“[Feminist Policymaking in Chile] is a bracing corrective for a tendency to treat political institutions and the opportunity structures that they produce as static and removed from a larger, more dynamic political context. Haas's work convincingly shows how feminist actors located in the executive branch, in the Congress, and in civil society progressively learned to overcome obstacles and create new institutional possibilities in order to promote their legislative goals. Drawing on extensive interviews with many of the most-important feminist activists in all three arenas, Haas reveals how feminist activists learned from early failures and setbacks and how this learning process helped to ensure the later passage of a number of pieces of controversial legislation, including the strengthening of the laws against domestic violence and the legalization of divorce in 2004. . . . Haas's empirically rich work provides a nuanced understanding of Chilean political processes. More broadly, Haas convincingly shows that analysis of policymaking must pay attention to how political actors learn from policy successes and failure and how these lessons become embedded within the overall process. Her engaging analysis is a must-read for scholars working on public policy and would work well in classes on women in politics, gender and politics, comparative public policy, and comparative politics.”
—Gwynn Thomas, Political Science Quarterly