Gender Politics in Multi-Dimensional Political Space: A Comparative Analysis of Intersection between Key Political Cleavages and Women’s Issues

The primary aim of this paper is to understand how key left and right-leaning parties approach women’s issues, e.g. abortion, maternity leave, or women’s employment discrimination, in the multi-dimensional political space. Defining political cleavage as “a long-lasting political division”, the paper utilizes existing variation in the key political cleavages in new democracies. The paper highlights that the primary political cleavage in a particular country at a particular time serves as a crucial prism through which specific women’s issues tend to be filtered and politicized by major left and right-leaning parties. One the one hand, some examples testify that key political cleavages can be potentially fatal to certain types of women’s issues. For instance, women’s health issues can run the danger of being highly contested healthcare issues in the U.S.; women’s reproductive or marital rights can overlap with conflictual religious cleavage in Latin America; and in Japan, war-time comfort women issues can face resistance from right-wing forces whose key ideological identity can be derived from being unapologetic about war-time crimes and rearming Japan to a “normal state”. On the other hand, evidence also suggest that, in new democracies like South Korea or Taiwan, the key concerns of left and right-leaning parties have not overlapped with women’s issues in the mainstream politics—diplomatic or military stance toward North Korea (South Korea) and toward Mainland China (Taiwan); as a result, issues concerning the promotion of women often have been treated as a valence issue key parties utilize to maximize votes. Against this background, the paper demonstrates how specific women’s issues become politicized and divisive based on a comparative case study of four non-western democracies whose key political cleavages revolve around non-socioeconomic ones.