As Americans’ trust in their government—most specifically Congress—has declined over the past half century, it has become increasingly important to answer the question of who does or does not trust government and why. Trust research tends to take for granted that sex affects trust—most studies control for it—but results have been mixed. This could be because researchers have been looking at the wrong aspect of gender, relying on the traditional distinction of sex rather than an alternative—the non-sex-specific distinction of feminine personality traits. These traits are communal in nature, and as such, they may lead to higher levels of trust in government. This article analyzes the potential effect of femininity, demonstrating that feminine personalities are significantly more trusting of our governing institutions than nonfeminine personalities.

The social and economic forces that shape attitudes toward the welfare state are of central concern to social scientists. Scholarship in this area has paid limited attention to how working part-time, the employment status of nearly 20% of the U.S. workforce, affects redistribution preferences. In this article, we theoretically develop and empirically test an argument about the ways that part-time work, and its relationship to gender, shape redistribution preferences. We articulate two gender-differentiated pathways—one material and one about threats to social status—through which part-time work and gender may jointly shape individuals’ preferences for redistribution. We test our argument using cross-sectional and panel data from the General Social Survey in the United States. We find that the positive relationship between part-time employment, compared to full-time employment, and redistribution preferences is stronger for men than for women. Indeed, we do not detect a relationship between part-time work and redistribution preferences among women. Our results provide support for a gendered relationship between part-time employment and redistribution preferences and demonstrate that both material and status-based mechanisms shape this association.

When Argentine president Mauricio Macri announced in March 2018 that he supported a “responsible and mature” national debate regarding the decriminalization of abortion, it took many by surprise. In a Catholic country with a center-right government, where public opinion regarding abortion had hardly moved in decades—why would the abortion debate surface in Argentina when it did? Our answer is grounded in the social movements literature, as we argue that the organizational framework necessary for growing the decriminalization movement had already been built by an emergent feminist movement of unprecedented scope and influence: Ni Una Menos. By expanding the movement's social justice frame from gender violence to encompass abortion rights, feminist activists were able to change public opinion and expand the scope of debate, making salient an issue that had long been politically untouchable. We marshal evidence from multiple surveys carried out before, during, and after the abortion debate and in-depth interviews to shed light on the sources of abortion rights movements in unlikely contexts.

A case study of reform in police governance provides an opportunity to examine how the micro-foundations of institutional change impact gender policy. The literature has established an association between institutional transformation and opportunities for gender policy change. It is clear that new actors and new rules are significant, but less is known about their interaction. Elinor Ostrom's concept of “rules-in-use” captures rules and their enactment in combination. Interviews with a new cadre of directly elected police and crime commissioners in England revealed the ways in which they worked with new institutional rules to prioritize violence against women and girls. Seven sets of rules are identified, arranged along a formal-informal continuum. Most were not specifically “about gender” but, when enacted by motivated, knowledgeable and reflexive actors, they facilitated gender policy change. A focus on micro-foundations enables the identification of institutional building blocks for gender policy change, highlighting the co-constitutive relationship between actors and rules.

In this study, we report results of a survey of U.S. state senators about their experiences of psychological abuse, physical violence, and sexualized abuse and violence on the job, as well as gender differences among senators. Overall, our results indicate that more than 80% of state senators reported having faced abuse and violence, and women senators reported more physical violence than men. Moreover, we found differences in the factors that contributed to abuse and violence among women and men state senators. Most notably, women with higher levels of power (party or committee leaders) were more likely than other women to experience psychological abuse and sexualized abuse and violence, and Democratic women senators faced more sexualized abuse and violence than Republican women. The implications for continued service by state senators in the face of these experiences, the likelihood of attracting future candidates, and the implications for gender diversity in office are explored.

Analyzing votes on abortion-related legislation from the 103rd (1993–94) to the 115th (2017–18) Congresses, we find that both gender and party influence members’ voting behavior. Among Republicans, women are more likely than men to oppose pro-life initiatives, although the impact of gender attenuates over time. Among Democrats, apparent gender differences in voting behavior are explained by the nature of the districts they represent. We also find that the type of abortion issue impacts the influence of gender. Republican women are more likely than Republican men to defect on policies that highlight women's autonomy, such as on bills related to contraception, while Democratic men are more likely than Democratic women to support legislation related to abortion bans. These gender differences reflect a complex dynamic of members’ responsiveness to public opinion on specific issues and party efforts to influence that opinion in ways that favor perceptions of party issue expertise.

Research on political representation demonstrates that the presence of historically underrepresented groups in political office (descriptive representation) can have not only a substantive impact on policies and procedures but also a symbolic impact that changes the attitudes and even behavior of those groups. The dynamics of group identity and its significance for representation, however, are complicated. Individuals often hold multiple identities, and the meanings attached to those identities may vary in relation to each other and to the particular political context. In this article, we provide an intersectional analysis of two minoritized ethno-racial groups, African Americans and Latinos/as. Using data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, we explore the extent to which shared identity matters for perceptions of representation. Our findings demonstrate that while shared identity does influence perceptions of representation, the impact varies in complicated ways that are simultaneously raced and gendered.

Do messages that evoke a gendered leadership style affect attitudes toward well-known candidates? If so, among what sorts of voters? I show that voters’ evaluations of national politicians, including Hillary Clinton, can be influenced by presenting candidates as stereotypically masculine or feminine leaders. In two survey experiments of California registered voters (n = 1,800 each) conducted at the height of the 2016 presidential election campaign, I find that, on average, voters seemed to prefer both male and female politicians more when they were described as having feminine leadership styles. However, clear heterogeneous treatment effects occurred: Democrats, liberals, and women from all parties evaluated politicians more favorably when they were described as feminine; Republicans, conservatives, and voters for Donald Trump evaluated the same candidates less favorably when described as feminine. The findings have implications for scholarship that links gender stereotyping, partisanship, and ideology to voter behavior.

This article seeks to understand why Ghana, unlike several other African countries, has seen relatively few women appointed as ministers to the cabinet since the transition to democracy. We draw on Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet's 2019 book Cabinets, Ministers and Gender, which provides an in-depth analysis of the cabinet appointment process in seven democracies (but no African cases) and demonstrates that the cabinet appointment process is gendered—that is, men and women have different (and unequal) opportunities to be appointed as cabinet ministers. This article covers Ghana's Fourth Republic, during which women's presence in cabinets has increased slowly but steadily. We rely on media reports from five recent presidential administrations and semistructured, in-depth interviews with selected informants, as well as other primary and secondary sources. We find that while Ghana has a fairly empowered president who could appoint a gender parity cabinet, the formal and informal rules governing the selection of cabinet ministers—for example, those related to regional balance and “minister MPs”—work against more women in the cabinet.