the key institutions of the European Union has gained considerable powers over time and often presents itself as a constant gender equality promoter. Whilst gender equality in the EP tended to be analysed in terms of women's descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation, this article shifts the focus to the concept of power itself in assessing gender equality achievements in and through the EP. ...