Although previous research shows compellingly that female officeholders engage in advocacy for women, measured in a range of ways, at greater rates than their male colleagues, studies have also shown that the content of this advocacy is highly varied (Celis 2006; Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004; Reingold 2000). Further, identifying the factors that shape which legislators engage in which kind of advocacy is more complex than merely distinguishing between women and men or between feminist and traditionalist orientations. Many diverse voices engage in the substantive representation of women, which is broadly defined as all of the ways in which representatives “act for” women (Mansbridge 1999; Phillips 1995; Pitkin 1967).

In this study, we examine substantive representation of women in the 2011–15 Turkish Parliament by focusing on sponsorship of private members’ bills by members of parliament (MPs) across eight major issue areas. The Turkish case offers new insights into women's representation, not only because this topic is unexplored in the Turkish context but also because it provides an opportunity to examine the tension between gender as a social identity and ideology as a political identity in a legislature characterized by disciplined political parties and low gender parity. Findings indicate that women MPs in Turkey substantively represent women by sponsoring more bills on women's rights and equality issues than their male colleagues, despite their low numbers in parliament and affiliation with highly disciplined parties. Party ideology also shapes women MPs’ issue priorities depending on the emphasis placed by the parties on different issue areas. Whereas left-wing women MPs sponsor more bills on women's rights and equality issues defined with a feminist accent, right-wing women MPs sponsor more bills on issues regarding children and family. Left-wing women also differ significantly from right-wing women in their sponsorship of bills on health and social affairs issues, as left-wing parties prioritize those issues more than right-wing parties.

Two things distinguish Taiwan from other Asian countries regarding women's political representation: a high level of female political representation by Asian standards and an early implementation of quotas by global standards. Women constitute 33.6% in the country's parliament, second in Asia only to East Timor (38.5%). Taiwan has also achieved a higher level of women's parliamentary representation than Japan (8.1%), South Korea (15.7%), and Singapore (23%). Unlike other young democracies that adopted gender quotas in the 1990s or even later, Taiwan has had reserved seats for women since the early 1950s when the country was under authoritarian rule. Quota reforms were later instigated subsequent to Taiwan's democratization.

A number of studies have shown that men and women hold dissimilar opinions on a variety of issues. While we have been cognizant of the existence of the gender gap, none of the extant research examines the extent to which these differences are a consequence of period and cohort effects simultaneously. Cohort and period explanations are central to how scholars theorize large-scale changes in public opinion. This study uses a multilevel approach—employing cross-classified random effects models—to explore the underpinnings of gender differences on social and cultural issues (such as social welfare opinions, gender roles, sexuality, abortion, racial equality, and crime- and justice-related attitudes) stemming from the replacement of individuals or because men and women are changing how they think. The advantage is that this approach encourages an effort to examine the relative impact of compositional and contextual factors over time and across birth cohorts and assesses the consequences of how changes in these factors affect some of our most fundamental hypotheses about the origins of a gendered culture war.

Research on the impact of gender quotas in open-list proportional representation systems has described quotas as ineffective or even paradoxical. While some authors argue that gender quotas without a placement mandate will be essentially ineffective since most women will be nominated to unpromising positions, others suppose that women will be disadvantaged by gender quotas because the increase in the number of female candidates will decrease the average number of preferential votes cast for women. We reexamine the evidence for these claims by analyzing the case of Poland. We demonstrate that the gender quota introduced there in 2011 increased the number of women placed at promising ballot positions and had very little impact on the number of preferential votes cast for women. Additionally, using simulations, we show that the quota had a positive impact on the number of elected women.

Gender and politics scholars have demonstrated that the women's movement plays a pivotal role in the adoption of gender quotas and in improving women's political representation (Bauer and Britton 2006; Dahlerup 2006; Krook 2009). They typically argue that domestic political transformations and international pressure help to mobilize the women's movement and demands for more women in elected offices (Huang, this volume; Krook, O'Brian, and Swip 2010). The South Korean case affirms these studies, as women's organizations often take advantage of the local political transformations to push for the gender quota adoption. However, we contend that without political parties' full commitment to implementing gender quotas and supplementing quotas with non-quota measures, efforts that prioritize the descriptive representation of women and formal quota legislation have brought only limited effects on enhancing women's political representation.

The surge in gender quotas across Africa raises questions about the varied impacts of these measures on women's empowerment in legislatures. This study contends that we must explore the diverse political conditions under which quotas are adopted to understand the potential for empowerment in legislatures. By examining political context, we can pinpoint why political parties acquiesce to gender quotas and how they design laws to either empower women or reinforce party control. Parties influence aspects of gender quota design that have lasting effects on women legislators elected through these laws. Employing a new measure of legislative leadership equity, this article compares political conditions under which quotas are adopted across 18 African countries and the extent to which women reach leadership positions following the implementation of a quota. Levels of political competition and women's mainstream political activity at the time of gender quota adoption indicate how the interests of political parties shape the design and effects of the law. That the outcomes of gender quotas are highly contingent on adoption context suggests the need for academics and policy makers to analyze the politics behind these measures to develop country-specific approaches for empowering women in politics.

Patriarchal practices and understandings, especially those based on religious teachings, are seen as serious hindrances to women's access to political power. This obstacle often is seen as greatest in countries where Islam is the dominant religion. This study offers preliminary insights regarding how the sex of political candidates affects voting perceptions and behavior in Turkey, one of the few democratic countries with a Muslim majority population. We designed an experiment in which university students read speeches by candidates from the two major parties (AKP and CHP), randomly varying the sex of the candidates. We find that candidate sex influences respondents' evaluations of areas of competence and perceptions of individual characteristics. It has almost no impact, however, on voting decisions. When it comes to voting, party support and policy stands are vastly more important than candidate sex, even for religiously observant voters.

Although the presence of women in the political science profession has increased rapidly since the 1980s, women still constitute less than 30% of the political science faculty nationwide and are more likely to find themselves in lower-paying and/or nontenure track positions (APSA 2011, 39; Evans and Moulder 2011). In the discipline, the position of gender and politics as a legitimate course of study has improved markedly since the 1970s (Lovenduski 1998; Mackay 2004; Murphy 2010; Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll 2006). As Childs and Krook (2006, 19) point out, “mainstream editors, publishers and conference conveners no longer feel able to ignore the work of feminist political scientists.” But they also present evidence that this improvement stops short of full incorporation into the discipline and note that there is still skepticism about the value of feminist scholarship. This skepticism is also present at the intersection of the profession and discipline: while there are no systematic data on the employment of gender and politics scholars, it is not rare for a gender and politics scholar to be told that her employment prospects would be better if she were to research something else (Childs and Krook 2006). Given the position of women in the profession and the status of gender and politics in the discipline, it is unsurprising that there is continued resistance to integrating gender into mainstream political science education (Baldez 2010; Lovenduski 2005; Murphy 2010).

In Russia and Turkey, the pro-authoritarian regimes have largely relied on nationalistic narratives appealing to cultural authenticity, tradition, and religion for legitimacy and cultural resonance at the mass level. Within this narrative, as it is argued, traditional notions of family and femininity are endorsed so as to represent national power against the West and to invigorate social unity and morality in Russian and Turkish societies. The revival of traditional gender norms and patterns that characterize the prevailing gender climates in Russia and Turkey is visible in the restructuring of gender equality mechanisms, the organization of reproduction in accordance with pronatalist policies, women's employment patterns, and state policy on combating domestic violence. This analysis relies on empirical data obtained through in-depth interviews with academics, representatives of international organizations and nongovernmental organizations, feminist activists, experts from women's shelters, and public officials based in Russia and Turkey. It is supplemented with a review of relevant examples from political discourse employed by political leaders, legal regulations, and public policies on these four areas. The article concludes that the revival of traditional gender categories and stereotypes aggravates the inferior position of women and unleashes discriminatory attitudes toward them at home, in society, and in the labor market.

Support for gender equality in the United States has gradually increased from the 1970s onward. Nonetheless, significant and varying gender gaps in this support become evident when we analyze public opinion over time and across generations. I utilize longitudinal survey data from national samples of three generations that came of age in the pre–women's movement era, during the era, and in the postmovement era, respectively. Three main indicators of attitudes about gender equality are employed and two types of gaps are formulated. Contemporaneous gender gaps—the differences between men and women at a given time—tended to increase over time and across succeeding generations. Longitudinal gaps, the differences in support between men and women across generations at different points in time, took the form of women becoming more liberal than men. Signs of growing resentment or ambivalence about gender equality among men appeared in the postmovement generation. A combination of generation and period effects accounts for these dynamics, the key factor being the interaction of gender with generational location and secular tides.The most recent support for the research reported here comes from the National Science Foundation and the Academic Senate of the University of California, Santa Barbara. I thank Lia Roberts and Kuang-hui Chen for their technical assistance. The data used here are available through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the Dilemmas of Democracy Conference, Loyola Marymount University, 2003.

It has long been claimed in the gender and politics literature that male and female legislators have different communication styles. The evidence for this claim has come mostly from interviews with legislators as the key informants on gendered differences. We contribute to this literature in two ways: First, we empirically examine speeches by Members of Parliament to establish whether gendered differences are observable in parliamentary debates. Second, we advance existing measurement approaches by testing for multiple dimensions of communication style, providing a more systematic approach to studying gendered speech behavior. Communication style is examined through a content analysis of almost 200 speeches in three parliamentary sessions of the British House of Commons. We find compelling evidence for differences in communication style: women evidence arguments with personal experience, discuss policies in a concrete way, and are less adversarial than men. Our findings have important implications for how political communication styles might improve public engagement with politicians, offer a different focus to the discussion, and improve democratic legitimacy.

In countries around the world, constitutional protections of women's rights have provided a legal foundation to combat discriminatory laws, customs, and actions and a catalyst for advances in gender equality. This article draws on newly available data from 191 countries to analyze women's constitutional rights across the spheres of general equality and nondiscrimination, political participation, social and economic rights, family life, and customary and religious law. We examined how gender-specific and universal protections differed according to a constitution's year of adoption and last amendment, and identified regional patterns that persisted across all decades. Women were explicitly guaranteed general equality or nondiscrimination in 81% of constitutions, some aspect of political equality in 32%, marital equality in 27%, some aspect of work equality in 26%, and equal educational rights in 9% of constitutions. Protection of women's rights increased substantially between 1980 and 2011. As of June 2011, however, no constitution in the Middle East and North Africa guaranteed gender-specific protection in education, work, or marriage, and there were no guarantees of marital equality in South Asian constitutions. Of the constitutions that protected some aspect of gender equality, 5% stated that customary or religious laws could prevail over constitutional provisions.

Why is the #MeToo movement very active in some countries but not in others? What factors encourage the transnational diffusion of digital feminist activism? Although transnational forces are important, we argue that domestic political opportunity structures play a more significant role than transnational influences in the country-level diffusion of #MeToo. We collected 35,211 global tweets and used Bayesian statistical modeling to test the implications of our theory. Our findings support the idea that as a country better protects its citizens’ political and civil rights and civil liberties, individuals in that country are more likely to engage in the #MeToo movement.

In 1997, an unprecedented number of female MPs—120—were elected to the UK House of Commons, doubling the numbers of female representatives overnight. Of these, 101 came from a single party: Labour. They entered a political institution that had hitherto been massively male-dominated (even in 1997, their number counted less than 20%) and famed for its historic traditions dominated by masculinized structures and norms (Lovenduski 2005; 2010). Many of the newly elected Labour women were known to each other, having already shared experiences of passing through their party's internal selection processes over the preceding years. Many broadly shared the same views of what the Labour party should stand for, ideologically speaking, and most were attitudinally feminist (Childs 2004). The mass media at the time of the general election, and thereafter, routinely constituted them as a collective entity—Blair's Babes—and the specifically right-wing media regularly subjected them to highly gendered criticism (Childs 2008, 140–165).

This article presents an analysis of how activists, politicians, and the media framed youth involvement in the sex trade during the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 2000s in the United States. Across these periods of public concern about the issue, similar framing has recurred that has drawn upon gendered and racialized notions of victimization and perpetration. This frame has successfully brought attention to this issue by exploiting public anxieties at historical moments when social change was threatening white male dominance. Using intersectional feminist theory, I argue that mainstream rhetoric opposing the youth sex trade worked largely within neoliberal logics, ignoring histories of dispossession and structural violence and reinforcing individualistic notions of personhood and normative ideas about subjectivity and agency. As part of the ongoing project of racial and gender formation in US society, this discourse has shored up neoliberal governance, particularly the build-up of the prison industrial complex, and it has obscured the state's failure to address the myriad social problems that make youth vulnerable to the sex trade.

Violence against women in politics (VAWP) is a human rights violation, as it prevents the realization of political rights. Violence against women in political and public life can be understood as “any act or threat of gender-based violence, resulting in physical, sexual, psychological harm or suffering to women, that prevents them from exercising and realizing their political rights, whether in public or private spaces, including the right to vote and hold public office, to vote in secret and to freely campaign, to associate and assemble, and to enjoy freedom of opinion and expression” (UN Women/UNDP 2017, 20).

Research on gender and politics has made use of Pitkin's (1967) distinction between descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation to conceptualize and understand the different facets of women's underrepresentation and misrepresentation. The corresponding overrepresentation of men has seldom been explicitly recognized in this literature. We explore what the critical study of men and masculinities could contribute to the study of different forms of representation. Researching the descriptive overrepresentation of men implies recognizing male dominance and turning our attention from the factors that constrain women from entering politics to the factors that enable and reproduce men's presence. Researching the substantive representation of men also implies investigating how men represent men and identifying whether hegemonic masculinities privilege the representation of some men while neglecting others. Finally, a study of the symbolic representation of men implies identifying and describing the masculine signals and symbols that permeate political life but remain largely invisible because they constitute the political norm. Naming them as “masculine” will facilitate a gendered analysis of political institutions, practices, and discourses that are seldom questioned. We also consider the symbolic representation of men who do not conform to hegemonic masculine ideals and are not represented descriptively.

This article explores the consequences of quotas on the level of diversity observed in legislators’ professional and political experience. We examine how party system and electoral system features that are meant to favor female representation, such as gender quotas for candidate selection or placement mandates on electoral lists, affect the composition of legislatures by altering the mix of professional and political qualifications held by its members. Using data collected for all legislators initially seated to the current session of the European Parliament, one of the largest and most diverse democratically elected legislatures in the world, we find that quotas eliminate gendered differences in experience within the institution, particularly when used in conjunction with placement mandates that ensure female candidates are featured on electoral lists in viable positions. Electoral institutions can generally help to “level the playing field” between the backgrounds of men and women in elected office while increasing the presence of desirable qualities among European Parliament representatives of both genders.

In this essay we use a basic feminist analytical tool, intersectionality, to understand why we do not see more women across the spectrum and at all levels in the international relations field in the United States. Our intersectional analysis reveals that to understand why women are underrepresented in IR, we should not look harder at women in IR but rather at IR as a discipline.