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This essay introduces a collection of articles on the lessons that can be drawn from Canada's Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) as Canada moves toward a more concrete and deliberate approach to feminist foreign policy. The articles in this collection provide insights into the challenges to be addressed, gaps to be filled, and the critical analyses necessary for expanding and enhancing Canada's feminist foreign policy. The aim of the collection is to show that lessons learned from the FIAP can inform the design of Canada's next steps in forging a formalized, comprehensive, and coherent feminist foreign policy. This introductory essay summarizes the five articles in this special section of International Journal on the FIAP and Canada's feminist foreign policy and highlights their key findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Government of Canada introduced its new Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) to guide its foreign aid programming in June 2017. This feminist turn mirrors earlier adoptions of feminist aid and foreign policy by Sweden and echoes the current Canadian government's feminist rhetoric. This paper examines the FIAP and its Action Areas Policies to ask what kind(s) of feminism are reflected in the policy and what groups of people it prioritizes. The paper examines the values, goals, and gaps of the policy in order to understand what feminist values and goals are being operationalized and pursued and what gaps and contradictions exist. By examining the FIAP's Action Area Policies using a discourse network analysis of the groups represented in the policies, we demonstrate the failings of the FIAP to incorporate an intersectional approach. Our results show that the FIAP adopts a mainstream liberal feminism that excludes many peoples and groups from the core of Canada's aid efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing levels of democratic freedoms should, in theory, improve women’s access to political positions. Yet studies demonstrate that democracy does little to improve women’s legislative representation. To resolve this paradox, we investigate how variations in the democratization process—including pre-transition legacies, historical experiences with elections, the global context of transition, and post-transition democratic freedoms and quotas—affect women’s representation in developing nations. We find that democratization’s effect is curvilinear. Women in non-democratic regimes often have high levels of legislative representation but little real political power. When democratization occurs, women’s representation initially drops, but with increasing democratic freedoms and additional elections, it increases again. The historical context of transition further moderates these effects. Prior to 1995, women’s representation increased most rapidly in countries transitioning from civil strife—but only when accompanied by gender quotas. After 1995 and the Beijing Conference on Women, the effectiveness of quotas becomes more universal, with the exception of post-communist countries. In these nations, quotas continue to do little to improve women’s representation. Our results, based on pooled time series analysis from 1975 to 2009, demonstrate that it is not democracy—as measured by a nation’s level of democratic freedoms at a particular moment in time—but rather the democratization process that matters for women’s legislative representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Growing similarity of development assistance policy and reference to emerging global consensus on development issues has been a striking trend in the foreign aid community in recent years. This article uses event history techniques to undertake an exploratory analysis and test world polity effects on the spread of gender and development policies and institutional structures among 22 aid donors of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee from 1968 through 2003. Findings point to the influence of other donors, international civil society, international treaties and conferences as strong determinants of the homogenization of development assistance policy and the adoption of gender policies by donor organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following divorce or separation, father-child contact is deemed an important influence on child development. Previous research has explored the impact of sociodemographic and attitudinal factors on the amount of contact between fathers and their children following a union dissolution. This article revisits this important question using fathers' reports on a sample of 859 children from newly available survey data. Multilevel random intercept models are used to reassess the influence of child- and father-level factors on the amount of reported contact. Results show that the amount of father-child contact following separation is the product of several factors such as the father's income, conjugal/parental trajectory, and level of satisfaction with existing arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

World polity explanations of the isomorphism of institutions and values among nation-states have not focused sufficient attention on explaining the decoupling or gap between granting rights and actually implementing them. This article examines the decoupling phenomenon by exploring what factors influenced the gap between granting women the right to stand for election and the eventual election of the first woman to parliament in 92 countries of the developing world from 1945 to 1990. Both the influence of the world society and concepts of state-weakness are examined as determinants of this decoupling gap. This article shows that world polity influence on the nation-state extends beyond the adoption of policy scripts to bear on the actual implementation of world cultural models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]