Much has changed since 2007–2010 when I co-edited the journal Politics & Gender (P&G) with Kathleen Dolan. In this essay, I reflect on the changes in the journal and the subfield of a comparative politics of gender. Dolan and I were the second team to edit the journal, following in the footsteps of the inaugural editors Karen Beckwith and Lisa Baldez. The journal was finding its footing at the time, and increasing submissions was a key concern. This year, on its 20th anniversary, we can celebrate that the journal, like the subfield of gender and politics, has flourished and matured. The number of articles published by the journal has multiplied exponentially and the quality of articles has improved significantly. Moreover, the journal has demonstrably helped shape the subfield of a comparative politics of gender in ways that I outline below.

The Dutch parliamentary far right has been considered a relatively liberal outlier to the gender politics of the European far right, yet recent years have shown the increasing anti-gender mobilization of the party Forum voor Democratie(FvD). Based on a theoretical framework of anti-gender mobilization, the far right, and politics of knowledge, this article explores anti-gender politics as a form of alternative knowledge production through a qualitative content analysis of the FvD’s online presence. Through applying Verloo’s concept of the episteme, this article’s findings show that the FvD mobilizes against epistemic institutions by claiming they disseminate dangerous knowledge about gender, which they argue presents a fundamental threat to society, captured in conspiratorial terms like “transgender ideology” and “woke.” Simultaneously, the party promotes illiberal gender politics through the establishment of alternative epistemic institutions. This article shows how far-right actors may promote anti-gender politics by presenting themselves as “alternative intellectuals” who seek to carve out an epistemic niche alongside the mainstream.

Does the situation in Afghanistan amount to persecution due to the accumulation of repressive measures enacted against women and is it sufficient that women are affected by such measures merely on the basis of their gender? While these two questions remain in front of the Court of Justice of the EU, several EU member states have moved to grant asylum to women and girls from Afghanistan on general risks of gender-based persecution. This dynamism in asylum regulations across the EU has occurred alongside renewed discussions around gender-based persecution and gender apartheid in international criminal law in light of the ongoing process for a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty. In this article, I put these developments into conversation through case study method and legal-institutional analysis, and argue that the historical link between international refugee law and international criminal law provides a space to envision an integrated system of protection around gender-related claims. To this end, I offer three outlooks for establishing general risks of gender-based persecution in international refugee law and the relationship between gender apartheid and asylum.

Previous research has found that individuals harboring hostile sexist attitudes are more likely to support the use of political violence. In this study, we examine this relationship further. We theorize that the impact of hostile sexism on support for political violence is mediated through two mutually reinforcing factors: social dominance orientation and political illiberalism. We test this argument using an original survey we administered to over 1,400 subjects in the United States. We employ two operationalizations of individuals’ support for political violence: support in the abstract and support for specific acts of political violence. We find that individuals who exhibit hostile sexism are substantially more likely to support political violence, both abstract and specific. Moreover, we find that both social dominance orientation and political illiberalism together mediate 64.9% of the effect of hostile sexism on support for political violence in the abstract and 80.5% of the effect on support for specific acts of political violence. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings.

As the number of ethnic minority politicians increase across countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, so too have instances in which these officeholders act against the communities they descriptively represent. In this contribution, we introduce the concept of paradoxical representation which we argue functions through neoliberal, post-racial scripts of color-blindness and meritocracy. Similar to research on gender representation which calls into question assumptions that substantive representation will follow unproblematically from women’s descriptive representation (Celis and Childs 2012), we argue that ethnic minority representatives can act as “post-racial gatekeepers.” This means paradoxically working against rather than for marginalized ethnic minority groups (Saini, Bankole, and Begum 2023). Through political discourse and policymaking, these representatives construct and “gatekeep” hegemonic ideas around race, racism, gender, and migration.

If one were to write the history of representation from an intersectional perspective, it would read as a veritable comedy of errors. A story, in short of inclusion and exclusion, privileging and marginalization, and of good, mis-, poor, and non-representation. No facet of politics is untouched by these dynamics – whether civil society or formal political participation, political recruitment and leadership, or policy and legislation (Siow 2023).

Nancy Pelosi makes history. She was the first woman elected to a high-ranking position in the US House of Representatives when she became the Democratic Whip in 2001. She made more history as the first female Democratic Leader in 2003, and first woman elected as Speaker of the House in 2007. She made history by remaining the Democratic Leader even after losing the House majority. Pelosi made history yet again when she was again elected Speaker in 2019, joining Sam Rayburn as the only House leader to lose and then regain the Speakership.

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade, reversing the nearly 50-year-old landmark decision that affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. Several months later, voters turned out in record numbers for the 2022 midterms, though a widely predicted “Red Wave” vote did not materialize. There has since been speculation that overturning Roe v. Wade played a crucial role in the midterms, generating a “Blue Tsunami” or “Roevember” driven largely by young, pro-choice women voting out of self-interest. We posit instead that group empathy was the key motivational mechanism in the link between opposition to Dobbs and voter mobilization in that election. Analyzing data from an original national survey, we find that opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade did not directly affect one’s likelihood to vote unless one is empathic toward groups in distress. Such opposition was actually demobilizing for those low in empathy. The findings indicate group empathy serves as a catalyst for people to act on their opposition to policies that harm disadvantaged groups, in this case women as a marginalized political minority losing their constitutional right to bodily autonomy and access to reproductive care.

Previous research has examined whether voters will punish candidates who engage in sexual harassment in national-level elections, revealing partisanship as a strong predictor of electoral punishment. Using original survey data, we evaluate whether the public supports a broader range of sanctions (e.g. apologies, training, and removal from office) that legislatures can impose upon politicians who perpetrate sexual harassment in Canada’s municipalities, a non-partisan context. In the absence of partisan-based motivated reasoning, we find that women are more likely than men to support the removal from office of a councillor who engages in sexual harassment. Respondents who do not believe that sexism is a problem and are skeptical about claims of gender-based violence are also less likely to support punishment in these cases. These findings have relevance for democratic institutions, revealing that sanctions imposed on politicians who perpetrate sexual harassment can help maintain political accountability and restore public trust.

Women are globally underrepresented as political leaders; as of January 2023, only 17 countries had a woman head of government. Included in this small group is Samoa, which elected Fiame Naomi Mata’afa as its first woman prime minister in 2021 after a fiercely contested election and subsequent protracted legal disputes centered around interpretations of Samoa’s 10% gender quota. Drawing on data from the Pacific Attitudes Survey, the first large-scale, nationally representative popular political attitudes survey conducted in the Pacific region, this article examines how the political environment in Samoa shapes opportunities for women’s political participation and leadership. Using the theoretical framework of cohabitation, it finds that although there is an enabling environment for women’s participation and leadership in formal politics, women’s access to decision-making spaces more broadly is still constrained by norms of traditional leadership. This speaks to traditional and nontraditional political norms and practices that coexist, at times uneasily, alongside one another.

Representation scholarship has drawn from intersectionality theory 0to examine how systemic structures of oppression and privilege have created social groups with distinct political needs. Derived from Black feminist theory that recognizes that identities are mutually constitutive and interconnected, intersectionality research is rooted in the lived experiences of marginalized groups who call attention to social (in)justice. Empirical scholarship building on the insights of Black feminist theorists such as Collins and Bilge (2016), Hill Collins (1990), Crenshaw (1989; 1991), and King (1988) has constituted nothing less than a paradigm shift in the study of gender and politics. Nevertheless, there remain an array of opportunities to expand upon the potential for intersectional frameworks and methods, as well as pressing new questions concerning the operationalization of intersectionality itself. This Critical Perspectives section offers a moment to take stock of these developments and debates, as well as to highlight new pathways for scholarship committed to centering the margins and considering the nexus of multiple power structures that frame our political lives.

Do recent increases in women’s representation around the world have implications for international relations? We argue that greater representation of women in legislatures increases the likelihood of human rights treaty ratification for two reasons. First, given their shared gendered experiences of exclusion and discrimination, women legislators will advocate on behalf of marginalized groups on an international scale as transnational surrogate representatives. Second, women legislators may be more inclined to prioritize the ratification of human rights treaties because these treaties align with their domestic policy preferences, which aim to support marginalized groups. We contend that, in countries where ratification depends upon legislative approval, legislatures are more likely to ratify human rights treaties as women’s presence increases. Using an original dataset of 201 multilateral treaties, we find that countries become more likely to ratify human rights treaties as levels of women’s legislative representation increase.

Election violence is increasingly taking place online. However, we still do not know much about how such attacks affect the representation of politically marginalized groups such as women. This article develops and applies strategies for analyzing (gendered) exposure to and impacts of online attacks against political candidates. It focuses on the 2019 parliamentary election campaign in Tunisia and combines manual analysis of Tunisian candidates’ public Facebook pages with candidate interviews. We find no gendered patterns in exposure to online election violence in the Facebook data and a low general exposure to attacks. The interview data nevertheless suggests gendered perceptions and impacts of attacks, as well as a perception among the candidates that online election violence is widespread and problematic. These discrepancies highlight that we need a combination of methods and materials to capture the multifaceted nature of online election violence, and in particular those that directly link candidate exposure to impact.

This article analyses the possibility of an intersectional understanding of “disability” in relation to Article 14(2)(c) of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol). Adopted in July 2003 and enforced since November 2005, the Maputo Protocol is considered a ground-breaking international human rights instrument (Johnson 2023, 329). It is the first treaty to comprehensively protect the reproductive rights of African women, including the contentious issue of abortion (Maputo Protocol 2003, Article 14(2)(c); Banda 2006, 82).

Elected officials can often successfully increase voter support in their district by “bringing home the bacon,” yet theory suggests that the electoral effects of such efforts may depend on the legislator’s gender and whether the legislator delivered benefits in a stereotypically feminine (e.g., healthcare) or masculine (e.g., agriculture) issue area. Using both observational and experimental data in the United States, we find weak, limited evidence that issue area conditions the electoral impact of credit claiming for legislators of either gender. In addition, we show that men and women are rewarded comparably when they secure benefits for their district, regardless of issue area. Our findings suggest that women legislators — typically more effective than men at securing these benefits — can use distributive politics and credit claiming as an effective electoral strategy without concern that issue-based gender biases in the electorate will get in the way.

In 2020, Asian Americans were the least descriptively represented at all levels of elected office compared to whites, Blacks, and Latinos (Sedique, Bhojwani, and Lee 2020). In this context, Asian women lagged behind Asian men in holding local-level positions, yet they surpassed Asian men in holding federal and statewide offices, and they led 81% of state- and local-level Asian civil rights organizations (AAPI Power Fund 2020; Reflective Democracy Campaign 2021). Do gender disparities in Asian American political representation arise because Asian women are less likely to run for office than Asian men, or because they are less likely to win elections? Do these disparities vary across levels of office? And are they unique to Asian Americans?

Violence against women in politics is on the rise, threatening political achievements with respect to equality. Little research, however, has been conducted on the experiences of women from minority communities. This article, therefore, takes an intersectional approach to explore how gender, religion, and other categories of difference intersect when it comes to Muslim women’s experiences in the UK. Based on a longitudinal case study of Bradford West during the 2015, 2017, and 2019 general elections that combines participant observations, qualitative interviews, and a Twitter analysis, we argue that, in addition to the violence often experienced by women, Muslim women are also confronted with Islamophobic bias and abuse, as well as intersectional intimidation and harassment from within the Muslim community in their constituencies. Our case study approach, however, also reveals the existence of appreciation and support for Muslim women in politics that needs to be nurtured to counter abuse.