Federalism creates two main sets of strategic choices for organized women interested in shaping public policy. Women can push for policy innovations at the meso-level, which are less costly to approve and implement, but create only locally-accessible public goods; alternatively, they can engage with the central government, which is more costly but has a higher payoff: laws of national scope, which encompass all women. Using the case of anti-violence legislation in Brazil as an example, we show that the national-strategy payoff gets significantly reduced in countries plagued by an uneven distribution of meso-level state capacity. Descriptive statistics, maps and semi-structured interviews reveal that the pursuit of the national option resulted in severe inequalities in the territorial distribution of benefits, segmenting women into law-haves and law-have-nots.
