Research shows that masculinity and sexuality are pivotal to the leadership and success of the populist radical right (PRR). In particular, normative conceptions of masculinity, as seen in gendered nationalism, have been argued to be important to the appeal of PRR parties. However, the supply side of this dynamic remains understudied. To fill this gap, this article uses critical discourse analysis to analyze the role of masculinity and sexuality in the self-positioning and envisioned hegemonies of the most successful Dutch PRR leaders: Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders, and Thierry Baudet. The Dutch case is particularly insightful as it presents a diverse array of PRR parties in one country context. We found crucial similarities and differences between the discourses of these leaders. Our findings suggest that masculinity and sexuality, while constitutive at the party level, are largely negotiable or nondefining for the larger party family. These findings problematize often-made identifications of PRR politics with a one-of-a-kind conservative ideology of gender and sexuality.

In 2004, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the voter turnout rate for women was 60.1% compared with 56.3% for men, and across the United States 8.8 million more women than men voted. Women have voted at higher rates than men in all presidential elections since 1980, with the gap between women and men growing slightly larger in each subsequent election year. Moreover, in 2004, women outvoted men (in terms of both turnout rates and actual numbers) in every racial and ethnic group—African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, and whites (Center for American Women and Politics 2005a).

Research has long observed the absence of gender in child care policy, media, and elections. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has invoked critical questions about child care and its importance to states’ economic recoveries around the world. In this research note, we analyze news coverage of child care in major Canadian daily newspapers to explore whether and how news narratives regarding child care are shifting in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, are we seeing a focus on women and gender in child care coverage amid the compounding pressures that women face in the current social and economic climate? The results of our analysis suggest that the pandemic has not shifted the conversation on child care and that current coverage principally reflects long-standing trends in child care framing. We find that gender remains systematically written out of coverage of child care, occluded by a larger focus on health-, economic-, and accessibility-related concerns about child care services.

In emails from the besieged town of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israel's December 2008/January 2009 war on Gaza, Majeda Al Saqqa (2009a), a long-time community and women's activist, describes to friends the shrinkage of her life into the domestic space. She explains the endless strategizing to protect children physically and psychologically and her fears not only for family but for friends all over Gaza, sometimes reachable by mobile phone, sometimes, most terribly, not. In her war diary, there is no mention of Palestinian leaders or governments, neither the Hamas-led de facto government in Gaza nor the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. She offers only bitter asides about the international community. Apart from family, neighbors, and friends, the only agents that offer a modicum of sanity and security are local: the Palestinian health workers risking their lives for the wounded and local radio broadcasters who stay on the air with news, warnings, and encouragement.

This essay explores the controversy spawned by the release, in April, 2004, of the photographs taken by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Its particular concern is with photographs that depict American servicewomen engaged in various forms of abusive conduct against Iraqi prisoners. In its opening half, the essay examines and criticizes the responses to these photographs offered, first, by right-wing commentators and, second, by American feminists, most notably Barbara Ehrenreich. All read these photographs as a referendum on feminism and, more particularly, its commitment to the cause of gender equality; and all do so, I argue, on the basis of a naive understanding of gender. In its latter half, accordingly, the essay offers a more adequate understanding of gender, one loosely grounded in the work of Judith Butler and the concept of performativity. Referencing various official interrogation manuals, as well as the investigative reports released in the wake of this scandal, the essay employs this concept in offering a more adequate account of the gendered import of the deeds depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs. It concludes by arguing that what is important about these photographs is neither whether the perpetrators of the exploitation they depict are male or female, nor whether the deeds they portray somehow compromise the feminist quest for gender equality. Rather, what is important are the multiple ways in which specifically gendered practices, which can be detached from the bodies they conventionally regulate, are deployed as elements within a more comprehensive network of technologies aimed at disciplining prisoners and so confirming their status as abject subjects of U.S. military power.This essay has its origins in a roundtable titled “Gender Relations in the Age of Neo-Liberalism,” which was conducted in conjunction with the 2005 meeting of the Western Political Science Association. I wish to thank the other participations on that roundtable, Jane Bayes, Mary Hawkesworth, and Judith Hicks Stiehm, as well as Paul Apostolidis, Renee Heberle, Jinee Lokaneeta, Jeannie Morefield, Aaron Perrine, Kari Tupper, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of the essay.

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.

One crucial element of Hanna Pitkin's (1967) definition of political representation has been relatively neglected in the voluminous literature her work has inspired. That element is what I will refer to as potentiality, the subjunctive idea that to be considered represented, citizens must feel that someone would defend their interests if those interests were threatened. Attention to potentiality provides a reason to value descriptive representation. Second, it illuminates the representation provided by nonelected leaders and social groups. Third, it clarifies the reciprocal links between participation and representation: persons who are participatory have better grounds to believe that their interests will be protected, and those who have such a belief participate more. Evidence to support this claimed relationship between participation and representation is presented for the U.S. case.

In this study, we seek to describe and explain changes in mass abortion attitudes in Poland and the United States. Both countries exhibit modest, but significant, declines in support for legal abortion during the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century. When compositional, structural, and period effects are estimated separately, both countries exhibit strong pro-life period effects beginning in the late 1990s. In Poland, compositional effects exert pro-choice pressure but are counteracted by strong pro-life structural effects. By contrast, compositional effects in the United States are rather weak, but strong pro-choice structural effects are offset by pro-life period effects. The latter result is attributed to strategic framing of the abortion issue by pro-life elites.A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 2004. Thanks are due David Damore, Kenneth Fernandez, Sheila Lambert, Jonathan Strand, Matthew Wetstein, and Melanie Young for valuable comments and assistance.

Although most states select their judges via merit selection or an appointive process, a number of states choose their trial and appellate judges on the basis of contested elections. Currently, approximately one-half of all state judges reach their state court benches by winning partisan or nonpartisan races. In the 21 states that elect their judges, women with judicial aspirations must be as competitive as men in these elections. Specifically, they must finance increasingly expensive judicial campaigns, garner widespread support from influential political elites, and, most importantly, convince voters that they are as capable as men. Do aspiring women judges experience similar barriers or challenges as women running for legislative or executive office?

Recent discussions over similarities and differences between feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (FGPE) approaches invite us to reflect on the underlying assumptions about knowledge production within feminist international relations (IR) more broadly (Allison 2015; Enloe 2015; see also the introduction to this forum). I use Nepali women ex-combatants’ life stories to make two specific points relating to these discussions. First, I illustrate how the separation of security and political economy issues cannot fully account for their life experiences. Second, and by way of overcoming this separation, I show how by beginning with life stories, we can develop a holistic analysis that challenges the broader Eurocentric politics of feminist IR knowledge production.

Scholars increasingly recognize that voters’ attitudes about gender shape their electoral preferences. Yet previous research has not captured important nuances of the relationship between gender attitudes and electoral choice. We argue that the effects of gender attitudes are not unidirectional and interact in complex ways with voters’ perceptions of candidates, depending not only on candidates’ sex but also on their gender-relevant characteristics and values. We draw on an original survey of Americans during the 2016 elections that measured three gender attitudes—hostile sexism, modern sexism, and traditional gender roles—and evaluations of primary and general election candidates. Our study design increases analytical leverage by examining actual and hypothetical candidate matchups. We find that among Democrats, hostile sexists were drawn to Bernie Sanders, but gender traditionalists preferred Hillary Clinton. Our results also suggest that if Sanders had been the Democratic nominee, gender egalitarians would have strongly supported him over Donald Trump, as they did Clinton.

How do the media depict the leadership abilities of government leaders, and in what ways are these depictions gendered? Does the focus of leadership evaluations change over time, reflecting the increased presence of women in top leadership roles? To answer these questions, we examined news coverage of 22 subnational government leaders in Australia and Canada, countries in which a significant number of women have achieved the premiership at the state or provincial level since 2007. Analysis demonstrates that newly elected women and men leaders receive approximately the same number of leadership evaluations. Women are assessed based on the same criteria as men. All subnational political leaders are expected to be competent, intelligent, and levelheaded. That journalists prioritize experience and strength while downplaying honesty and compassion indicates a continued emphasis on “masculine” leadership norms in politics. Yet evaluations of new premiers have emphasized the traditionally “feminine” trait of collaboration as key to effective leadership and, over time, have given more attention to likability and emotions when covering male premiers. As our analysis reveals, media conceptualizations of political leadership competencies are slowly expanding in ways that make it easier for women to be seen as effective political leaders.

Parliaments are still often criticized for being gendered—that is, for maintaining problematic inequalities between male and female officeholders. While research highlights how female members of parliament (MPs) take the floor less often than men, especially during debates on “hard” policy domains, much remains unknown about the role that political parties play in fostering such differences. Drawing on a novel data set on the use of parliamentary questions in Belgium (N = 180,783), this article examines gendered patterns in the substantive focus of MPs’ parliamentary work. It confirms that differences in the issue concentrations of male and female MPs exist, but they are larger when access to the floor is more restricted and party control is stronger. Our findings yield important insights into the gendered side effects of parliamentary procedure and shed some light on the “choice versus coercion” controversy with regard to women's substantive focus of parliamentary work.

Media coverage of women and black members of Congress and presidential candidates often relies on gender and racial stereotypes, providing distorted coverage of these members and their agendas. This study analyzes national news media appearances of House members discussing the 2008 presidential election to examine whether the increased salience of race and gender due to the presence of nonwhite male presidential and vice presidential candidates resulted in greater media visibility for female and black representatives. Female and black House members, particularly those Democrats who endorsed a candidate, appeared in the media more often in 2008, driven by the media's interest in connecting their gender and racial identities to evaluations of Clinton, Palin, and Obama. With the national media's attention drawn to conflict, members with perceived conflicts among their intersectional identities drew greater media attention, especially Republican and black women. Overall, the media rendered black and female members as mainly surrogate representatives for black and women voters. The results suggest that black and female sources may secure national media exposure through the strategic use of their perceived raced-gendered expertise but at the risk of reinforcing stereotypes, and female or minority presidential candidates may influence the visibility of these members to voters.

Despite many similarities between them, the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have represented women in parliament at different rates. This article argues that differences in party organization, electoral system rules, and left party strength interact to explain the varying levels of representation of conservative women in parliament. The CDU's corporatist structure allowed it to represent diverse interests and successfully respond to challenges for female support from the left. As a result of a weaker left party challenge and a classic catch-all party organization, the LDP's attempts to incorporate women have been less extensive and largely symbolic.

A comparative analysis of emotional taxation was conducted to investigate the affective cost of entering the political process among 1,019 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) activists in the United States (n = 355), the United Kingdom (n = 230), South Africa (n = 228), and Australia (n = 206). Four consistent trends were identified across these four contexts, with important implications for the study of social movements, youth activism, gender, sexuality, and race. First, levels of emotional taxation resulting from LGBTQI activist work were consistently very high. Second, emotional burdens were systematically greater for young, nonwhite, and transgender activists. Third, emotional taxation was compounded for activists whose identities crossed multiple marginalized groups. This finding supports the validity and importance of intersectional approaches to LGBTQI issues. Fourth, the sources of emotional taxation varied greatly among activists, and transgender activists were particularly stressed by public engagements such as major events and marches. Transgender nonwhite activists also indicated relatively high levels of emotional stress related to online forms of engagement, such as posting on Twitter and Facebook. These findings could help identify the kinds of activists who participate, the kinds of issues advocated for, and why certain tactics are used.

Contemporary discourse on sexual(ized) violence in armed conflicts represents a powerful source for legitimization of highly controversial military interventions. Recent gender-responsive security studies have called for enhanced protection of women and girls from widespread and systematic sexual(ized) violence. Yet military operations reproduce the Western masculine hegemony rather than providing inclusive and apolitical assistance to victims of sexual assault. The article aims to critically assess discourse on sexual violence in a case of military intervention in Libya initiated under the rubric of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The case study indicates a set of discursive strategies exercised by Western political representatives and nongovernmental organizations and even more expressively by the media to legitimize the military campaign. Typically, sexual(ized) violence is presented as a weapon of war, used by one of the conflicting parties without an adequate response of the state. This is followed by urgent calls for international action, willingly carried out by Western powers. The simplified narrative of civilized protectors versus savage aggressors must be challenged as it exploits the problem of sexual(ized) violence in order to legitimize politically motivated actions.

In Latin America, it is difficult to win approval for policies that allow induced abortion and same-sex marriage. Social movements face more obstacles in promoting these policies than in promoting other gender and LGBTQ policies because abortion and same-sex marriage are particularly contentious issues. These policies involve doctrinal or countercultural topics, and supporters of these legislative changes must confront groups that mobilize to block these reform efforts (Blofield 2006; Corrales 2015; Díez 2015; Friedman 2019; Grzymała-Busse 2015; Htun 2003). Yet in the period following democratic transitions, some Latin American countries successfully liberalized their legislation concerning abortion and marriage equality.

In light of the growing scholarship on women's representation in the executive, we examine whether extant theories on the determinants of female ministerial appointments apply to and explain the role of women in the executive in new democracies. We are further interested in better understanding the dynamics of portfolio allocation to female ministers. Given the different meanings that the political left and right carry in new compared with established democracies, we argue that ministerial appointments and portfolio allocations reflect this difference and therefore show diverse results. Presenting data on women ministers in five southeastern European states between 1990 and 2018, we analyze the descriptive representation of women at the highest echelons of political power. We establish that while the standard claim found in the literature that left political parties stage more women and with more progressive views, as shown primarily in scholarship on Western democracies, southeastern European women ministers who are given portfolios traditionally reserved for men are appointed primarily by parties of the right. Moreover, we find little support for the link between legislative and executive representation; rather, we see that the appointment of women ministers is related to the institutionalization level of the parties in power.

In my Sex, Power, and Politics class it is often easy to convince students of the ways in which feminist political activism is radically different from the women's movements of the 19th century. Grappling with how “slut shaming” has changed from Hawthorne's story of Hester Prynne (The Scarlet Letter) to Emma Stone's ironic performance in the film Easy A to pop star Miley Cyrus' “twerking” in an MTV performance with singer Robin Thicke is an easy feat for my late-millennial generation students. They are far less comfortable, however, with the idea that there are troubling continuities in the topics of that political activism. It is thus harder for them to see the continuities and ongoing challenges as part of a longstanding rationale for a perpetual women's movement. These continuities are seen more clearly by baby boomer feminists, the bulk of whom came to consciousness as second-wave feminists.