Meg Rincker - Böcker

In her probing book, Empowered by Design, Meg Rincker asks, Under what conditions will decentralization lead to women’s empowerment in countries around the globe? Using three case studies-the United Kingdom, Poland, and Pakistan-she shows how decentralization reforms create new institutional offices as power shifts from the national level to a meso-tier level, which is located between the national government and local municipalities. These shifts impact a country’s political, administrative, and fiscal reforms as well as women’s representation. Rincker argues that this shift should be inclusive of women-or at least lead more women to participate in institutions-but this is not always the case. She indicates that three conditions, “the gender policy trifecta,” need to be met to achieve this: legislative gender quotas, women’s policy agencies, and gender-responsive budgeting at the level of governance in question. Rincker's innovative research uses original comparative data about what women want, quantitative cross-national analyses, and interviews with women’s organization leaders and politicians to show how cross-institutional policymaking can empower women.  Rincker’s fine-grained analysis makes a significant contribution to the study of representation and gendered implications of decentralization, as well as how representatives go about understanding and aggregating our diverse policy preferences.

Forthcoming Fall 2026