Can Conservatism Make Women More Vulnerable to Violence?

DOI10.1177/00104140211024313
Date01 January 2022
Published date01 January 2022
Subject MatterArticles
Article
Comparative Political Studies
2022, Vol. 55(1) 122153
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211024313
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Can Conservatism Make
Women More
Vulnerable to Violence?
Victor Ara ´
ujo
1
and Malu A. C. Gatto
2
Abstract
Violence against women (VAW) affects at least 35% of women worldwide.
The need to combat VAW is seemingly noncontroversial: As existing work
shows, ideology does not explain governmentspropensity to adopt anti-
VAW legislation. Yet, effectively implementing anti-VAW legislation requires
complex policy frameworks at odds with conservative values. Voterspref-
erences can meaningfully inf‌luence policy outputs, so can electoral conser-
vatism make women more vulnerable to violence? Employing data from 5570
Brazilian municipalities, we f‌ind that conservatism in the electorate is asso-
ciated with the adoption of fewer anti-VAW policies. With data from a
nationally representative survey of Brazilian respondents (N= 2086), we then
show that conservative voters are less likely to prioritize the need for tackling
VAW. That is, the adoption of fewer anti-VAW policies in conservative
municipalities ref‌lects conservative voterspolicy preferences. Critically, our
results suggest that in contexts where the electorate holds conservative
preferences, policy responsiveness may incur costs to womens lives.
Keywords
political representation, ideology, violence against women, policy design,
Brazil
1
University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
2
University College London, London, UK
Corresponding Author:
Malu A. C. Gatto, Institute of the Americas, University College London, 51 Gordon Square,
London WC1H 0PN, UK.
Email: m.gatto@ucl.ac.uk
Introduction
The World Health Organization estimates that 35% of women worldwide have
been subjected to intimate-partner violence or sexual violence by a non-
partner. The prevalence of intimate-partner violence is particularly high in
developing countries (Garc´
ıa-Moreno et al., 2013). In Brazil, it is estimated
that one woman was affected by violence every 4 minutes in 2017 and an
average of 13 women was murdered every day (Cerqueira et al., 2019).
These numbers are alarming and the need to combat violence against
women (VAW) is seemingly noncontroversial. Unlike demands related to
womens sexual and reproductive rights (Bentancur & Rocha-Carpiuc, 2020),
tackling VAW is not in inherent opposition to conservative or religious values
(Htun & Weldon, 2010;Htun & Piscopo, 2014). In fact, efforts to protect
women seem to be in alignment with traditional, paternalistic gender roles and
views of women as fragile (Lodders & Weldon, 2019). The non-dogmatic
nature of VAW partly explains the rapid spread of anti-VAW policies (Beer,
2019), and legislation on domestic violence is now present in at least 155
countries (World Bank, 2020). As cross-national and within-country studies
show, ideology does not explain governmentspropensity to adopt anti-VAW
legislation (e.g., Beer, 2017;Htun & Weldon, 2012). In other words, con-
servative politicians do not seem to be less supportive of combating VAW than
their more progressive counterparts.
While ideology may not impact support for anti-VAW legislation per se,it
may shape actorsattitudes towards the policy frameworks necessary for the
implementation of legislation. For example, as an emerging literature shows,
once legislation is adopted, conservative groups with ties to state actors may
work to undermine policies perceived to threaten the maintenance of family
structures (Neumann, 2018;OBrien & Walsh, 2020).
There is still much that we do not know about the relationship between
conservatism and anti-VAW policies, however: Although the literature has
extensively covered the ways in which womens mobilization, international
organizations, and transnational diffusion have prompted legal transforma-
tions on gender-based violence around the world, identifying the factors that
curb progress on anti-VAW has remained a less explored line of work
(OBrien & Walsh, 2020, p. 114). In this article, we make further strides in this
direction by assessing whether and how votersconservative preferences
impact the adoption of policy instruments to tackle VAW in Brazil. Is so doing,
we also respond to recent calls to understand the role of ideology in the
postreform stage of the policy process (Bentancur & Rocha-Carpiuc, 2020).
A key tenet of representative democracy is the notion that public policy
ref‌lects votersinterests and preferences (Przeworski et al., 1999). As a large
body of work shows, the electorate shapes the actions of policymakers in
meaningful ways (e.g., Ezrow et al., 2011;Lax & Phillips, 2012). Voters that
Ara´
ujo and Gatto 123
share ideological principles also tend to share policy preferences (Luna &
Zechmeister, 2005), so it is likely that conservative votersattitudes towards
tackling VAW are different from those of their progressive counterparts. In
turn, effectively enacting anti-VAW legislation requires the implementation
of complex policy frameworks (Tavares et al., 2019). If the political will of
politicians to enact these policy infrastructures is tied to the preferences of
their constituents, then it is possible that conservative votersopposition to
particular types of policy instruments (OBrien & Walsh, 2020), unwilling-
ness to fund anti-VAWinitiat ives (Macaulay, 2010), and/or non-prioritization
of VAWas a policy area(Page & Shapiro, 1983)could have dire consequences
to governmentsefforts to eradicate gender-based violence.
Understanding whether voterspreferences can contribute to the weak-
ening of anti-VAW provisions is an urgent exercise: Electoral conservatism is
rising around the world (e.g., Biroli & Caminotti, 2020;Kov ´
ats, 2018), so
assessing whether it could pose threats to a non-dogmatic policy area is a hard
test of ongoing concerns about the future of womens rights.
We investigate the relationship between voterspreferences and public
policy outcomes with a two-step analysis. First, we examine whether electoral
conservatism impacts the adoption of policy instruments to tackle VAW in
Brazilian municipalities. When the Maria da Penha Law on Domestic and
Family Violence (Federal Law 11.340) was approved in Brazil in 2006, it
recognized domestic violence as gendered, typif‌ied different forms of vio-
lence, and identif‌ied a number of justice and protection mechanisms spe-
cif‌ically targeted at tackling VAW. However, although the law applies
nationally, the decision to select which and how many policy instruments to
adopt (if any) remains under the authority of municipalities. As a result, there
is wide variation in the uptake of these instruments across the country.
Combining data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics
(IBGE) on the presence and number of policy instruments in each munici-
pality with data on constituencies’“electorally revealed conservatismde-
veloped by Power and Rodrigues-Silveira (2019), we assess whether
municipalities with conservative electorates are less prone to adopting policy
instruments to combat VAW (N= 5570).
Employing novel survey data from a nationally representative sample of
Brazilian respondents (N= 2086), we then investigate whether holding
conservative preferences shapes votersattitudes towards VAW and the need
to adopt further legislation to tackle it. This approach allows us to not only
assess the association between constituenciesideology and policy adoption
but also to examine whether it is indeed voterspolicy preferences that likely
yield aggregate-level observed outcomes. In other words, by conducting
analyses at the municipal and individual levels, we evaluate whether policy is
responsive to voters (Lax & Phillips, 2012).
124 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

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