Given the growing importance of state subsidies as a source of party income, several countries have introduced policies that link the provision of party funding to the promotion of gender equality in political representation. Variations in the assignment of public funding—that is, financial incentives and cuts—are increasingly employed to promote equal gender participation in intraparty politics and in public office. However, we know little about why and how these equality promotion policies have been adopted in different countries, how they work in practice, and, most importantly, what effects they have on women's representation. To contribute to this debate, after embedding gender-targeted public funding regulations in the broader set of political representation policies and presenting a comparative overview of existing rules in the European Union, the article concentrates on the Italian case. We examine the evolution of Italian regulation of gender electoral financing and the extent to which the Italian parties have complied with the rules over time. The results show that this set of policy instruments, when poorly designed, is nothing more than symbolic policy. The lack of appropriate mechanisms for sanctions and rewards, which can induce parties to change their behavior, has hampered the effectiveness of these policy measures.

In the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq, gender has become even more obviously important for understanding contemporary world politics, including armed conflict and war. Gender is an explicit structuring principle of contemporary conflicts between Western powers and an Islamist fundamentalism energized by opposition to the freedoms enjoyed by Western women and committed to the imposition of a version of sharia that explicitly denies to women rights equal to men's.

The global warming backlash, the managed care backlash, the Bush backlash, the corporate backlash, the 9/11 backlash, the Obama backlash, the Clinton backlash, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill backlash, the antigay backlash, the immigration backlash, the backlashes against globalization, student testing, the social, economic, and political progress of Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans, and, central to this “Critical Perspectives,” the backlash against the feminist movement—these were just some of the many politically related backlashes that appeared when I performed a general Google search of the words: “backlash” and “politics” in July of 2008.

Feminist international relations is situated uneasily within a subfield of political science, on the one hand, and within an interdisciplinary literature on globalization, on the other. Emerging in the 1990s from a critique of the realist and rationalist IR canon, feminist IR research has diversified considerably, including different lines of theoretical and empirical inquiry and drawing on a range of methods. Different emphases emerge in three fields – feminist security studies, feminist international political economy, and feminist work on international governance.

The publication in 2008 of Michael Ross's “Oil, Islam, and Women” by the discipline's flagship journal, the American Political Science Review, is a welcome development. It is the first empirical work with a primary focus on gender and political economy ever published in the journal and portends well for the development of research that focuses on such questions. My essay has two foci. The first is a critical engagement with Ross's analysis of why oil production negatively affects women's employment prospects. The second is how to further develop the study of gender in the comparative political economy of labor markets.

Most democracies fail to provide equal representation and tend to have an overrepresentation of men from the upper class and the majority racial or ethnic group. We investigate public support for increasing the number of women and indigenous Māori members of parliament (MPs) in the New Zealand Parliament, both in general and through specific mechanisms such as quotas and reserved seats. We offer three explanations: descriptive (group identity), substantive (issue alignment), and symbolic (socioeconomic and political equity concerns). Using data from the 2014 New Zealand Election Study, we found that shared identity (descriptive) matters for all measures of increased representation, but especially for Māori respondent support of increased Māori MPs. Support for increasing the proportion of Māori MPs is also strongly driven by substantive concerns, as measured by support for keeping the Treaty of Waitangi in law. Support for increasing the number of women MPs is driven most strongly by symbolic concerns (measured as increased government social spending and efforts to reduce income differences). Overall, respondents favor retaining the current number of reserved seats for Māori MP representation, whereas informal efforts (rather than quotas) are strongly preferred for increasing the number of women MPs.

The global diffusion of #MeToo has sparked case studies and scholarly discussions (Fileborn and Loney-Howes 2019; Lee and Murdie 2020; Noel and Oppenheimer 2020), but the East Asian experience remains understudied, especially from a comparative perspective within and outside the region. The internet hashtag movement emerged from quality investigative journalism, and the movement has done what the law could not (MacKinnon 2018). Examining tweets that include the English version of the hashtag, Lee and Murdie (2020) found that women are more likely to engage in #MeToo in countries where their political rights are better protected. This finding, however, does not seem to fit East Asia's experience. The region's earliest and longest democracy, Japan, had a much milder movement than neighboring South Korea. Many South Korean women publicly named their perpetrators, but Japanese women, when sharing their experience of being harassed, mostly remained anonymous (Hasunuma and Shin 2019). Moreover, Taiwan, arguably the most gender-equal country in this region—if measured by women's political representation (42% in the national legislature) or by policies toward sexual minorities (it was the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage)—has had virtually no #MeToo movement.

Decentralized finance, including cryptocurrency and other blockchain-based applications, promises participants benefits such as financial freedom, security, privacy, and wealth accumulation. More recently, it has also offered the promise of participation, lowering financial barriers, and empowerment—especially to women, the poor, and those residing in the Global South. I argue that the rise of decentralized finance as an alternative development platform is explicitly gendered and calls for feminist analysis. I discuss how cryptocurrency-based approaches to development rest on foundations that are gendered, interacting with hierarchies of race/ethnicity and class. I also explore how they are part of a lineage of neoliberalism, leveraging neoliberal beliefs about entrepreneurialism, financial inclusion, and gender roles. The discussion further introduces the concept of neolibertarianism as an extension of neoliberal logics that advocates for bypassing states entirely in favor of private actors. The current analysis compares this new model of decentralized finance to similarly problematic development trends and assesses how it has—as of yet—failed to deliver on the promises of participation, lowering financial barriers, and empowerment. This analysis concludes with a call to action for feminist and critical scholars, encouraging further work on the topic.

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.

This essay expresses my gratitude for the spirit of inclusiveness shown by the first generation of Feminist Security Studies (FSS) scholars. I would like to see FSS remain a large tent, for in constructing boundaries for FSS, we may unintentionally make it smaller than it really is. Indeed, I would like to explore the value of inclusiveness to FSS by undertaking a bit of autobiography. I was a poor candidate to wind up as part of this field; the story of how FSS insights upended my academic life may be instructive as we endeavor to help others in the academy see the connections between gender and security studies that we ourselves see.

We present the results of a randomized survey experiment demonstrating that the public evaluates women politicians more highly than men across multiple characteristic assessments. This finding is consistent with a recent wave of research indicating greater preferences for women politicians. Which respondents rate women politicians more highly, and why? We find that women and younger voters do not account for the greater marks given to women politicians. Instead, respondent partisanship and the presumed partisanship of the politician account for a great deal of our findings, with gender playing a complicating role. Democratic and Republican respondents are apt to project their own partisanship onto politicians, and across both parties, we find higher assessments for co-partisan politicians and for women politicians. On the whole, women politicians are evaluated on par with or significantly higher than men politicians across six characteristics, scoring especially well relative to men when politicians are presumed to be members of the opposing party and when traditionally feminine characteristics are assessed.

Women continue to be underrepresented in politics. A contemporary focus on inequality, however, belies the remarkable changes that have occurred in women's political representation, participation, and impact over time. Thus, scholars are increasingly calling for longitudinal theory and research that focuses on change across time. In this essay, we advocate moving to a longitudinal approach, which, we argue, has four broad implications for theories on women and politics. First, in shifting from a static to a longitudinal perspective, we may find greater support for existing theories that have to date generated only weak or mixed empirical evidence. Second, in contrast, we may also identify limitations of documented findings, which may not generalize broadly across time. Third, some theories imply over-time processes but have never been modeled as such. Thus, a longitudinal approach promises new, and potentially more rigorous, hypothesis testing of existing theories. Finally, theorizing over time may generate new explanations for stasis, growth, or decline in women's political representation or participation that have not, to date, been considered.

Although gender plays an enormous role in structuring personal relationships, society, politics, and culture, we know relatively little about when people's gender ideologies will influence their opinions on issues that do not trade directly on matters of gender. This article presents a theory of “group implication,” which defines the conditions under which elite political discourse can lead citizens to perceive and evaluate issues in terms of their gender schemas—their cognitive representations of gender beliefs. I apply this framework to an analysis of the 1993–94 U.S. health care reform effort, and demonstrate how elite frames structured the issue in a way consistent with the gender schema. This structuring was subtle and symbolic, and served to associate people's gender ideology with their thinking about health care reform. The article concludes with consideration of the implication of these findings for our understanding of the political impact of gendered rhetoric, and for our conceptual understanding of the relationship between gender and public opinion.

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.

Cross-national studies of women's political leadership (WPL) usually focus on female prime ministers and presidents or numbers of women in parliament. While illuminating, these studies fail to provide a comprehensive assessment of WPL in a particular place and time. Addressing this gap in the literature, we assert that WPL is inherently contingent upon the theoretical concepts of “structural power” and “male dominance,” encompassing multiple formal apex political decision-making institutions. In accordance with this perspective, we have constructed a novel women's political leadership index based on collective leadership across judicial (high court judges), executive (cabinet ministers), and legislative (parliamentary committee chairs) branches of governments to capture both the presence of women among political leaders and their balance across institutions. Applying our index to 21 diverse territories in Asia, we demonstrate the utility of our approach through a series of country case studies illustrating four prominent patterns of WPL: exclusion, illusion, imbalance, and balance. We conclude by discussing the potential benefits of globally expanding the scope of the index.

Countries with Muslim-majority populations often are viewed as places where women are particularly oppressed. To a degree, this perception reflects reality. Fish (2002) demonstrates that, relative to Catholic countries, Muslim countries are associated with larger male–female literacy gaps, higher male–female population sex ratios (which can reflect poorer treatment of females), and lower scores on the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP's) Gender Empowerment Measure, which focuses on political participation, economic influence, and income. Looking at the developing world, Cherif (2010) finds that Muslim countries are associated with inheritance and nationality laws that are discriminatory toward women. Some suggest that Islam itself is responsible for limitations on women's economic, political, and social freedoms. Whether referring to the substance of Islamic (shari'a) law, which treats men and women differently, or to the ways in which politicians defer to conservative interpretations of shari'a law in order to build and/or consolidate their legitimacy, or to contemporary regimes' need to appease (or at least not inflame) important Islamist constituencies who favor a subordinate role for women, many accounts of gender inequality in Muslim countries assert that “prevailing interpretations of Islamic law . . . and the attitudes it informs” are a key culprit (Cherif 2010, 1145).

While feminists usually try to ground the meanings that they study, theorizing the mundane or the everyday may very well represent a detour—or even a dead end—if bread-and-butter issues related to the security and economic well-being of ordinary women and men are ignored. What value does feminist theorizing (even if it draws from women's lived experiences) have in war-affected contexts where meeting immediate needs is paramount? At what point does the theorizing of the body under such circumstances become a means to satisfying intellectual fetishes? Theorizing the everyday is messy because it has to contend with the immediate social setting in which popular culture is inseparable from the economic materiality of the conditions of oppression.

Britain's use of state agencies to address gender relations has evolved significantly over the past 30 years and is currently entering a new phase, characterized by a commitment to a generic equalities, or “diversity,” approach in which multiple equality strands are to be addressed via a single equalities body, the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). The CEHR will replace three existing equality commissions that focus on gender, race, and disability, respectively. This shift appears to involve the demise of a singular focus on gender equality and with it the justification for separate women's policy agencies.

A considerable body of research has analyzed the influence of the women's movement, changes in women's political representation, and policies promoting women's interests in the developing world. However, we know comparatively less about the degree to which the attitudes and behaviors of the mass public mirror these national patterns. This article explores the evolution of gender differences in citizens' political interest, civic engagement, and support for women in politics in the Dominican Republic over 1994–2004, a period important for the country's democratization as well as one of significant changes in gender-related discourse and policies. We find evidence of a shift from a traditional gender gap to a modern gender gap, but the explanations for changes in women's views are distinct from those of men. We find that sociostructural factors, particularly age and education, and cues from political elites have significantly different effects on men versus women. Women's levels of political interest and support for equality in political participation are more fixed in their youth, whereas men's levels evolve through middle age. The evidence also indicates that reducing the gender gap in political interest would significantly narrow gender differences in civic activism. Most notably, men appear to be more easily swayed by elite cues that favor or oppose women's political participation; women's support for equal participation is much less susceptible to reversals in elite support. The consolidation of advances in gender equity thus depends significantly on contextual factors such as elite discourse.