Reimagining Trust as Feminist Praxis: A Transnational Analysis of Gender and Public Confidence in Women's Organizations

Abstract

This paper examines trust in women's organizations as a gendered and contextually embedded dimension of institutional trust, drawing on data from 90,192 respondents across 60 countries using the 2017–2022 World Values Survey, the World Bank, and Varieties of Democracy. Employing linear multilevel mixed-effects models, the analysis conceptualizes trust in women's organizations as a form of feminist praxis and as a socially situated evaluation shaped by universalized assumptions about women's shared interests, experiences, and gender inequalities. The findings show that women express significantly higher trust in women's organizations than men, although the magnitude of this difference is small and varies across countries. Integrating critical transnational feminist theory with cross-national quantitative analysis, the study contributes to debates on institutional trust and transnational feminism by demonstrating how transnational feminist mobilizing norms circulate globally yet are unevenly recognized and institutionalized across geopolitical contexts. Methodologically, this paper advances a decolonial and inclusive feminist approach to quantitative analysis by mobilizing multilevel modeling to center geospatial variation in women's organizing and empirically demonstrate how the politics of difference in feminism shape trust in women's organizations, thereby challenging Global North, Eurocentric, and universalist assumptions through which White feminism has historically reproduced hierarchy and the limits of solidarity.