Emancipation or Protection? The Public Policy Effects of Patriarchy

How does the structure of patriarchy in a society shape the public policies its government adopts? The conventional story focuses on women as objects of policy — domestic violence law, reproductive rights, family transfers. Emancipation or Protection? reframes the question around the form patriarchy takes: emancipatory, where the policy lever rewards women’s labor-market and political participation, versus protective, where the lever conditions state support on traditional family structure. The paper traces how patriarchal form maps onto specific policy bundles and tests the argument across a comparative sample.