This panel examines how gender, anti-racist and LGBTIQ+ policies are resisted, delayed, hollowed out or reversed from within legislatures, bureaucracies, and political parties. Rather than focusing only on open opposition, we are interested in the subtler mechanisms through which inclusive reforms are undermined such as (but not limited to): procedural obstruction, strategic reframing, selective implementation, and the everyday organizational cultures and attitudes that shape political institutions from within.
We invite contributions addressing, among others, the following topics: how resistance to inclusive policy is enacted, and where agency and support for such policies persist within institutions; how gendered parliamentary cultures shape the possibilities for substantive representation; comparative analyses of anti-gender, anti-racist, ableist, and anti-LGBTIQ+ politics across institutional and national contexts; the effects of democratic backsliding on minoritised groups; the role of social movements and public discourse in advancing or contesting inclusive agendas; strategies through which inclusionary policies push back against traditional forms of exclusion; and the identification of mechanisms of resistance, asking which mechanisms travel across contexts, which remain context-specific, and what these patterns reveal about the durability of democratic institutions under illiberal pressure.
By bringing these debates together, the panel aims to move beyond a binary understanding of resistance versus progress, offering a more comprehensive approach of how institutional actors, including legislators, bureaucrats and party representatives, negotiate, absorb or deflect demands for gender, racial, and sexual equality.
We welcome papers addressing a broad range of methodological approaches, including comparative case studies, process tracing, discourse analysis and mixed-methods designs, covering different regional and institutional settings. Particular attention will be given to contributions that theorise the mechanisms of resistance identified above and situate them within broader debates on feminist institutionalism, intersectionality and democratic resilience.