Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments: Women and Elected Office in Contemporary Western Europe. By Miki Caul Kittilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2006. 190 pp. $64.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This is an ambitious book that takes a comprehensive and multimethod approach to understanding the question of women's participation in parliaments. Miki Caul Kittilson proposes a gendered-institutions argument that focuses on political parties as the key mechanism for increases in women's parliamentary representation. She moves away from supply arguments that place the onus on women to run by instead focusing on how parties can be transformed to encourage women to run. She argues that women will be most effective in their efforts to gain a political foothold where they “recognize favorable conditions within the party and party system, and where they devise context-contingent strategies for inclusion” (p. 2).