The United States has the highest number of COVID-19 cases, yet many Americans have responded indifferently toward policies designed to combat the spread of the virus. While nearly all 50 states have implemented some type of stay-at-home policy to encourage social distancing, there has been high variation in the degree of compliance. We argue that this variance is partly driven by gender resentment. Gender resentment reduces trust in female political leaders and thus decreases compliance with government policy and recommendations. Using data from SafeGraph and the 2016 American National Election Study, we demonstrate that the effect of stay-at-home policies on social distancing is reduced when gender resentment increases in states with female leaders. However, when gender resentment is low, there is no difference in the effect of policies on behavior. This research has important implications for understanding unseen barriers that can mediate the efficacy of female political leaders.

This article explores the first female president of South Korea, Park Geun-Hye, and her substantive representation of women. Though Park is one of many women executives from Asia taking the family route to power, her presidency still may lead to the implementation of women-friendly policies once elected. Park's government has expanded women-related policy areas first developed by previous progressive governments, but not consistently. Though mixed, her performance shows improvement over the previous conservative president, who shares Park's party affiliation. Since we can control for partisanship, Park administration's efforts on behalf of women prove particularly compelling. While advantaged by her political lineage, her government offers important policy benefits to women.

This article provides an analytical framework for understanding why and how many authoritarian regimes have recently adopted reforms that address gender equality. I illustrate and hone the framework by tracing three policy-making processes on domestic violence in Russia, an important and least-likely case for such reforms. While recent scholarship finds the importance of international leverage, strategic actions by women’s groups, and regime interest in sidelining religious extremists, this study highlights other opportunities and agents and specifies authoritarian mechanisms such as intra-elite conflict, signaling between the autocrat and elites, and selective responsiveness. Drawing on the scholarship on authoritarian regime dynamics, policy making in Russia, and gender policy making, this study contributes to the literature on the relationship between gender and regime type by focusing on the micrologics of authoritarian policy making.

Policy documents are a source of authority in both a legal and a normative sense. When policy documents make particular assumptions about care work requiring private, not public, consideration, this can push care, its concerns, and those who give and receive care out of the public sphere. This marginalization of care work, however, is ethically suspect, and as such I argue here that we should use the feminist ethics of care as a way to analyze current policy and guide the creation of future policy to ensure more ethically robust policy statements. I advocate for the use of care ethics in addition to human rights ethically guided public policy, which prioritizes the effort to implement human rights standards through government action. My claim is that human rights should not be our sole basis for moral and political reasoning, especially in the policy process. Policy shapes our lives, and how we live in relation to particular others. Care ethics can and should be used as an ethical guide for the policy process because it can bring to the fore how institutional patterns of power shape our relations, an analysis that human rights theories are not, in general, built to undertake.

Scholars of marginalized groups are experts on attitudes, behaviors, practices, and institutions that resist inclusion and reproduce bias. Many scholars who study marginalization also work from first-hand experience of it. Although academic experiences of marginalization usually occur in sites of middle-class privilege, the effects can be profound. Women in the U.S. political science profession continue to be underrepresented, and women of color severely so. This sends the message to all students that women lack the capacity to be scientists. Women in academe often internalize that message and too rarely seek leadership positions. When they do, their achievements are characterized as tokenism and devalued, revealing a hostile gender climate that enables bias to flourish. That bias is reflected in salary discrepancies, resource distribution, and service responsibilities (e.g., APSA 2011; Monroe et al. 2008).

This article examines the writings of women who explicitly embrace wifelysubmission, including those who advocate corporal punishment. Through a closereading of primary sources, the article seeks to illuminate the biblicalliteralist theology that underlies the ideology of wifely submission and toexplain the reasons why many heterosexual women find such an ideology appealing.While many readers might be tempted to dismiss such women as antifeminist, thequestion of desire that their writing raises goes to the heart of a majorchallenge faced by contemporary feminist theory, which since the “sexwars” often remains divided between those who accept whatever womenchoose as feminist and those who stand in judgment of other women'schoices. This article uses the case of wifely submission to examine the problemof desire, the concept of consent, and the benefits and limitations of“choice” discourse within feminist theory. It argues for amiddle-ground approach that respects women as agents in their own lives, whilealso engaging them in reflective conversation about desire and itsramifications.

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 might one reconcile feminist international relations theorizing with quantitative methods, if they can be reconciled at all? This question has occupied a central place in the field of feminist international relations theory since its inception, and while it is not my intention to rehash it in its entirety here, my story sheds light on the difficulties that feminist IR scholars may face in choosing the quantitative route. My essay highlights these conundrums from different stages of the research process: formulation of the research question, selection of a research method, usage of quantitative methods, and the dissemination of the findings. I conclude with questions for further consideration.

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.

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.

The emergence of the feminist network Magín in Cuba in the mid-1990s challenged the monopoly of the official women's organization over issues related to women. Magín came into being as a result of encounters with feminists in international meetings, and it grew and developed through transnational support. Yet the organization did not extend beyond a small group of professional women and eventually the state closed it down. This article probes the question of why autonomous feminist organizing did not succeed in Cuba, particularly given a window of opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Union. I suggest that the nature of transnational networks, combined with the political hegemony of the Cuban government, limited the scope of Magín as an independent women's organization. Although transnational advocacy networks helped Cuban feminists to create new spaces for dialogue, they also encouraged tendencies of specialization and professionalization that led the women to forgo the possibility of building a broad-based autonomous movement. An analysis of feminist networks in Cuba can contribute to our knowledge of the pitfalls and promises of transnationalism, particularly in nonliberal democratic contexts.This research was made possible by support from the Social Sciences Research Council, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University. I am grateful to the women of Magín who gave generously of their time to share their experiences and ideas. In particular, I would like to thank Norma Guillard for providing materials and carrying out investigations for me long distance. Thanks to Mervyn Bain, Matt Cleary, Elisabeth Friedman, Kathryn Hochstetler, Catherine Murphy, Hairong Yan, and anonymous reviewers and editors of Politics & Gender for crucial feedback and/or enlightening conversations. An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Political Science Association meetings in Chicago, September 2004.

Attempts to integrate feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (GPE) were first meticulously studied in the Critical Perspectives sections of the June 2015 and December 2017 issues of this journal. Although the debate has gained presence in workshops, at international conferences, and even on dedicated websites, the diverse contributions have remained rather theoretical (e.g., Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson 2017; Hudson 2015). The aim of these Critical Perspectives essays is to take the integration of FSS and GPE one step further by presenting empirically grounded contributions that help us contextualize the existing theoretical debates. By focusing on postwar contexts, the pieces here take seriously the material conditions of women's empowerment from a perspective attuned to the gendered and racialized logics structuring social orders in postwar states. We believe that these are the spaces where war economies and peace economies meet and where (gendered) structural transformation of societies is possible. Like the two previous collections, we do not understand FSS and GPE as additive (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2017). Rather, we understand them as traditions that share a common goal, namely, to undermine the racialized neoliberalism and patriarchal capitalism underpinning international intervention and postwar reconstruction projects.

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?

This article examines a Japanese local party, Netto, as a new type of women's party. The Netto is defined as a “proactive women's party” to illustrate how it is different not only from conventional political parties but also from parties organized to promote feminist platforms. The Japanese Netto is a women-dominated party in which women constitute the majority of members and candidates, as well as party leadership. The party platform prioritizes practical women's interests such as safe food and child-rearing over women's labor or feminist issues. The gendered characteristics of Netto appeal to middle-class housewives and mothers, facilitating the electoral success of the party in urban areas. The party's notable features, such as rotation of deputies, term limits, donation of deputy salary, and volunteerism, distinguish Netto from conventional political parties. As such, the party provides an alternative model of political representation. The Netto party illustrates that not all women's parties use a feminist platform, but they still play an important role in changing male-dominated electoral politics.

This study investigates the subjective effects of gender quotas by examining how quotas affect party elites’ perceptions of quota beneficiaries. Furthermore, it proposes to distinguish between objective and subjective quota effects. Subjective effects were studied by randomizing information on whether politicians got into office through a gender quota. Elites then were asked to rate politicians based on an audio clip and an experimental vignette. Whereas the two treatment groups were told that gender quotas or ceiling quotas for men were employed during a politician’s election, the control group did not receive this information. This experiment was conducted in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. More than 1,000 party elites participated overall. Contrary to expectations, being framed as a “quota woman” only has a negative impact among elites of the radical right. In contrast with the center right, the radical right is opposed not only to quotas but to quota beneficiaries as well.

In Canada, as in the United States, the postwar welfare regime recognized the citizenship of the male breadwinner while women, for the most part, remained second-class citizens. This was reflected, inter alia, in Canada's child-care policy, a federal-provincial cost-sharing arrangement that provided subsidies to low-income families able to demonstrate their need, rather than as a public service available to all those who want and need it. While this meant that the Canadian state did not guarantee the right to affordable child care, these intergovernmental arrangements also offered feminists opportunities to challenge federal policy at the provincial and local level. This article examines child-care politics in Toronto, Canada's largest city and the first one in Canada to have a municipal child-care program. It shows how, in the 1970s, Toronto began to break with the liberal assumptions that characterized its past policies. Toronto's child-care program also posed a potential challenge to the national and provincial regimes. This, however, required the movement to secure changes at the provincial and/or federal level, which it thus far has failed to do.

In convergence with the global norm toward more proportional representative electoral systems, many countries in East Asia have adopted quota strategies to address women's political underrepresentation (Franceschet, Krook, and Piscopo 2012; Krook 2009). Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan provide ideal case studies to investigate the impact of these efforts. While these countries share similar economic development, educational levels, and Confucian communitarian ethos, their experiences and progress on empowering women vary. For example, the level of women's legislative representation in the region ranges from a low of 8.1% in Japan to a high of 33.6% in Taiwan. And while Taiwan and South Korea embarked on constitutional reforms in the 1990s and introduced candidate quotas or reserved seats to guarantee women's legislative representation at all levels, Singapore and Japan have resisted legislating quotas but instead set 30% women parliamentarians as targets of party strategies. This collection of papers explores this intraregional variation with a comparative view on the origins and impact of quotas on women's political life. Specifically, we trace the origins of quota adoption and how they interact with the existing electoral and party institutions to improve women's legislative numbers.

Scholarship on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) politics argues that political claims, such as access to the military and marriage, are most effective when representatives from the group articulate that the desire for inclusion and participation in those institutions is similar to the desires held by their straight and nontransgender counterparts. This strategy of assimilation has yielded many positive legal changes. And yet the Donald Trump administration marks a period in which these gains have been repeatedly challenged and particular segments of the LGBTQ group are increasingly under attack. This article offers a preliminary analysis of how LGBTQ politics has been impacted by the 2016 election. Using a historical case study of LGBTQ identity construction and agenda development during the second half of the 1990s, I ask: how might the LGBTQ group mine its recent history for clues to rethink its political agenda and political strategies? Having shown that opportunities to advance a different movement—one focused on more radical, broadly inclusive changes—were bypassed during this period, I conclude by putting forward several recommendations for contemporary LGBTQ movement building and resistance strategies.

This article offers an innovative way of understanding gender balance in parliaments. Motivated by research documenting how newcomers are disadvantaged during their first term in office, while senior members enjoy certain privileges, we want to find out how common women are among senior members of parliaments. We launch an institutional approach comprising three seniority measures to study gender gaps in political endurance to find out whether, where, and when men are more likely than women to be parliamentary seniors. Our analysis using data from seven countries in Western Europe and two countries in North America (1965–2020) shows very high gender gaps across the three measures. Thus, despite an increased level of female representation, women still constitute a small part of the exclusive group of senior members of parliament. Our findings extend the research documenting that women and men largely have equally long parliamentary careers, emphasizing the need to understand gender balance in multidimensional terms.

This article argues that systematic rape should be conceptualized not only as a war crime, but also as a destructive and increasingly deployed war weapon. As such, rape becomes a subject of arms control and thus directly relevant to security studies. Consequently, I argue that international relations should consider rape as a weapon of war for two major reasons. First, the categorization of rape as a weapon of war fits with core disciplinary theoretical definitions and assumptions. Namely, rape as a weapon of war compromises state security, operates in a conception of power defined as material/“power-over”/zero-sum, and corresponds with a rational actor model. Second, although wartime rape has often been marginalized as a “women's issue,” empirical evidence persuasively demonstrates how this categorization is incomplete; rather, women, girls, men, and boys all suffer direct and/or indirect consequences from the increasing prevalence and brutality of this weapon's deployment. Overall, the article maintains that excluding rape from security studies precludes comprehensive, accurate analysis within areas of theoretical and practical concern to IR. Thus, I conclude by suggesting avenues of research, from diverse theoretical perspectives, that may persuade IR scholars to view rape as an increasingly relevant and analytically rich topic of study.