The Gender of Informal Politics Russia, Iceland and Twenty-First Century Male Dominance

The Gender of Informal Politics Russia, Iceland and Twenty-First Century Male Dominance GENDER AND POLITICS Janet Elise Johnson Gender and Politics Series Editors Johanna Kantola Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland Sarah Childs Professor of Politics and Gender University of Bristol Bristol, United Kingdom The Gender and Politics series celebrates its 7th anniversary at the 5th European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG) in June 2017 in Lausanne, Switzerland having published more than 25 volumes to date. The original idea for the book series was envisioned by the series editors Johanna Kantola and Judith Squires at the first ECPG in Belfast in 2009, and the series was officially launched at the Conference in Budapest in 2011. In 2014, Sarah Childs became the co-editor of the series, together with Johanna Kantola. Gender and Politics showcases the very best international writing. It publishes world class monographs and edited collections from scholars - junior and well established - working in politics, international relations and public policy, with specific reference to questions of gender. The 15 titles that have come out over the past five years make key contributions to debates on intersectionality and diversity, gender equality, social movements, Europeanization and institutionalism, governance and norms, policies, and political institutions. Set in European, US and Latin American contexts, these books provide rich new empirical find- ings and push forward boundaries of feminist and politics conceptual and theoretical research. The editors welcome the highest quality international research on these topics and beyond, and look for proposals on feminist political theory; on recent political transformations such as the economic crisis or the rise of the populist right; as well as proposals on continuing feminist dilemmas around participation and representation, specific gendered policy fields, and policy making mechanisms. The series can also include books published as a Palgrave pivot. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14998 Janet Elise Johnson The Gender of Informal Politics Russia, Iceland and Twenty-First Century Male Dominance Janet Elise Johnson Brooklyn College City University of New York Brooklyn, New York, USA Gender and Politics ISBN 978-3-319-60278-3 ISBN 978-3-319-60279-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60279-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017946074 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Cover illustration: culliganphoto / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland PREFACE As I finalize this book manuscript in February 2017, its arguments are especially timely and important, not just in Russia and Iceland, which are its focus, but also elsewhere. After a campaign with unprecedented and explicit misogyny against the first woman candidate from a major political party, Donald Trump has assumed the US presidency, creating a cabinet that is overwhelmingly white male, surrounding himself with informal advisors from his personal networks, and ignoring pleas for transparency about his finances over reasonable concerns about potential conflicts of interest. Americans became familiar with Russian kompromat, the often gendered and sexual compromising materials that intelligence agencies have used to coral Russian elites, with the release of a supposed dossier revealing Trump’s outrageous sexual behavior in Moscow. In Russia, Vladimir Putin remains entrenched in power, using the same macho affec- tations to help legitimate his (and Trump’s) authority. Domestic violence, effectively criminalized just the previous summer, was mostly decriminal- ized, as Putin withdrew his support in response to a populist movement that declares such laws are part of a Western, liberal agenda. In supposedly democratic and egalitarian Iceland, the political party most responsible for the economy’s virtual collapse in 2008 is back in power, led by Bjarni Benediktsson, who, the Panama Papers revealed, had managed to pro- tect his wealth in offshore accounts. In a country where a year can go by without a murder, the body of a 20-year-old Icelandic woman was found on a beach, missing for eight days and who, it seems, had been sexually assaulted. After decades of increases in women leaders in countries around the world, the last several years have brought remarkable declines, with half of the world leaders as there were two years prior. v vi PREFACE I began this book in the wake of the global economic crisis, 2008–2010. As the Icelanders helped make clear, gender was everywhere in the crisis— in its causes, in its consequences, and in the political solutions—but the commentary in the United States was overwhelmingly gender blind. Studying Russia had made clear to me just how much power was gendered, symbolized in Putin’s dramatic masculinity stunts. From feminist political science, I also understood that such gendered power was struc- tural, endemic to institutions and practices. At first, as I was a new mom and an optimist, I was hopeful that there would be reckoning for the wheeling-and-dealing economy of wealth cre- ation, in its virtual finance form in the United States and Iceland as well as in its postcommunist form in Russia. However, as I dug deeper into gender and institutions, I saw the breadth and depth of the informal politics and the impossibility facing world leaders, many of whom were women, of cleaning up the man-made mess. I began to see a worldwide con perpetrated by the overwhelmingly male elites, often working behind the scenes, though the evidence was hard to come by. Such understanding of politics is common to Russianists, which was my training, but many of my other colleagues were skeptical when I tried to explain. So, I turned to Iceland, a country seen as democratic and clean of corruption, but had suffered the worst in the earliest stages of the economic crisis. After two research trips in 2010, I returned to Iceland in 2011 to present my research at the European Consortium on Political Research, where I became sure I was on the right track. First, Iceland’s then president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson gave the keynote speech in the outsized Harpa concert hall, which was a symbol of Iceland’s excesses. To my astonishment, but to my non-Icelandic counterparts’ acceptance, he argued that political science had not been critical enough of economic liberalization and that he was Iceland’s savior, despite the raft of critical political economy and his role as shill for Icelandic tycoons’ financial irresponsibility. Second, when I cautiously presented my research on Iceland, two Icelandic scholars, Þorgerður Einarsdóttir and Gyða Margrét Pétursdóttir who had written a formal gender report on the crisis, stood up and said that they completely agreed. The evidence suggested that Icelandic citizens were victims of the same shenanigans as in Russia, thankfully with less coercion, suggesting the con was indeed widespread. This book is my answer to the puzzle of how this worldwide con thwarts gender equality. We would be remiss not to note that, as a result of their efforts, women have made many advances, into politics, in nongovernmental PREFACE vii organizations, and in gender equality policies. Yet, the results in terms of women’s lived experiences are so much less than hoped for, especially for non-elite women. Written for all who care about gender equality, this book puts forth an argument that this gender equality paradox is best understood as a bait and switch, perpetrated by the male-dominated informal elite networks empowered by the so-called economic liberalization over the last four decades. Privileging wealth acquisition for insiders over the free markets, formal institutions, which had been empowered in advanced democracies and promised in democratizing countries in the late twentieth century, have been hollowed out and supplanted by non-elected, non-con- stitutional bodies, such as advisory bodies and informal gatherings (in the backyard, sauna, golf course), which are even

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