Authoritarian regimes around the world have increasingly implemented policies and reforms to strengthen women’s rights, ranging from adopting gender quotas to penalizing gender-based violence. Recent literature highlights that authoritarian leaders are at the forefront of these initiatives, often aiming to strengthen their rule rather than advance women’s rights (e.g., Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2016; Bush and Zetterberg 2021; Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2021). While we cannot ignore the contributions of grassroots activism in advancing gender equality (e.g., Kang and Tripp 2018; Krook 2009), authoritarian regimes, by nature, have less incentive to pay attention to popular demands. Thus, women’s rights reforms in autocracies tend to be top-down: initiated by the leadership, with a lack of citizen involvement in the design process. This essay considers how top-down gender reforms may be viewed by the public, and as a consequence, how the public’s perceptions of them may affect women’s status in the broader society.

Advocates have been striving for decades to improve the representation of women and people of color in the academy. The results in political science have been fairly limited. From 1980 to 2010, the proportion of women among white political science faculty grew from 9.6% to 24.8% (APSA 2011, 44). Even with this sizable increase, women constituted fewer than a quarter of white political scientists. Within their respective ethnoracial groups, women of color made up a greater proportion of political science faculty but remain woefully underrepresented in the profession, with only 79 Latino, 161 African American, and 117 Asian American female political science faculty nationally in 2010 (APSA 2011, 44–46). Overall, the proportion of scholars of color within political science during this period, male and female, has remained largely flat; in 2010, 88.9% of political science faculty were white. In this essay, I argue that an intersectional approach to thinking about this issue—one that acknowledges the marginalization and privilege that cut across faculty within departments and universities—raises the possibility of changing the conversation about inclusion, potentially opening up new possibilities for making substantive change within political science departments and universities.

Across the academy, there is growing concern over diversity within academic institutions. According to recent research published in three top political science journals, members of historically marginalized groups remain underrepresented and marginalized in submissions, publications, and even reviewer pools (Ayoub 2022; Bell et al. 2020; Reinhardt, Windsor, and King 2022). Expectations that scholars, especially early career researchers (ECRs), “publish or perish” thus exacerbate intersectional inequalities within the discipline (Briscoe-Palmer and Mattocks 2021; McKenzie 2017; Steinþórsdóttir et al. 2018). Further, the overwhelming pressure to publish at all costs can commodify knowledge production and foster a toxic, competitive environment based on peer rivalry rather than collaboration for the sake of advancing knowledge (Horta and Li 2023, 269–70, 271–72).

José Esteban Muñoz opens his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by stating that “queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality … an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.” Queerness, continues Muñoz, “is a longing that propels us onward … Queerness is essentially about the rejection of the here and now” (2009, 1). He identifies queer utopias with an idea of futurity as an attempt to think of something else that goes beyond the “here and now,” an act of resistance: “the present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes and ‘rational’ expectations … The present must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of past and future affective worlds” (27). In this article, I aim to show just the opposite. The argument I make here is that queer utopia—transgender—is a futurity of the here and of the now, a virtuality that does not belong to the past nor does it lend itself to projections of the future, but it is totally immersed in the very now of the present.

This article advances and tests an original theory of a “feminine homestyle” to explain how female legislators develop relationships with constituents that both mitigate the potential for gendered biases and fulfill the communal goals that motivate women to run for political office. We use an original audit study that tests legislator responsiveness to direct email communication. We show that female lawmakers are more responsive to constituent communication and more likely to display compassion and empathy in responses compared with male legislators; but we also find important differences in women’s responsiveness across the race and ethnicity. Further, we find that responsive female lawmakers can change the behaviors of their male counterparts by creating stronger norms of responsiveness within legislative institutions. Our findings have important downstream implications for democratic accountability among voters and illustrate how female lawmakers substantively represent through direct communication with constituents.

I once mentioned to a prominent feminist scholar that I was using one of her books in my course on feminism and political theory. She looked at me blankly for a moment and then replied, “Feminism and political theory? I thought feminism is political theory.” She was right of course; in some sense, everything that is feminist theory is also political theory. Feminism illuminates gendered relations of power in politics and social life, after all, and it contributes (however indirectly) to the larger project of transforming them. Moreover, since the rise of “second wave” feminism in the 1970s, feminist theorists have significantly reshaped political theory as a discipline, moving crucial questions from the margins of the field to its center, questions about gender equity and justice, the constitution of the political subject, the demands of difference, the intersecting dynamics of domination, the differential effects of globalization, and the conditions of freedom, among other things. As a result, much of what we think of as “mainstream” political theory is now also feminist theory. This is often true even of work that does not make women or gender its sole subject matter, as the leading voices in the field increasingly are scholars whose work has been shaped by literatures central to feminism and who think about politics in ways that are informed by a critical consciousness of the gendered quality of power relations.

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.

More women are running for and serving in the U.S. House of Representatives than ever before, but how does gender influence the careers of House members once they arrive in Congress? We find that gender matters in two important ways: first, freshmen women are older than freshmen men. Second, women are both more likely to lose a reelection race and more likely to retire because of electoral concerns than men. The result is that women have significantly shorter careers in the House than men. Both factors—women's delayed entry and early exit—produce fewer women in the House at any given time than if these disparities did not exist. These findings have significant consequences for the House's demographic makeup, ideological makeup, and policy agenda. The broader implication of our findings is that more women in the electoral arena is a necessary but not sufficient condition to make the representation of women truly equal.

Since its foundation, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promoted gender equality, at least at the level of official rhetoric. Despite some progress in their social and economic lives, women have not been able to make headway in Chinese politics. Many scholars have studied this topic, but due to the CCP's political sensitivity, systematic data are not available. Drawing on a unique data set about provincial-level elites, I quantify gender inequality in Chinese politics and test several commonly held hypotheses. Although most empirical studies of Chinese women in politics focus on the National People's Congress (NPC), this paper focuses on officials in the Party-State, on the grounds that they wield more power than members of the NPC. Female leaders of the Party-State are more likely to be drawn from nonparty members and to occupy less prestigious positions than male leaders. There is no evidence, however, indicating that women and ethnic minority status are associated, or that women face more difficulties entering more powerful branches of the Party-State. Cross-regional analysis finds that political institutions, socioeconomic conditions, and culture have all played some role in promoting or hindering women's political careers.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago. I thank Louise Davidson-Schmich, Ying Huang, Marc Moskowitz, Dali Yang, two editors, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and excellent suggestions. Anesa Uda-Diaz has offered excellent research support.

Family-friendly (FF) working practices in political institutions have attracted scant attention from scholars, arguably reflecting the scarcity of their implementation. Using a survey of legislators and qualitative interviews, we examine for the first time how satisfied elected members of two new legislatures (the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament) are with FF working practices. We offer four possible explanations—parenthood, age of the legislator, sex, and the distance between the legislator's constituency and the legislature—for the variation in satisfaction. Our findings suggest that being a woman and having a greater distance between legislature and constituency exerted significant negative effects on legislators' satisfaction with FF working practices. In contrast, legislators over age 60 were significantly more likely to be satisfied with FF working practices in the new legislatures. We conclude by outlining future research avenues for comparative scholars of gender and politics interested in the effectiveness and resilience of FF working practices, in particular highlighting the importance of looking beyond the parent–child caring relationship to other caring and domestic obligations.

One of most negative campaigns in history may have taken place during the 2014 Senate election cycle. Nearly 75% of senate ads aired during a two-week period in early fall of 2014 showed a candidate in a negative light, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. A postelection analysis by the Center for Public Integrity showed that 46% of the more than one million ads aired during the 2014 senate campaigns were negative. And, in the most competitive states, the proportion of negative ads was even higher (e.g., 67% in North Carolina, 58% in Kansas). Negative advertisements sponsored by candidates, interest groups, and political parties are being launched on the airways, in newspapers, on radio, and via the Internet at an unprecedented pace. These advertisements, however, are now routinely subjected to fact checking. The Washington Post, along with many other fact-checking organizations, such as PolitiFact, The AP Factcheck, and Factcheck.org, examine thousands of statements and political advertisements during campaigns to determine the accuracy of the claims. For instance, during the 2012 election cycle, PolitiFact had 36 reporters and editors working in 11 states producing more than 800 fact checks on the presidential campaign and hundreds more for candidates running for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.

When a party selects an out lesbian as its leader, do women and LGBT people evaluate that leader more positively? And do they become more likely to vote for that party? We answer these questions using the case of Kathleen Wynne, premier of Ontario, Canada, from 2013 to 2018. We draw on four large-sample surveys conducted by Ipsos before and after the 2011 and 2014 Ontario elections. We compare shifts in best premier choice and vote choice among non-LGBT men, non-LGBT women, LGBT men, and LGBT women from 2011 to 2014. We find gender and LGBT affinity in leader evaluations. However, we find that only non-LGBT women and LGBT men were more likely to vote Liberal after Wynne became leader. This article contributes to research on affinity by examining LGBT affinity in a real-world election and the intersection of gender and LGBT affinity.

A large body of literature in political science documents differences between elected men and women in their substantive policy preferences, representation styles, and effectiveness as legislators. We know far less about whether female and male representatives respond differently to being held politically accountable for their decisions. Although it is a difficult concept to evaluate empirically with incumbents, this absence of research is nevertheless surprising considering the central role of accountability in legislative behavior and the nonelite evidence that women and men respond differently to attributions of accountability. I provide evidence for the existence of such an accountability gender gap in an experiment with 377 incumbent legislators in three countries, in which they were asked to choose between economic policy plans alternately presented as the status quo, with varying levels of implied task accountability. Elected women and men reacted significantly differently when the political accountability levels of the task increased: female politicians exhibited a stronger preference for policies presented as the status quo, whereas male politicians were more likely to abandon the status quo and favor change. This pattern is unique to politicians and is not observed in nonelites. I discuss processes that motivate this divergence and the implications for research on gender and political representation.

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a method for the systematic analysis of cases. A holistic view of cases and an approach to causality emphasizing complexity are some of its core features. Over the last decades, QCA has found application in many fields of the social sciences. In spite of this, its use in feminist research has been slower, and only recently QCA has been applied to topics related to social care, the political representation of women, and reproductive politics. In spite of the comparative turn in feminist studies, researchers still privilege qualitative methods, in particular case studies, and are often skeptical of quantitative techniques (Spierings 2012). These studies show that the meaning and measurement of many gender concepts differ across countries and that the factors leading to feminist success and failure are context specific. However, case study analyses struggle to systematically account for the ways in which these forces operate in different locations.

Pressure to make policy issues gender neutral, as in the cases of policy debates concerning child care and anti-violence against women, had initially been put onto public policy agendas by feminist advocates. The broader influence of neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism (also known as the social-investment perspective) in Canada has amplified this trend. Global trends toward neoliberalism encouraged less state involvement and reduced public spending on the welfare state from the 1980s into the 1990s, with detrimental effects on women's policy. Moreover, feminist women's groups and women's issues were increasingly labeled “special interests”; advocacy claims toward the state were routinely delegitimized by successive provincial and federal governments, although this trend was less pronounced under left-wing regimes than right-wing ones (Collier 2006; 2009). As Canada entered the new millennium, many social-policy researchers identified a renewed state interest in reinvestment in social programs to position the state better in a competitive global marketplace. This newer shift toward the “social-investment perspective” is alleged to have consciously erased gender from social policy debates, particularly in the child-care arena (see Jenson 2009).

Social movements seek social and political change in very specific political, economic, and cultural contexts. Their very imperative for structural change means that they are nonbureaucratic, noninstitutional, fluid collectives that have no single head office and few formal records of their existence. This poses a substantial problem for researchers—how do we locate, measure, and record the trajectories of these phenomena?

The European Parliament (EP) is credited as an important actor in improving the rights of women in Ireland. Lacking a power base in national political parties, Irish feminists and European Union (EU) officials, including members of the EP (MEPs), have worked to secure progress on gender equality. This research explores whether, in the contemporary context, Irish female MEPs remain critical actors for women's interests at the EU level. Findings show that although Irish female MEPs have a limited record of involvement with the EP's main site for gender equality, the Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality, they do act in a variety of ways on women's interests. These include mobilization on gendered occupational roles and traditionally gendered areas such as care work, child poverty, and issues constructed as affecting women outside the EU. Irish female MEPs also facilitate forms of supranational lobbying in their support of EU-level advocacy for domestic gendered civil society and campaign groups. However, ideology and party political discipline, the pull toward local and national interests, and an absence of strong feminist agency work to diminish opportunities for female MEPs to act as critical actors and deliver critical acts on women's interests.

Existing scholarship has shown that the media and interest groups play an important role in the shaping of the public's perception of reality and in establishing the quality of democratic discourse on public policy questions. In turn, interest group actors employ different media and grassroots strategies in hopes of exploiting discursive opportunities that advance their cause. This study explores recent public policy debates over Title IX to illustrate how gender undergirds the discursive framing choices made by interest groups and presented in the media coverage. I find that framing, especially in the media, reinforces enduring cultural aspects of masculinity in sports.