Abstract
What types of collective actions have women’s movements conducted and what effects have they had? I argue in this chapter that their campaigns have been crucial. The analysis, which is inspired by feminist institutionalism, explores secondary material regarding women’s early campaigns for suffrage, the decades of next to no representation until the breakthrough of national public campaigns in the late 1960s, and the subsequent period of uneven increase in women’s representation. The actions such campaigns have directed against formal institutional obstacles have included secret interventions by small groups of voters as well as legal petitions and protests against single seat constituencies. The strategies employed against informal institutional constraints have involved efforts to amend norms, discourses, and practices. In addition, I discuss various public and women’s movement campaigns to inform, sensitise, and mobilise women, political parties, and the electorate, such as meetings, marches, and the dissemination of facts about absence of women from politics. I also maintain that the broader cultural context is crucial. For example, the paradoxical Norwegian system of preferential voting has, both historically and in general, given an advantage to male candidates. However, secret actions for preferential voting for women produced sensational increases in the representation of women.