Multiple literatures suggest that the following factors may figure prominently in explanations of women’s increasing empowerment: economic modernity factors, cultural modernity factors, cultural legacies, institutional legacies, political institutions, and the status of women’s civil society. I argue that the comparison of these factors across different stages of women’s empowerment will give us a clearer picture for understanding the roles of social conditions, national histories, institutional designs and associational behavior in empowering women. This, in turn, will help us clarify the ability of theories central to the study of politics to explain social change in processes of inclusion.

I test seven explanations the function of gender in parliamentarian support for abortion policy by comparing the differences in attitudes between women and men national and European parliamentarians across 15 democracies in Western Europe. I consider the influence of the social policy environment of a parliamentarian’s nation, women’s autonomous access to resources in a parliamentarian’s nation, the mass orientations of a parliamentarian’s nation, the party family to which the parliamentarian belongs, the ideology of the parliamentarian, the institutional design elements of the parliamentarian’s nation, and the gender composition of the representational body in which the parliamentarian resides.

This article presents evidence for a rising emancipatory spirit, across generations and around the world, in a life domain in which traditional family, fertility and sex (FFS) norms have been most resistant to emancipatory gains since the ages: reproductive freedoms. We propose an explanation of rising emancipative values that integrates several theoretical approaches into a single idea—the utility ladder of freedoms. Specifically, we suggest that objectively improving living conditions--from rising life expectancies to broadening education to better technologies—transform the nature of life from a source of threats to suffer into a source of opportunities to thrive. As living conditions begin to hold more promise for increasing population segments, societies climb the utility ladder of freedoms: supporting universal freedoms becomes increasingly instrumental to use the opportunities that a more promising life offers. This trend has begun to spill over into a life domain in which traditional FFS norms have until recently been able to block emancipatory gains: reproductive freedoms. We present (1) cross-national, (2) longitudinal, (3) generational and (4) multi-level evidence on an unprecedentedly broad basis in support of this theory.

Evidence that Muslims support patriarchal values more than Non-Muslims is abundant but the nature of this evidence is contested. The ‘cultural’ interpretation suggests that patriarchal values are an inherent element of Muslim identity. The ‘structural’ interpretation holds that patriarchal values reside in structural characteristics and have little to do with Muslim identity. Evidence on these contradictory claims is inconclusive. Neither have advocates of the cultural position shown that Muslim support for patriarchal values remains robust under control of structural characteristics; nor have proponents of the structural position demonstrated that Muslim support for these values vanishes under such controls. Filling this gap, we use multi-level models to test whether Muslim support for patriarchal values vanishes under control of patriarchy’s structural underpinnings. We find that Muslim support for patriarchal values is robust against various controls. And, we identify mosque attendance as a mechanism to sustain Muslim support for patriarchy in Non-Muslim societies. Yet, rising levels of education, labor market participation, and a glacial emancipative trend diminish Muslim support for patriarchy, especially among women.