In this article, I evaluate how subnational governments pursue feminist policy outputs. To do so, I examine equality policies in the Spanish regions of Andalusia and Galicia during the 1980s and 1990s. Whereas the national Women's Institute in Spain was the driving force behind equality policies during the 1980s, regional administrations gained autonomy in the early 1980s and developed their own equality policies during the 1990s and 2000s. I ask 1) whether leftist political allies are key to feminist policy outputs, 2) whether regional feminist policy outputs increase over time as subnational institutions develop, and 3) whether feminists in society are able to impact such policies. I conclude that subnational administrations do not always advance feminist policy outputs nor do they work cooperatively with all feminist organizations. Whereas the leftist regional administration of Andalusia has been a leader in feminist policymaking, the conservative Galician administration developed equality policies more slowly, and these policies were controversial among feminists and leftist politicians. I explain how regional women's policy agencies led by the Left and Right have nevertheless promoted women's civil society and policies that respond to women's local identities.

J. R. R. Tolkien once suggested that “short cuts make long delays.” While Tolkien was not talking about improving the situation of women in political science, this essay argues that those of us interested in making political science less alienating for women would do well to heed his advice.

Some of the most interesting and important work on freedom in recent years has been produced by feminist theorists (e.g., Friedman 2003; Hirschmann 2003; Nedelsky 2011; Zerilli 2005; and see Anker, forthcoming). Feminist theory has also generated important insights about the character and conditions of human agency, the intersectional nature of human identities, and the dynamics of political action that richly enhance our understanding of freedom (Ackerly and Attanasi 2009; Alcoff 2006; Anzaldua 2007; Bartky 1990; Beltrán 2010; Benhabib 1992; Brown 1995; Butler 2004, 2006; Crenshaw 1989; Hill-Collins 2005; Love 2007; Mohanty 2003; Young 2005). Yet feminist perspectives on freedom—like others in political theory today (e.g., Berlin 1990; Pettit 2000; Villa 2008)—are limited by their tendency to conceive freedom in a monistic way. Whether freedom means the exercise of personal choice (Hirschmann 2003), or inaugural acts of world making (Arendt 1958; Zerilli 2005), or noninterference (Berlin 1990), or nondomination (Pettit 2000), or something else, theorists generally describe freedom as being just one thing. Yet the experiences that we have of freedom come in different forms, and sometimes the different kinds of freedom that we have, or that we seek, conflict with one another. Nor is it obvious that these conflicts could ever be fully reconciled, even under ideal conditions. Our freedom today is complex: We are at once free and unfree, in ways that are multiple and often conflicting.

Concepts such as risk aversion and anxiety have received renewed attention in various strands of gender and politics research. Most contemporary scholars suggest that gender gaps in this area are related to social norms and stem from social learning rather than from inherent gender traits. Very few, however, elaborate on the gender variable to reach a fuller understanding of the dynamics at work. In this study, we examined gender gaps in levels of anxiety, an area closely related to risk aversion, and we applied a combination of categorical measures of gender distinguishing between “woman, “man,” and “other” and scales capturing grades of femininity and masculinity in individuals. We label this approach fuzzy gender, and we suggest that it can be used to advance research in our field. The key finding is an interaction effect between categorical measures of gender and fuzzy gender: The more female characteristics in women, the higher the levels of anxiety. Moreover, there is no difference in levels of anxiety between men and women with few female characteristics. The data used draw from a large-scale survey among Swedish citizens in 2013.

Territorial debates have recently shaken the political systems in Scotland and Catalonia, leading to referenda on independence. This article engages with questions concerning whether this extraordinary process has affected the women's movement and why. Specifically, feminist scholars have often expressed concern regarding how strong territorial identities and nationalist projects might prove detrimental to the movement's unity and success. Here, I look for indications of engagement and revival within the frames of the Scottish and Catalan referendum campaigns. A comparative approach revealed the mobilizing potential of these contexts when certain conditions were present. While the women's movement in Scotland has thrived in the last couple of years, territorial debates in Catalonia have not provided fertile ground for feminist campaigning and have shown divisive potential. The specific dynamics of the women's movement in each setting and the presence of political and discursive opportunity structures account for the different outcomes.

Race and gender have never been more visible on the national political stage than during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, particularly during the months when Democratic Party rivals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled in the party's state nomination caucuses and primaries. Clinton stood in for gender, representing all women, while Obama took his place in the category of race, standing in for all people of color. The success of these candidates and the addition of Sarah Palin as vice presidential nominee on the Republican ticket was a source of pride for many women and minority Americans. The “default” category for presidential candidates—the white male—had finally been displaced from the top of the ticket on the Democratic side and from the second in command for the Republicans.

The article examines whether female political candidates are disfavored in terms of persuasiveness potential based on their expertise and trustworthiness. Using a Bayesian argumentation paradigm in which candidates endorse policies, this study shows that male voters regard female candidates as less persuasive than male candidates. A controlled between-subjects experiment among 202 potential voters in the United States suggests that female election candidates are subject to sex biases in two central ways. First, despite agreeing on their trustworthiness and expertise, male voters find highly credible female candidates less persuasive than identical male candidates. Second, female candidates are affected more adversely if they are perceived as lacking in trustworthiness. Male candidates, on the other hand, are affected more negatively if they are perceived as lacking in expertise. Whereas perceived lack of expertise is relatively easy to repair, trustworthiness may be difficult to regain once it is lost. In a political environment in which attack ads are prevalent, this may carry a greater negative impact for female candidates.

While research on women's substantive representation in legislatures has proliferated, our knowledge of gender lobbying mechanisms in authoritarian regimes remains limited. Adopting a state-society interaction approach, this article addresses how women's interests are substantively represented in China despite the absence of an electoral mandate and the omnipresence of state power. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this article maps out the intertwining of key political agents and institutions within and outside the state that mobilize for women's grievances and demands. We find that representation of women's interests in China requires the emergence of a unified societal demand followed by a coalition of state agency allies navigating within legislative, executive, and Party-affiliated institutional bodies. The pursuit of women's interests is also politically bounded and faces strong repression if the lobbying lacks state alliances or the targeted issue is considered “politically sensitive” by the government.

Are women disproportionately more likely than men to have family ties in politics? We study this question in Latin America, where legacies have been historically common, and we focus specifically on legislatures, where women's representation has increased dramatically in many countries. We hypothesize that, counter to conventional wisdom, women should be no more likely than men to have ties to political families. However, this may vary across legislatures with and without gender quotas. Our empirical analysis uses data from the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America survey. We find more gender similarities than differences in legislators’ patterns of family ties both today and over the past 20 years. We also find that women are more likely to have family ties than men in legislatures without gender quotas, whereas this difference disappears in legislatures with quotas.

The substantive representation of women has attracted limited attention in cases in which women are present in politics in small numbers over an extended period of time. This article aims to fill this gap by focusing on two policy episodes in a postcommunist state where female descriptive representation has remained low and static and the regime's democratic backlash can also be observed. The two analytical questions refer to the agency and regime aspects of women's substantive representation under unfavorable conditions. Who is representing women under these conditions, and where and how is their representation taking place? How do the regime's characteristics explain the evolving representation patterns? The article will first argue that the same descriptive representation levels can imply different substantive representation patterns in terms of both actors and space. Second, by reconnecting descriptive representation and substantive representation, the article demonstrates that the decline of a regime's democratic credentials is detrimental to female substantive representation.

Feminist critics of the institution of marriage point to its tendency to reproduce and solidify a gendered division of labor, norms of dependency and protection, and mandated monogamy. While I support the feminist call for a decoupling of state benefits, such as rights to health care and legal proxy, from the institution of marriage in light of discrimination against same-sex couples who are denied the right to marry, in this essay I draw attention to a separate but related issue. I focus here on what I consider one of the most troubling aspects of marriage for feminists, one highlighted by Simone de Beauvoir in her classic and still timely critique of marriage in The Second Sex (1952): the fact that marriage automatically confers bourgeois respectability on its participants. Even as we oppose antigay marriage legislation and recognize that marriage can protect vulnerable parties by guaranteeing health care, equity upon divorce, tax benefits, and so forth, feminists must continue to refuse the bourgeois respectability that is so deeply linked with the institution of marriage. Having the state accord legitimacy to some kinds of intimate relationships and consensual sex, but not others, goes against basic ideas of feminist freedom articulated most convincingly, I argue, by Beauvoir. While arguing this position, however, I will also ask whether only the relatively privileged are able to refuse the bourgeois respectability that marriage promises.

When considering possible conversations, synergies, overlaps, similarities, conflicts, and distinctions between two subfields or “camps” (Sylvester 2010), the question of limits looms large. Where, why, and how are the limits of feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (FGPE) currently being drawn, and to what effect? Building upon previous conversations about the relationship between FSS and FGPE, particularly as they were discussed in the Critical Perspectives section in Politics & Gender (June 2015), as well as those about FSS and FGPE more generally, I briefly touch on a few central points regarding the politics of boundary drawing and the practices of feminist research.

Feminist organizations, like many other interest groups and advocacy organizations, have increasingly turned to the rulemaking process to create meaningful policy change. Although rulemaking is an attractive policy-making venue for feminists because it provides them with an opportunity to bypass congressional gridlock and interact with more women policy makers than they might in Congress, the existing literature does not address how and when feminist organizations' participation in rulemaking is influential. To examine this question for the first time, I analyze a sample of the 5,860 comments that the U.S. Department of Education received in response to its 2004 proposed rule allowing for public single-sex education programs and the department's justifications for its proposed and final rules. Specifically, I ask whether findings from the rulemaking literature showing that organizations can encourage bureaucrats to change their proposed rules when they submit large numbers of high-quality, homogenous, opposing comments hold for feminist organizations in a redistributive policy area. The findings indicate that when bureaucrats receive multiple sets of high-quality homogenous comments, they are more likely to side with commenters who support their initial proposals and/or partisan and ideological positions.

The process of selecting cabinet ministers often takes place behind closed doors, including weighing the need to balance or manage factions within the president's party and/or coalition partners; addressing demands for diversity in the cabinet, such as appointment of women or other historically underrepresented groups; sending signals about the administration's policy agenda; and enabling the president to have people he or she trusts close at hand. On the other hand, ministerial exits are usually less private affairs. In some cases they come after weeks of public or congressional scrutiny and criticism of ministers for policy failures or follow extended speculation about who will lose their seat when the president reshuffles the cabinet. Some ministers depart to pursue lucrative private-sector opportunities. Other ministers switch posts but stay in government. How ministers exit can have implications for the administration since a president who is frequently forced to shuffle the cabinet or sack ministers looks ineffective, and comparisons to rats and sinking ships are difficult to avoid in the wake of excessive changes. At the same time, an administration with zero turnover may also not be healthy, as it would suggest that presidents are staidly bound to their initial course of action and unable (or unwilling) to adapt to changing circumstances.

How does the gender of a political leader affect policy compliance of the public during a public health crisis? State and national leaders have taken a variety of policy measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, with varying levels of success. While many female leaders have been credited with containing the spread of COVID-19, often through implementing strict policy measures, there is little understanding of how individuals respond to public health policy recommendations made by female and male leaders. This article investigates whether citizens are more willing to comply with strict policy recommendations about a public health issue when those recommendations are made by a female leader rather than a male leader. Using a survey experiment with American citizens, we compare individuals’ willingness to comply with policy along three dimensions: social distancing, face covering, and contact tracing. Our findings show that a leader's gender has little impact on policy compliance in general during the pandemic. These findings carry important implications for successful crisis management as well as understanding how a crisis in a nonmasculine issue context influences the effectiveness of a leader's ability to implement measures to mitigate the crisis.

The European Union (EU) consists of 27 nation states, and its motto “united in diversity” refers to the right of EU citizens to cross borders and work and live legally in another EU country as well as to the accommodation of national minorities. In spite of this common fate, “diversity” issues have increasingly been associated with conflicts between citizens and noncitizens about integration of new migrant groups. At a time of rising populism in Europe, it is important to assess how major political actors of the European Public Sphere (EPS) articulate issues regarding the intersection of gender and ethnic diversity. To do so, this article draws on the findings from the Eurosphere project, which compares sixteen European countries to investigate the inclusion or exclusion of women and minority groups in the EPS (Siim & Mokre 2013). The Eurosphere project provides timely insight into how key actors representing selected political parties and social movements/NGOs across Europe perceive intersections of gender and ethnic diversity.

This article analyzes the relationship between parties and the representation of women in Spanish subnational legislatures. We argue that studies on party ideology and gender have generally failed to (a) acknowledge the effect of electoral time: the left started to recruit women earlier, when their number was low and they were mainly perceived as liabilities; and (b) distinguish between two different party mechanisms: parties can be gate openers and ease the access of newcomers to the legislature, and they can be career promoters, which facilitate the parliamentary continuity of incumbents. Drawing on a database containing comprehensive information about the population of regional members of parliament (MPs) (N = 5,353) in 138 elections and focusing on the two most prominent parties, the conservative People's Party and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), we test the hypothesis that left-wing parties outperform right-wing parties concerning gender representation. Our statistical analyses show that electoral time blurs the effect of ideology on the share of women MPs. Once time is controlled for, the socialists emerge as systematically recruiting more women. Concerning the two mechanisms, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party fares better as a gate opener, while the People's Party, unexpectedly, excels as a career promoter.

Since the development of modern survey methods, political scientists have identified gender-based differences in the political behavior of men and women. Early research found women to be less politically engaged than men and to be more likely to vote for right-wing parties (Lipset 1963). Beginning in the 1980s, however, these differences in political participation dissipated, and the gender-based pattern in vote choice was reversed (DeVaus and McAllister 1989; Inglehart and Norris 2000). These gender differences in political behavior, and the many others that could be added here, are commonly referred to as “gender gaps.”

While breastfeeding mothers generally possess an official legal right of access to public places, the lived experience of breastfeeding mothers in public is marked by inequality and lack of autonomy. The motivating question of this article is, from the perspective of a breastfeeding mother, what characterizes an ideal—that is, equal and autonomous—public sphere in a liberal society? I explore in particular the issue of people, including breastfeeding mothers, who evoke discomfort or disgust. I argue that public and private spheres must be accessible in certain ways: first, every person must be able to occupy public space while embracing all significant aspects of their personhood; second, the comfort of others cannot weigh more than an individual's own needs in public; finally, all people must be able to opt for privacy in a way that does not entail invisibility or coerced exclusion. In making this argument, I describe three main ways in which breastfeeding mothers respond to the antipathy of the public sphere: exclusion, accommodation, and affirmation. I end with an exploration of the ideal of public and private spheres defined by equality and autonomy and offer concrete steps that can improve the position of breastfeeding mothers in public.

We know that women politicians are harassed by constituents to a greater extent than men, but we know less about why this difference exists. This study tests potential drivers of hostility against women politicans using an original survey experiment with 7,500 respondents in the United States and Sweden. First, I test whether constituents hold more lenient attitudes toward hostility directed at women than men, which would make hostility in messages targeting women representatives more likely. Second, I test whether constituents prefer to direct their complaints to women, which would increase the risk of hostility by generating a higher number of angry contacts. Results from both countries show a preference for directing complaints to women representatives over men, but no evidence of more leniency toward hostility directed at women.