Doctoral Dissertation Research: Everyday violence against women and the state's promotion of "universal breadwinning model"

性别平等与经济发展齐头并进。大量证据表明，经济发展对妇女的社会、经济和政治环境具有强大的、变革性的和深刻的积极影响。这种关系在欧洲表现得最为明显，欧洲各州在所有与性别平等相关的指标上都持续而系统地获得高分。然而，尽管在性别平等方面取得了这些进展，但最近的调查研究表明，欧洲对妇女的暴力行为发生率很高，尤其是亲密伴侣的暴力行为。本项目认为，这种违反直觉的日常暴力侵害妇女行为模式与具体家庭政策的实施和推广相对应，如带薪育儿假、托儿服务和个人税收。虽然这些政策旨在提高女性的经济独立性，但它们也加速了传统性别角色的解体，从而引发了男性对其伴侣的暴力反弹。通过认识到国家的作用，并确定哪些家庭政策催化或加剧了日常暴力，该项目将帮助决策者制定解决暴力侵害妇女行为的最佳做法，并提高欧洲和其他地区妇女的地位。这个项目研究了政治学中一个以前被忽视的话题——对妇女的日常暴力问题。虽然对冲突和福利国家的分析越来越多地纳入了性别因素，并解决了战时性暴力和职业性别隔离等问题，但对国内和平时期针对妇女的暴力行为的研究相对较少。这个项目调查了这个被忽视的现象，并质疑为什么这么多高度发达和平等的国家，特别是在欧洲，继续有如此高的暴力侵害妇女的发生率。报告认为，日常形式的针对妇女的暴力行为从根本上讲是政治性的，最好的解释是一个国家在实施和推广“普遍养家模式”方面的差异，这种模式破坏了传统的性别规范，降低了男性在家庭内部的议价能力，然后引发了暴力反弹。为了检验提出的理论框架，本项目利用三种相互关联的经验策略来阐明欧洲性别暴力的次国家和跨国模式，以及微观层面的因果机制。首先，该项目使用关于普遍养家模式的原始数据集，结合具有全国代表性的欧盟范围内的受害调查，定量测试欧洲暴力与家庭政策之间的关系。这一统计分析随后辅以比较历史分析，追踪普遍养家模式的出现和实施情况，并对专家和遭受暴力的女性幸存者进行访谈研究，这对于建立家庭政策与改变家庭内部动态和男性暴力的微观机制之间的联系至关重要。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Gender equality and economic development go hand in hand. A wealth of evidence shows that economic development has a powerful, transformative, and profoundly positive effect on the social, economic and political circumstances of women. And nowhere is this relationship more apparent than in Europe where the states consistently and systematically score highly across all indicators associated with gender equality. However, despite these advances in gender equality, recent survey research shows that Europe has high rates of violence against women, particularly by intimate partners. This project argues that this counterintuitive pattern of everyday violence against women corresponds to the implementation and promotion of specific family policies, such as paid parental leave, childcare services, and individual taxation. While these policies are designed to increase female economic independence, they also precipitate the unravelling of traditional gender roles, which then provokes a violent male backlash against their partners. By recognizing the role of the state and identifying which family policies catalyze or exacerbate everyday violence, this project will help policymakers formulate best practices for addressing violence against women and improve the status women in Europe and elsewhere.This project examines a previously overlooked topic in political science - the issue of everyday violence against women. While analyses of conflict and the welfare state have increasingly incorporated gender and addressed issues such as wartime sexual violence and occupational sex segregation, relatively little research has been devoted to the violence against women during times of civil peace. This project investigates this unheeded phenomenon and questions why so many highly developed and egalitarian states, particularly in Europe, continue to have such high incidences of violence against women. It argues that everyday forms of violence against women are fundamentally political and can be best explained by variation in a state's implementation and promotion of the "universal breadwinning model", which undermines traditional gender norms, decreases men's intrafamily bargaining power, and then provokes a violent backlash. To test the proposed theoretical framework, this project utilizes three interconnected empirical strategies to elucidate not only the sub-national and cross-national patterns of gendered violence in Europe but also the micro-level causal mechanisms. First, the project uses an original dataset on the universal breadwinning model combined with a nationally-representative, EU-wide victimization survey to quantitatively test the association between violence and family policy in Europe. This statistical analysis is then supplemented with comparative historical analysis tracing the emergence and implementation of the universal breadwinning model, and interview research with experts and female survivors of violence, which is crucial for establishing the link between family policies and the micro-mechanism of changing intrafamily dynamics and male violence.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.