In this article, we rely on data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) to examine the impact of gender for U.S. senators running for reelection. We propose a theoretical explanation for why an incumbent's gender may influence how citizens evaluate senators, and we present empirical evidence showing that people develop distinct impressions of men and women senators during campaigns. In the 2006 election cycle, women senators were viewed more positively than their male counterparts. Some of the advantages women senators enjoyed were consistent with established gender stereotypes. In particular, women senators were viewed as more honest and more caring than male senators. Moreover, women senators were viewed as more competent at dealing with health-care issues. However, we did not find evidence for gender stereotypes that traditionally produce more positive views of male senators. For example, we did not find that male senators were viewed as stronger leaders or more experienced than women senators. People did not view male senators as better able to deal with economic issues.

Since the 1990s, many countries have adopted policies aimed at combating violence against women; however, despite widespread policy adoption, actual reform has been uneven at best. In this article, I analyze the role played by international organizations and transnational networks in promoting women's human rights. In the first section, I examine the different mechanisms by which states adopt new policies and the implications they have on prospects for implementation. I propose a new model, the umbrella pattern, that accounts for the decoupling of policy and practice caused by states with limited local capacity. In addition, I argue that international organizations can improve the prospects for domestic implementation by engaging in capacity-building strategies, such as resource distribution and the facilitation of transnational networks. In the second section, I present an empirical study of the European Union and its efforts to address violence against women. In regards to policy adoption, I evaluate its efforts at policy promotion and then provide a comparative and aggregate analysis of policy adoption in member and candidate states. To address EU capacity-building efforts, I focus on one particular initiative, the Daphne project, which is the EU's primary mechanism for addressing gender violence.

Between 1993 and 2000, nearly every democracy in Latin America passed a law prohibiting domestic violence. Between 2001 and 2006, five countries strengthened their legislation, and Brazil passed its first law. What explains these advances with respect to women's rights? While other work has focused on domestic or international factors, this article brings to light the role of the region. It reveals that the two inter-American women's rights organizations have been active in both establishing regional norms and promoting their national adoption and implementation. While this suggests that regional governance can promote women's social rights, there is no automatic institutionalization of these norms. Case studies on Chile and Brazil illustrate the impact of national context.

The most conservative party in Chile, the Unión Demócrata Independiente, has nominated and elected more women to local-level office than any of the other major parties in the country. In this article, I argue that the candidate selection processes used by this party explain how it has proposed more women candidates for municipal office than parties with defined ideological commitments to increasing women's representation. The party's use of candidate selection procedures that are both exclusive and centralized allow women to avoid important obstacles on the path to obtaining candidacies. The case of the Unión Demócrata Independiente is important, first, because it allows us to understand how a party without a commitment to increasing women's participation can nonetheless do so, and second, because it lays bare the causal mechanisms of candidate selection procedures and increases our understanding of the effects that these processes have on female representation.

How might one reconcile feminist international relations theorizing with quantitative methods, if they can be reconciled at all? This question has occupied a central place in the field of feminist international relations theory since its inception, and while it is not my intention to rehash it in its entirety here, my story sheds light on the difficulties that feminist IR scholars may face in choosing the quantitative route. My essay highlights these conundrums from different stages of the research process: formulation of the research question, selection of a research method, usage of quantitative methods, and the dissemination of the findings. I conclude with questions for further consideration.

Feminist research is motivated by and concerned with social justice, equality, and the empowerment of women and other marginalized groups. The method I have chosen to further my feminist-inspired research is merely an analytical tool. Feminist principles apply to the act of research, the questions asked, and the data to be collected. Thus, the intersection of feminism and quantitative analysis offers a new method of knowledge production for the study of international relations. Yet my research design is traditional: Based on theory, testable hypotheses are formulated, data gathered, and findings reported. The purpose of this feminist-oriented quantitative research is to produce a body of knowledge that can explain, predict, or help elucidate empirical phenomena relevant to women's lives and issues.

What are the injustices of the world? What causes them? How might we mitigate them? Feminism needs empirical inquiry in all subfields to inform our understanding of the world and our normative reflections on it. Feminist theorists do not necessarily need to do it ourselves, but we do need it. Because we need empirical research, we need to be able to evaluate its methodology. In international relations, feminist scholars adopt and develop methods previously developed in other fields for nonfeminist questions. Feminist theorists need to evaluate this adoption and development by feminist IR in order to learn all we can and should from feminist IR scholarship.