Feminist Activists Inside the State: Comparing Paths to Insider Activism in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.

This paper discusses the inclusion of feminist movements -- and by implication all social movements -- inside the State. It makes two major arguments. First, that exclusion from the State is a continuous variable with many social movement actors having penetrated the State to some degree. We then argue that social movements' inclusion is a function of characteristics of the State, particularly the partisan control of the bureaucracy and mechanisms for building the civil service, and characteristics of movements, particularly ideology and their partisan allies. We examine these arguments by examining three cases of feminist activism inside the State: the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The U.S. and Germany have similar bureaucratic characteristics in terms of recruitment and partisan control but differ dramatically in the nature of the feminist movement. The women's movements of Germany and the United Kingdom share many characteristics but the pathways into the bureaucracy differ dramatically. We find that feminist insider participation through women's policy agencies is affected by partisan control and the organization of the bureaucracy (e.g. location of the women's policy agency). The participation of individual feminist insiders also appears affected by norms of partisan control and by the ideology of the women's movement. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]