Contesting Women's Rights Across Regime Types: A System Dynamics Approach

Many governments around the world enforce discriminatory norms that violate human rights. Interested actors can challenge and, potentially, change these norms via a process known as contestation. In this paper, using mixed‐methods, I developed a system dynamic simulator based on social identity theory and applied that simulator to contrasting regime structures, democratic and non‐democratic, to generate new theoretical predictions. While the basic model for both democratic and non‐democratic contestations is the same, model simulations illustrate that cultural differences are significant moderators that substantially shape whether or not powerless actors can transform harmful norms over time. I find that, in non‐democratic contexts, fear of severe government punishment can play a significant role in postponing societal change, even in societies where a substantial portion of the population recognizes that the existing norm is harmful. To explain this phenomenon, I introduce the concept of ‘trapped opposition’, which describes formerly public, organized resistance that following extreme repression becomes fragmented, siloed and durably deterred from collective public action, even as anti‐norm preferences and organizational capacity persist within the population. Finally, I compare the simulated results to real‐world events in two cases of norm contestation by powerless actors: 1) the U.S. women's suffrage movement from 1830 to 1920 (using existing data), and 2) the Iranian women's suffrage movement from 1880 to 1963 (original data via an expert survey, as well as panel data analysis).