A higher percentage of women consistently run as candidates and serve as the lieutenant governor when running on the same ticket with the governor than for any other state elective office. In this article, we provide the first examination of how running with a woman affects vote choice. We conclude that running-mate sex does influence vote choice in gubernatorial elections, even when we take into account a wide range of individual-level and electoral characteristics that are related to voter preference. Further, voter preference for tickets containing women running mates is not consistent, but rather depends upon certain electoral circumstances. Our findings have implications for assessing how voters respond to women candidates and how gender plays into strategic calculations in state-level politics.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 American Political Science Association Meeting. This research was funded by a grant from the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Union College. We thank Mark Anderson, Alla Abramov, Rhobie Langwig, and Nish Patel for assistance with data collection and Jeff Koch and the anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on the project. Special thanks go to Bruce Connolly, Courtney Seymour, and David Gerhan of Schaffer Library, Union College, for locating data that was especially difficult to find.

Past research has identified several factors that help explain what happened to civic engagement after World War II, but it has not adequately explained how these factors mattered to particular groups of citizens defined by gender, race, or class. This essay reexamines the dominant account of postwar civic decline by highlighting the relational nature of political change and the processes through which social groups transform. It explores the development of three women's associations: the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), and Woman's Division of Christian Service (WDCS) (predecessor of the United Methodist Women). A variety of postwar changes—in the realities of women's lives, the appearance of new social movement organizations, and the formation of the United Nations, for example—pressured the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS to adopt new organizational methods that blurred civic–political distinctions. Postwar women's associations experimented with the structures, strategies, and identities now common to modern-day interest groups, providing a critical foundation for a new politics of gender that would emerge in the 1960s. If these reinvented and ascendant organizations were more attuned to emerging political opportunities, however, they also translated into less active and less inclusive forms of participation.The author would like to thank Kristi Andersen, Elisabeth Clemens, McGee Young, Kathleen Laughlin, and the editors and anonymous reviewers from Politics & Gender for their thoughtful contributions to this manuscript. Draft sections of this essay were presented at 2004 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Journal of Policy History, and the Social Science History Association.

Existing studies of political ambition tell two different stories, male and female. Most research on political ambition focuses on the desire of men and women to hold political office at the state or national level and examines the ambitions of those already employed in the labor force. Scholarly inattention to ambition among activists at the local, neighborhood level may lead us to erroneous conclusions about people's motivations for engaging in politics, particularly along racial lines. A focus on those already in the workforce may distort our understanding of the factors that drive the political ambitions of women in particular. This study confirms that men and women have distinct paths of family socialization, qualifications, high school and college socialization, and life situations on the trail to ambition. It also shows that the local context changes the explanations for ambition. In particular, race, combined with the holding of conservative religious beliefs, varies in its impact upon white and minority women's expressions of ambition for future public office. In addition, the experience of sex discrimination has the countersocialization effect of increasing women's ambition.Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2003 meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois and the 2005 meetings of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana. I would like to thank William G. Jacoby, Marcia Moore, the editors and anonymous reviewers for their generous comments in the preparation of this manuscript. Also thanks to Kay Lehman Schlozman and David Campbell for their comments and redirection on a much earlier version of this work.

This essay explores the controversy spawned by the release, in April, 2004, of the photographs taken by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Its particular concern is with photographs that depict American servicewomen engaged in various forms of abusive conduct against Iraqi prisoners. In its opening half, the essay examines and criticizes the responses to these photographs offered, first, by right-wing commentators and, second, by American feminists, most notably Barbara Ehrenreich. All read these photographs as a referendum on feminism and, more particularly, its commitment to the cause of gender equality; and all do so, I argue, on the basis of a naive understanding of gender. In its latter half, accordingly, the essay offers a more adequate understanding of gender, one loosely grounded in the work of Judith Butler and the concept of performativity. Referencing various official interrogation manuals, as well as the investigative reports released in the wake of this scandal, the essay employs this concept in offering a more adequate account of the gendered import of the deeds depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs. It concludes by arguing that what is important about these photographs is neither whether the perpetrators of the exploitation they depict are male or female, nor whether the deeds they portray somehow compromise the feminist quest for gender equality. Rather, what is important are the multiple ways in which specifically gendered practices, which can be detached from the bodies they conventionally regulate, are deployed as elements within a more comprehensive network of technologies aimed at disciplining prisoners and so confirming their status as abject subjects of U.S. military power.This essay has its origins in a roundtable titled “Gender Relations in the Age of Neo-Liberalism,” which was conducted in conjunction with the 2005 meeting of the Western Political Science Association. I wish to thank the other participations on that roundtable, Jane Bayes, Mary Hawkesworth, and Judith Hicks Stiehm, as well as Paul Apostolidis, Renee Heberle, Jinee Lokaneeta, Jeannie Morefield, Aaron Perrine, Kari Tupper, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of the essay.

Increasing the number of women in positions of political power is top priority for women's movements and for governments around the world. Activists, international institutions, and national governments have come to see gender quota laws as the best way to achieve this goal. In the past 15 years, more than 40 countries have adopted measures that require a certain number of those running for or holding legislative office to be women. Political science research on this topic has hewn closely to empirical questions about this phenomenon: Under what conditions do countries adopt gender quota laws? What impact do they have on the percentage of women elected to office? What difference do “quota women” make once elected? This debate, by contrast, focuses on normative questions about gender quota laws. Are quotas a good idea? Should more countries adopt them? Should the United States consider them? We have invited leading scholars to step back from the more cautious findings of their research to tell us what they really think.

As I write, descriptive representation by gender improves substantive outcomes for women in every polity for which we have a measure. And as I write, significant representation by gender cannot be achieved in any existing polity without some form of quota. At this historical moment, therefore, quotas play an important democratic role in increasing gender equality. Yet because quotas potentially produce institutional rigidity and their need should decrease as structural and cultural conditions improve, it is best to institute them in their most flexible form. Because quotas also encourage essentialism, it is best to institute them in conjunction with major efforts to define in nonessentialist ways the reasons for their institution. Although quotas will inevitably increase essentialist beliefs, a conscious, concerted campaign could mitigate the most destructive effects of this tendency.Many thanks to Lisa Baldez for help in editing these thoughts. Comments welcome: [email protected].

Are gender quotas a good idea? Yes, for two reasons: Quotas are an effective mechanism for improving women's numerical representation, and they encourage new attitudes towards women in politics. I argue that the numerical and ideational gains brought by gender quotas outweigh the potential pitfalls they might introduce. From a pragmatic standpoint, quotas constitute an imperfect means to a positive end: women's political empowerment. What is more, formal rules may become norms, reinforcing changing attitudes.I would like to thank Marilyn Dantico, Kim Fridkin, Adrian Pantoja, Becki Scola, and the editors of Politics & Gender for their constructive comments on this essay.

October 3, 2005, marks a dozen years since Argentina started the quota ball rolling via the first use of gender quota legislation applying to all parties for the election of national legislators. For the October 3, 1993, Argentine Chamber of Deputies election, all political parties were required to present closed party lists on which women accounted for a minimum of 30% of the candidates, and furthermore, a comparable proportion of these women had to be placed in “electable” positions on the lists (Jones 1996). Although the initial implementation process was not free of problems (Durrieu 1999), in a short time the gender quota became an established fixture of the Argentine political system. The impact of the quota legislation on the representation of women in the Argentine congress was nothing short of dramatic, with women now accounting for 34% and 44% of the seats in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and Senate, respectively, a marked contrast to the situation prior to the adoption of the quota legislation, when women on average held a mere 5% of the seats in both legislative bodies.

Jailbait: The Politics of Statutory Rape Laws in the United States. By Carolyn E. Cocca. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2004. 228 pp. Paper $21.95.

Carolyn Cocca notes at the outset of her book that she is interested not only in the nuts and bolts of morality policy but also in how the narratives about those policies circulate and justify, in this case, the regulation of sexuality. The book breaks ground in its sustained attention to an issue that has been insufficiently addressed by political scientists.

Political Women: The Women's Movement, Political Institutions, the Battle for Women's Suffrage and the ERA. By Alana S. Jeydel. New York: Routledge. 2004. 223 pp. $125.00.

Resource mobilization theory and, more recently, political process/opportunity theories dominate the study of social movements. The pioneering work of Jo Freeman and Anne Costain uses these theories to explain the emergence and mobilization of the contemporary U.S. women's movement. According to this perspective, women's movements have the incentive to act when their chances for success are high. They take advantage of new opportunities and open new ones for themselves. These opportunities are a function of their internal resources and of external factors, such as governmental structures and rules that provide access. Because the U.S. women's movement often has been more oriented toward changing gender role norms and practices, rather than achieving rights, it has received relatively little attention from political opportunity structure (POS) scholars.

VideoStyle, WebStyle, NewsStyle: Gender and Candidate Communication. By Dianne G. Bystrom, Mary Christine Banwart, Lynda Lee Kaid, and Terra A. Robertson. New York: Routledge. 2004. 240 pp. $23.95.

In their ambitious and timely book, Dianne Bystrom and her colleagues seek to answer the following question: Why are women still so underrepresented among political officials? The authors design an impressive study to examine whether gender differences in campaigning style influence voters' reactions to candidates.

Activist Faith: Grassroots Women in Democratic Brazil and Chile. By Carol Drogus and Hannah Stewart-Gambino. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. 212 pp. $55.00.

In the 1970s and 1980s, civil society–based movements rose up to fight against authoritarian regimes in the Southern Cone of Latin America. Some of the most unexpected, and inspirational, of the actors involved were poor women. Many of them were mobilized through Christian “base communities,” lay study and action groups organized by the Catholic Church during its liberation theology period.

List of contributors.

On behalf of the Editorial Board, the Editors thank the following scholars who generously reviewed manuscripts for Politics & Gender in 2005.

Index to Volume 1.