The Ministry of Women's Affairs in Aotearoa/New Zealand was established as a stand-alone agency in 1986. It has remained institutionally intact for more than 20 years, unlike many women's policy agencies that have been downsized or eliminated. It has survived significant economic and state sector restructuring and weathered the extension of neoliberal orientations into the reform of social policy. We analyze New Zealand's version of state feminism during three political periods since its inception. For each period, we identify significant developments both in the broader political context and within the ministry itself, and examine how effective Women's Affairs has been in advancing the substantive interests of diverse groups of women. Our analysis identifies three key features of the Ministry of Women's Affairs—its political context, its political and bureaucratic leadership, and its institutional design—as important in explaining both the ministry's continued existence and the limits on what it has been able to achieve.

In previous work, I characterized Feminist Security Studies as pluralistic, but transformative:

What effect do social welfare policies have on women's active involvement in the economy and politics? Though there is much policy and scholarly debate on a wide spectrum of socioeconomic and political outcomes of welfare spending, little research has explored the possible impact that social welfare policies have on one of the supposed major beneficiaries of such policies—women. Combining data on welfare spending in three areas—social security, health, and education—with data on women's labor force participation and share of seats in national legislatures, this article examines the extent to which welfare spending might affect women's economic and political status. The results from a panel of 97 countries for the years spanning 1990 to 2010 indicate that the government's fiscal commitment to social policies is positively related to female participation in the total labor force and national politics. The findings are robust to different model specifications, sample selection, and the use of instrumental variables. One major policy implication of the findings is that the government's fiscal commitment to key social welfare areas are likely to contribute to women's economic and political empowerment, which might in turn help address gender imbalances in the economy and political sphere.

Research on female politicians suggests that women face a double bind. Female politicians must embrace their femininity but not be too feminine, and they must demonstrate masculinity without deviating from gender norms. Hillary Clinton has often struggled with this balance, which has resulted in conflicting and inconsistent portrayals of her in the news. To examine the extent of this coverage, this study provides a longitudinal analysis of Clinton's personal and professional media coverage in the New York Times. A content analysis of news coverage of Clinton from 1969 to 2016 shows that she has largely not been bound to gender labels, gender traits, or mentions of physical appearance. In addition, Clinton was not overly discussed as a novelty or norm challenger. These findings contradict previous literature, demonstrating a potential trend away from using gender as a descriptor for or limitation to female politicians.

A large literature on the United States and Western Europe establishes that there is a correlation between gender and legislator activity. The article extends the literature to India by exploring a unique dataset of Question Hour activity in the lower house of parliament over a 30-year period (1980–2009). Compared with male legislators, female legislators ask 24% fewer parliamentary questions, and there are also significant differences in question content, even after controlling for important covariates. However, it is likely that female and male legislators differ on unobserved attributes that affect legislative activity. Using the intuition that the gender of winners in close elections between women and men is quasi-randomly determined, the article employs a regression discontinuity design to reestimate the gender effect. The results indicate that gender has zero causal effect on the volume of questions and most types of question content.

Scholars of gender quotas have paid increasing attention to the ways in which formal and informal institutions shape the outcome of this electoral reform (Hassim 2009; Jones 2009; Zetterberg 2009). Quotas, however, are not only affected by the institutional context in which they are adopted; their transformative nature also implies that they (should) contribute to changing political institutions. This dynamic relationship has consequences for the analysis of key institutions within representative democracy: Electoral quotas may, in some cases, challenge well-defined analytical frameworks and established ways to study political life. This essay aims to demonstrate theoretically how quota adoption exerts an impact on established political structures and thus challenges existing understandings within subfields of comparative politics. More specifically, I bring up two institutions within representative democracy that are likely to be affected by quotas: the political recruitment process and intraparty politics within legislative institutions.

Although it is no longer a symbol of socially degenerate behavior in many societies, single motherhood remains associated with numerous risks and disadvantages. In addition to their disadvantages in the labor market and their greater risk of poverty, single mothers also tend to be less politically active. This article explores the patterns of single mothers’ electoral participation across 25 European countries. In addition to the individual-level characteristics that shape the likelihood of taking part in an election, public policies can also do a great deal to encourage political involvement. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey combined with national family and labor market policies, I examine the ways in which policies aiming to reconcile the responsibilities at work and home can draw single mothers into political engagement. I find that early childhood expenditures and cash benefits to families are positively related to single mothers’ political participation.

Responding to ongoing debates about the presence (or otherwise) of feminism within left-wing politics, this article has two central aims. First, it seeks to develop a set of analytical criteria to identify and assess the extent to which an instance of politics has become “feminist.” Second, it aims to illustrate the utility of this framework by applying it to a range of examples of contemporary left politics in Britain. Our argument is similarly twofold. Conceptually, learning from the literature on socialist feminism, gender and politics, and cultural studies and sociology, we identify five features of what we call “feministization,” arguing that in addition to feminist ideas, policies, and modes of organizing, we must also pay attention to the role of embodied performances and affect. Empirically, we suggest that, seen through this lens, the British left has in fact undergone a significant but uneven process of feministization in recent years.

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.

I am grateful to the editors of Politics & Gender for organizing this exchange. I agree with many of the points raised by Teri Caraway, Mounira Charrad, and Alice Kang, but disagree sharply with Pippa Norris.

Since the 1970s, institutions with the explicit purpose of advancing women's rights and status have been established in an overwhelming majority of countries. In political science research, these institutions usually are called “women's policy machineries,” “state feminist institutions,” or “gender equality agencies.” The people who work in them are often referred to as “state feminists.” This article offers a general overview of academic studies on state feminism, the majority of which were published in the last decade. Generally speaking and with few exceptions, social scientists researching state feminism in postindustrial countries tend to consider only academic work on other postindustrial countries and ignore scholarly analyses of developing countries and new democracies. Countries outside the postindustrial world have women's institutions, and there is no reason to disregard them.

Operating within the androcentric premises that support idealized models of populist leadership, self-representations cultivated by female populist leaders often involve precarious balancing acts, compelling them to appropriate contextualized traditionalist discourses and modes of power to qualify for conventional leadership models. This article engages with the stylistic performance of populist leadership by Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress in the state of West Bengal, India, focusing on her adoption of the discursive mode of political asceticism, nativist rhetoric, and religious iconography. Through an interpretive analysis of selected party documents, autobiography, and semistructured interviews with Banerjee's followers and critics, the article delineates Banerjee's populist self-fashioning as a political ascetic and explores perceptions of her leadership. The article argues that while the self-makings of female populist leaders remain fraught and contested, they contribute substantially toward redrawing the boundaries of both conventional leadership models and the broader political landscapes they inhabit.

“Intersectional analysis,” or “intersectionality,” is a concept that is widely used in various academic disciplines to explain and articulate the oppressions faced by the “multiply minoritized” (Vidal-Ortiz 2006), those marginalized by their sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and national identities. We are concerned that “sexuality” as an identity used in intersectional analysis is perhaps overly reductive, sometimes telling nothing more than whether someone is “straight” or “gay,” rather than leaving room to interrogate the complicated, diverse landscape that is at the intersection of gender, sex, and sexuality. In this essay, we apply a queer-theory critique of intersectionality to demonstrate how human-trafficking policy, particularly as it relates to sex trafficking, is productive of what Valentine (2007) calls culturally constructed and deployed identity categories, resulting in inclusion of some and exclusion of others. We aim to show how social science research that relies on normative identity categories can lead to incomplete intersectional analyses.

Gender and politics scholars have long recognized the importance of political institutions (Lovenduski 1998). Most of this work focuses on formal institutions (Chappell 2006; Kenney 1996), but several studies discuss gendered practices and norms in ways that can be seen as consistent with definitions of informal institutions (Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1995; Kenny 2007). Despite these shared concerns, few feminists frame their research in relation to institutionalism. To the degree that they do, they tend to view the most promising point of intersections to be with historical, sociological, and discursive versions. In contrast, they seem more wary of rational choice, arguing that this brand of institutionalism is unhelpful to, if not fundamentally incompatible with, the objectives of feminist research (cf. Kenny and Paantjens 2006).

Most research on the causes of women's underrepresentation examines one of two stages of the political pipeline: the development of nascent political ambition or specific aspects of the campaign and election process. In this article, we make a different kind of contribution. We build on the growing literature on gender, psychology, and representation to provide an analysis of what kinds of men and women make it through the political pipeline at each stage. This allows us to draw some conclusions about the ways in which the overall process is similar and different for women and men. Using surveys of the general U.S. population (N = 1,939) and elected municipal officials such as mayors and city councilors (N = 2,354) that measure the distribution of Big Five personality traits, we find that roughly the same types of men and women have nascent political ambition; there is just an intercept shift for sex. In contrast, male and female elected officials have different personality profiles. These differences do not reflect underlying distributions in the general population or the population of political aspirants. In short, our data suggest that socialization into political ambition is similar for men and women, but campaign and election processes are not.

The 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic has significantly altered lives across the globe. In the United States, several states attempted to manage the pandemic by issuing stay-at-home orders. In this research note, I examine whether the gender of state policy makers in the executive branch might impact a state's adoption of a stay-at-home order. Using event history analysis, I find that the governor's gender has no impact on the likelihood of a state adopting a stay-at-home order. However, I find that gender plays a significant role for agency heads. Specifically, my analysis shows that states with a female-headed health agency tend to adopt stay-at-home orders earlier than states with a male administrator. These findings shed light on how female leadership in the executive branch may impact public policy regarding COVID-19.

Much research examining gender bias in politics analyzes responses to explicit survey questions asking individuals whether they prefer male over female leaders or agree that male political leaders are superior. Drawing insights from the measurement of other types of prejudice, this article explores the methodological shortcomings of a widely used question of this type. Analyzing the results of two surveys—one national and one state-level—I compare response patterns to a standard, highly explicit question that is frequently administered by the Pew Research Center with those for a modestly altered item that employs multiple strategies to reduce social desirability bias. Compared with the alternative measure, the conventional item seriously underreports prejudice against women leaders. Moreover, the underreporting of bias is especially prevalent among individuals belonging to groups that are strong advocates of gender equality.

The sex gap in politics is widely documented: women tend to support left-wing parties more than men do. Evidence of this observation was recently supplemented by the identification of a within-party sex gap: within parties, female voters and politicians tend to take more left-wing positions. While this research typically limits itself to one policy area or one political party, we provide more broad-based evidence of within-party sex gaps among Flemish local politicians by covering a broad set of policy domains and six political parties. Our focus is on expenditure preferences. Analyzing stated preferences of 1,055 council members, we find that—across parties—female politicians have more leftist preferences than their male colleagues in six out of eight policy domains. Crucially, sex differences also occur within parties. We identify significant within-party sex gaps in four out of eight policy domains. Female representatives express preferences that are more left wing than their male colleagues with respect to public spending on crime, culture, and welfare. For environmental spending, they take a more right-wing position.

This article responds to earlier research on the role of Islam as a barrier to women's political nominations by assessing and comparing parties’ efforts to meet institutionally required gender quotas in Indonesia. With the provision of 30% candidate gender quotas implemented since the 2004 elections, how have parties responded? Do Islamist and pluralist parties differ systematically in this regard? More specifically, does religious ideology influence how parties go about meeting quotas, recruiting female candidates, and getting them elected? Or do all parties face the same challenges when it comes to getting women into parliament? Drawing on a unique dataset collected from 2004 to 2019 legislative elections and in-depth interviews with central party officers, faction leaders, and members of parliament, this article investigates these questions. The results indicate that Islamic ideology plays no obvious role in limiting female participation in legislative elections; Islamist and pluralist parties are equally good at achieving the percentage quotas of female nominees. Both groups are also similarly poor at putting female candidates first on the party lists. Indonesia's open-list proportional representation (PR) system is prohibitively expensive, and this hurts women candidates more than it does male candidates because women generally have less access to the capital necessary to purchase the top position on party lists.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the history of women's involvement in liberation struggles and the realignment of gender relations following independence have long been characterized as a kind of gender backlash. Whether national independence from colonial or settler rule was achieved in connection with nationalist movements or armed struggles, the scenarios of gender relations are remarkably similar. Particular groups of women are mobilized during the struggle for national liberation, their issues become part of the liberation movements' agendas, but following the achievement of independence, these same women are rapidly demobilized and the issues they raised during the national liberation struggle get marginalized amid competing and “more urgent” state priorities. Scholars have illuminated the historical and cultural specificities of this pattern in particular cases (Geiger 1997; Kruks, Rapp, and Young 1989; Seidman 1984 and 1999; Tétreault 1992; Urdang 1989). While this pattern fits with colloquial understandings of backlash, identifying the pattern does little to shed light on how state power gets infused with gender meaning in postindependence politics or how these power dynamics evolve.