The Gender Regime in Politics. Advocacy Coalitions Strategies in the Setting Agenda Processes in Central America for the Decriminalization of Abortion Demand

4th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4) June 26-28, 2019 – Montréal PANEL: T01P09 - Advocacy Coalition Framework: Advancing Theory and Evidence about Phenomena of Policy Processes The gender regime in politics. Advocacy coalitions strategies in the setting agenda processes in Central America for the decriminalization of abortion demand By: Jeraldine Alicia del Cid Castro1 1. Introduction This paper provides information about three different cases (Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua) of advocacy coalitions and their strategies in the setting agenda process for the decriminalization of abortion’s demand. The coalitions involved in the policy process in Central America have very different and interesting strategies because of the type of issue that we are studying. Abortion gets the attention and interest of a big variety of official and non-official actors. Specially in these contexts where sexual and reproductive issues are very restrictive. Our main purpose is to identify the gender regimes that constitute the practices and strategies of the actors involved in the agenda setting process for the case of the for the decriminalization of abortion’s demand in the nation-states Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in the last two decades. The research question is: Which strategies do coalitions engage in to influence the agenda setting process of the decriminalization of abortion’s demand in Central America and is the gender regime an essential element in the resources that coalition apply? 1 PhD Student at Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales -FLACSO- México. The contents of this paper are part of the results of the doctoral thesis research. 1 The hypothetical argument is that the advocacy coalitions, consider as the entrepreneurs of the demand for the decriminalization of abortion, develop strategies to achieve politics promoting coalitions with government actors. However, the alliances that are against this demand have greater influence in the state arena, which is associated with the historically close relationship between the State and Churches in these contexts and with a dominant gender regime in the politics and policies in this processes that is based on gender stereotypes that associate women to motherhood. The gender regime and public policies are interdependent, it means they are cause and consequence of each other, so it is important to identify the processes by which they occur and reproduce each other. This is a qualitative study with comparative cases method (George & Bennett, 2005). The cases to compare are: Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, countries in where sexual and reproductive rights and, particularly, the demand for decriminalization of abortion, are part of the issues that do not show dynamism in the decision-making agenda. Based on semi- structured interviews with the main actors of the process and newspapers review, we apply an analysis of the actors and networks with network analysis techniques. 2. Advocacy coalitions and gender regime in the setting agenda process From Political Science, the perspective of public policies, and in particular of the policy process (Sabatier, 2007), a theoretical and empirical field has been developed to study the agenda setting process (Cobb, Ross y Ross, 1976; Birkland, 2007), in which diverse interrelated elements converge, focusing the interest in politics more than in the technical aspects of the policy instruments, it is also interested in the actors involved in the process, the dynamics and the institutional mechanisms, both formal and informal. The Theory of Agenda Setting within the Policy Process is approached from the contributions of reformed Pluralism and the analyses of the complex formal Agenda. With these inputs, the focus is on the political context, the actors in the process and particularly the policy promoting coalitions. These approaches seek to study the policy process, in which, as proposed by Sabatier (2007), the complexity of the public policy process is addressed, which contains the following elements: actors involved, period of time that PP cycles last, institutions and levels of government, wide range of values and interests. Among the actors, the promoters of public policies stand out, who are actors with significant desires to change things within an area of interest (Mintrom and Norman 2009). They are willing to invest resources and energies in the process. In particular, advocacy coalitions, which according to Sabatier (1988), acquire a fundamental role in the process, since they can be determinant in the construction of the agenda that leads to the political and policy decisions that impact change. For the study of such coalitions, the feminist perspective also offers some important elements. Bustelo (2001) presents a study on public policies for gender equality based on an analysis of the relationship between feminism and the State, a process in which the State, through its various institutions, promotes a change in inequality relations based on gender. This perspective implies an important assumption: to consider that the origin of these policies lies in the idea or recognition that the State must do something to overcome gender inequalities. Assuming that it is also based on the perspective 2 recognized in the State, an apparatus for the production and reproduction of such inequalities, a constant paradox in this research. Within policy process studies, independent variables are contexts. In the "context" variables, there are the actors and their configuration in their coalitions to influence decision-making processes. In the case studies, we observe the configuration of these variables to preserve the stability of anti- abortion policy, as well as the results that could be obtained from the discussion and negotiation of a policy change with the intention of decriminalizing. In other words, the context, the actors and their mechanisms are fundamental in the policy process. This would explain that the issues that enter the agenda-setting process are placed on the formal agenda to the extent that they reach a political network with power, which is expanding with its contingent character. However, in coalitions to promote the decriminalization of abortion in Central America, political networks do not become networks around problems as the reformed pluralism proposes, probably because they are moral issues that, when observed as a problem from diverse frames of meaning, very diverse possible solutions are developed. According to Birkland (2007), non-official actors with power deficits can access the agenda through the "windows of opportunity" developed by Kingdon (1995), as well as the search for change in public perceptions of a problem and its solution, the same institutional changes, which could represent a window of opportunity, as well as changes in indicators of problems and, above all, coalitions that may be developed with external or internal power actors, institutional or not, official or not. This approach can be linked to the theoretical perspective in Social Movements on Political Opportunity Structures and Legal Opportunity Structures. The model of defense coalitions or of windows of opportunity that is being contemplated in this theoretical framework explains the origin of changes in public policies based on the interaction between actors, "while in neo-institutionalism or network analysis they are explained based on the institutional context in which political action takes place" (Chaqués-Bonafont, 2004, p. 33). A defense coalition is a grouping of actors - politicians, bureaucrats, lobbies, researchers - who "occupy positions of responsibility in a political subsystem, share a particular belief system and carry out coordinating activities in a relatively stable manner over time for a decade or more" (Sabatier, 1988:133). Such stability is explained from the existing consensus around a set of ideas or ways of understanding the world, and the difficulty of changing such ideas in the short term. "Cohesion in fundamental political positions is what also marks the difference between allies and opponents within the same political subsystem, differences that tend to be stable over time for a decade or more" (Chaqués-Bonafont, 2004, p. 119). Network analysis shares some of the principles of neo-institutionalism regarding the importance of the role of states and institutions in political life. "The process of public policy-making is developed through a specific institutional framework that must be taken into account to explain success or failure in the management of public affairs, as well as the distribution of power" (Chaqués-Bonafont, 2004, p. 34). 3 Most public issues are conducted and managed through closed networks, in which few actors participate in a stable manner. The analysis of networks according to Chaqués-Bonafont (2004), starts from the idea that policies are the result of constant interaction between the State and social groups. In this process, each subsystem has a limited number of actors, who enter into a constant process of negotiation. The author identifies that there is a certain tendency towards the creation of closed networks and that the decisions are the exchange of resources and information that permanently occurs between governmental organizations and private groups. In network analysis, exogenous factors such as the emergence of new ideas, mobilization of social groups, new technologies, are necessary conditions, but not sufficient to explain why policy objectives are

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