There for the moment: extra-legislative windows of opportunity for women’s social movements in politics, a comparison of Canada and Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

This article considers the role and influence of women’s groups and larger national women’s social movements during two different constitutional moments: the lead-up to the finalisation of the 1982 patriation of the Canadian Constitution and the lead-up to the 1998 Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland. We argue that while women were successful in ensuring women’s participation and consideration of women’s issues in these constitutional negotiations, those accomplishments did not lead to a significant increase of women’s representation in formal politics. In both the Canadian government-sponsored National Action Committee on the Status of Women and the political party, the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, women’s descriptive representation in formal politics did not improve dramatically as a result of women’s participation in either constitutional process which suggests the need for guarantees of greater representation, such as what women’s electoral quotas would constitute.

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s movements
• constitutional change
• negotiations
• social movements
• renewal
• equity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Prior to the repatriation of the constitution in 1982, the 1980 federal election returned only 5 per cent of women MPs to the House of Commons. That number increased to 9.6 per cent in the 1984 federal election. Although this almost doubled the representation of women MPs, the House of Commons still featured a super majority of men. Since then, the rate of representation of women MPs has increased slowly, reaching a high of 26 per cent in the 2015 federal election. Similarly, the new Northern Ireland Assembly included only 13 per cent women representatives in 1998. Women’s representation grew slowly over time reaching a high of 30 per cent in 2017. (See the Interparliamentary Union for the Canadian figures; for the 1998, 2003, and 2007 elections in NI see Galligan, 2013; for the 2012 and 2016 elections see ARK Northern Ireland; and for the 2017 election see Potter, 2017).

2. Women remain underrepresented in formal politics worldwide with women holding only about 23 per cent of the seats in legislatures worldwide. In 1997, during the midst of the Northern Ireland peace talks, women held only about 12 per cent of seats in legislatures worldwide, while in the United Kingdom they held about 10 per cent (Interparliamentary Union, 2017). It is therefore unsurprising therefore that the political parties were not responsive to promoting gender parity. The resistance of political parties in Northern Ireland to women representatives is consistent with the dearth of women in peace negotiations worldwide: between 1992 and 2010, women comprised only 2.5 per cent of the negotiators and 4 per cent of peace agreement signatories (Ellerby, 2016).