Chapter 8 demonstrates that such effects can be augmented by stimulating solidarity among women with a focus on gender consciousness-raising, but that such actions generate backlash. It tests the importance of social solidarity in stimulating women’s collective action by exploiting arbitrary variation in the delivery of a gender consciousness-raising program to SHGs. It shows that women are more likely to undertake collective action after identifying shared experiences of deprivation and forming a bond based on their gender identity. This collective action is also more likely to be aimed at women’s strategic interests – their interests rooted in their patriarchal suppression – and therefore garner more resistance from men in the community, including through increased experiences of (public) violence and harassment. It shows that women navigate this resistance through their collective strength and solidarity.

Chapter 7 provides cause for optimism: women’s participation in apolitical women’s groups enhances their political agency and doubles their political participation. Leveraging a natural experiment to identify the impact of access to SHGs, or small women-only credit collectives, it shows that access spaces outside of the household with other women generates solidaristic collective action oriented toward women’s political participation that succeeds in changing women’s political behavior: SHG members were significantly and substantially more likely to participate in politics than nonmembers. Further, this impact is evident in the larger village political network; women are more densely politically connected, and gender emerges as a more salient political cleavage. This positive impact of SHGs occurs despite no change in women’s economic resources.

Chapter 3 builds a theory of women’s political behavior under conditions of patriarchy and gender inequality. It argues for the defining role of the household in women’s political lives and describes the conditions that would lead to household political cooperation – joint household political decision-making – and hypothesizes its implications for individual women’s political behavior and the structure of political organization more broadly. It then develops a series of expectations about how and when women will become active political citizens, arguing for the importance of women’s autonomy from the household, their social solidarity with each other, and the potential for women’s collective action to transform their political lives.

Despite having few natural resources and peasant serfs, Denmark developed public primary education in 1814, while Britain delayed the mass, public school system until 1870 and provided little instruction to working-class students. Later, Denmark’s secondary education system included publicly-funded vocational training programs, while Britain developed a single-track system that ignored technical skills. Fiction writers and their cultural narratives contributed to educational choices. Authors became important individual political agents in school reform movements, by using fiction to advance policy ideas and inspire emotional outrage. Writers collectively contributed to the nationally distinctive symbols and narratives about education that appeared in their country’s literature. Each generation of authors inherited these distinctive cultural tropes from their literary ancestors, reworked these for new problems, and passed these along to future generations. Studying fiction writers and their narratives offers a tangible way to evaluate how culture matters to political outcomes, as we may empirically (with computational linguistics and a close reading of texts) observe significant cross-national differences in historical literary images of education. The work suggests how cultural narratives contribute to the emergence of coordinated and liberal varieties of capitalism and reflects on how cultural narratives provide a source of continuity within long-term processes of institutional change.

This contribution examines EU citizenship as a ‘market’ and gendered notion and explores how these two dimensions are interlinked as they build on and reinforce each other with exclusionary effects that limit the scope of EU citizenship as a fundamental status. The normative model underpinning EU citizenship has been criticized as ‘market citizenship’ and described as exclusionary of those who are not rich or failing to engage with the market via employment or self-employment. The case law of the European Court of Justice suggests that quite a number of those affected by EU citizenship’s market orientation are women, prompting questions as to how and why EU law constrains and shapes the capacity of women to exercise their EU citizenship rights. By undertaking a critical analysis of the recent EU citizenship jurisprudence from a gender perspective this contribution shows that EU citizenship is not only a ‘market citizenship’ that attaches value primarily to work and financial self-sufficiency but also a gendered construct and that the two reinforce each other in limiting the reach of EU citizenship.

This chapter concludes the book by reflecting on its broader implications. It delineates the politics behind credit regimes and reflects on the underlying political coalitions and dynamics behind credit markets’ complementary and substitutive relationships with welfare states. It then discusses how credit markets amplify old and create new forms of social exclusion and inequality through discrimination, credit scoring, or differential credit access. As credit markets have grown more influential and increasingly determine life chances, equal and fair access to credit is now a prerequisite for full participation and inclusion in labor markets, housing markets, as well as educational opportunities and wealth-building trajectories. The chapter ends by discussing potential ways in which credit markets and welfare states can work together, not against each other, to ensure a fairer and more equal distribution of social risks and opportunities.

This chapter examines the criminalization of migration through the lens of transnational legal orders (TLOs). By doing so, it seeks to explain dramatic episodes such as the Diciotti refugee incident in Italy, but also provide socio-legal analysis for far-reaching practices such as immigration detention, removal, and refusal of entry, all of which depend on the development of a formalizing legal order and specific regulation such as the EU Returns Directive that transcends national boundaries. It argues that affluent democratic societies of the Global North are in the middle of a major transformation of governance while transnational legal orders are at the center of it.