While we applaud Hudson, Bowen, and Nielson (2011) for demonstrating the correlation between two modes of contemporary sexist oppression (inequality in family law and violence against women), we are concerned about how they embed a contested narrative of human evolution into otherwise straightforward findings. We argue that claims about human evolution are unnecessary to their argument, and, more importantly, that the version of feminist evolutionary analysis they describe is less feminist than it could be.

New and reconfigured structures of policymaking and governance present fresh challenges to gender equality seekers, especially in federal systems. In a world in which policy functions are increasingly being “uploaded” to international or supranational levels, “downloaded” to meso-level units, or “offloaded” to civil society and private enterprises (Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003), the links among institutional design, policy activism, and policy outcomes provide fruitful opportunities for empirical research and theory building. This essay asks what impact state architectures have on women's political mobilization around child care. How might we theorize the effects of different types of federation and multilevel governance on child-care activists' political opportunities and achievement of policy outcomes? How adequate are existing frameworks for explaining links among policy actors, state institutions, civil society, and international business? We sketch some preliminary answers and show how recognizing the significance of the multiple scales and layers involved in contemporary governance can expand feminist research agendas and promote gender-sensitive policymaking. Child care is increasingly understood as an essential component of contemporary welfare states (Michel and Mahon 2002). Well-designed child-care programs help time-pressed earner parents reconcile work and family life and make it possible for lone parents to improve their economic situation through paid work. Universal early childhood education and care (ECEC) also lays the foundations for lifelong learning, indispensable for success in knowledge-based, postindustrial economies. Adequate public support for ECEC systems generates good postindustrial jobs for early childhood educators who work in publicly financed, regulated settings instead of in low-paid, informal, caregiving situations (Esping-Andersen 1999). Developing high-quality, universal ECEC in federal systems with divided jurisdictional responsibility, however, faces particular challenges. Most comparative social policy and welfare regime literature ignores state architectures by assuming that unitary state forms are the norm and focusing purely on nation-state governments and policymaking (Esping-Andersen 1999). Advocacy and policy initiatives on international or meso-level scales typically are ignored or underexplored.

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.

Modern democracy is often considered to be tantamount to representative democracy. In her most recent statement on representation, Hanna Pitkin admits that when writing The Concept of Representation (1967), she took the relationship between representation and democracy to be unproblematic: “… like most people even today, I more or less equated democracy with representation, or at least with representative government. It seemed axiomatic that under modern conditions only representation can make democracy possible” (2004, 336). Almost forty years later, Pitkin's view is that “representation has supplanted democracy instead of serving it” (2004, 339). She concludes her analysis asking whether democracy can be saved from the increasing turn (or return) of political representation to more elitist forms of government and dominion.

The executive branch of government constitutes the pinnacle of political power. In principle, presidents and prime ministers, along with their cabinets, set the policy agenda, debate, and deliberate policy initiatives; introduce legislation; and oversee the implementation of public policies. Executives are the most visible political actors, representing the public “face” of government. Until very recently, executives were also the most masculinized of political institutions, with women absent entirely from the position of prime minister or president until the 1960s, and, at least until the last decade, holding only a small number of posts in cabinet. Yet one of the most striking global trends in recent years is the growing number of women elected to the post of prime minister or president: at the time of writing there are 12 countries where a woman occupies the top political office. A growing number of women are also being appointed cabinet ministers and, in some cases, to some of the most traditionally masculine posts. It is common today to define “parity” cabinets as those where women hold between 40% and 60% of ministerial portfolios. With that definition, countries as different as Spain, Bolivia, Sweden, and South Africa have had gender parity in cabinet. What is more, women's presence in cabinet is now a firmly established norm. Among the first questions raised by commentators after a newly elected president or prime minister announces her cabinet are, how many women were appointed? To which portfolios were they assigned?

A central argument in theories on women's political interests has been that the sexual division of labor, inter alia, gives women greater experience of responsibility for the care of others, especially children, which in turn influences their political attitudes. However, the specifics of this claim have not been sufficiently examined in prior literature. By applying unique data on Swedish legislators’ subjective policy preferences and use of their parental leave over time, this article explores empirically whether the personal roles of members of parliament (MPs) in reproduction affect their political preferences, regardless of their sex. The analysis reveals that men's interest in social policy tends to increase after being on parental leave while in office, whereas women's interest in social and family policy remains strong, regardless. This finding might indicate a care experience mechanism at work, pertinent also to men, but with a possibly shallower content. The analysis raises the question: are care issues, previously seen as women's issues, now becoming human issues? It further contributes to the discussion on ways to measure gender other than using sex as proxy.

At a time when both the value of gender mainstreaming as well as of higher education itself is being debated, this collection of essays on gender mainstreaming in the discipline of political science is an important rejoinder regarding the necessity of both. First, implicit in these essays is a reminder that the value of a college education resides as much in its contribution to the maintenance of democratic life in the United States as it does in the possibility of earning a good salary. Indeed, entwined with the advocacy of gender mainstreaming in the discipline of political science is a belief that the discipline itself contributes to the development of empowered democratic citizens and the cultivation of a robust political culture. The study and teaching of politics is part of how we learn to participate in political life: political science is a form of civic education. Including women—all women as well as all men—in the curriculum of political science ensures the vitality of our democracy. Further, including women in the discipline both as faculty and as students ensures that the agenda of the discipline itself will be transformed. After a decade of gender mainstreaming, the goal remains not only to ensure that women become part of the mainstream, but also that they transform the mainstream.

Women's legislative underrepresentation has emerged as perhaps the most stable feature of the postcommunist Hungarian political system, resisting Europeanization, changes in the electoral and party systems, and a new constitution. Early research on the decline in women's access to power in postcommunist transitional democracies focused on common legacies of communist rule, but those legacies cannot account for widening disparities in women's representation across the region over time or the persistent underrepresentation of women in Hungary. Using a pathway case analysis of Hungary's 2010 parliamentary elections, this research examines how cultural, structural, and institutional factors interacted to keep Hungary stuck in the basement with respect to women's legislative recruitment.

This article addresses the empirical uncertainty regarding whether gender quotas establish a foundation of political representation and experience that encourages female candidates to compete against men. It updates and expands existing empirical research by contributing an analysis of the most recent electoral data across four municipal corporations in India over two election cycles. Critical questions on the theoretical expectation that gender quotas should encourage and enable women politicians to compete in open-gender contests over time are considered. The Indian quota system has not encouraged women to broadly compete outside the quota at the local level but has made some wards more likely to elect women. Parties also continue to resist nominating women outside the quota but are more likely to do so in wards previously represented by a woman. Finally, the unique overlap of gender and community quotas can discourage incumbency by essentially blocking incumbents from running again in their ward due to shifting community requirements.

There are competing global trends in terms of gender equality. International concern with gender inequality is significant. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (2000), and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (2015), among other instruments, pushed countries to increase women’s access to decision-making and basic rights such as education, paid labor, and health care. Yet more recently, there has been a “backlash” against progress in gender equality (Berry, Bouka, and Kamuru 2021; Chenoweth and Marks 2022; Piscopo and Walsh 2020; Roggeband and Krizsán 2018).

As illustrated by these definitions from the Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, context dependency is a defining characteristic of gender, since gender and intersectional inequalities differ spatially and temporarily in how they are organized. It is on this issue of context dependency where gender studies scholars often collide with (the application and interpretation) of regression-based statistical analysis in debates about quantitative methods (see Spierings 2012).

Prostitution has been considered by feminists as, alternatively, a gendered relation, an issue of sexuality, and a kind of labor. In this article, I argue for an integrated feminist analysis of sex work that focuses on the first and third of these, leaving the second in the background. I argue that this reconstructed feminist analysis must reject the moralism and determinism of the gendered critique, and radicalize the economic critique. It must also, I suggest, orient itself toward consideration of prostitution as a symptom or function of various masculinities. In all cases, feminism has considered sex work as a question or problem of women's agency and sexuality. Reversing this standard feminist approach offers important new directions for empirical research, and denaturalizes prostitution as an inevitable feature of human life. This denaturalization radicalizes the otherwise traditional policy debate over prostitution by allowing for a more revolutionary critique of the relations of domination that both govern and constitute sex work as a stigmatized, hierarchical, and exploitative practice.I would like to thank Kate Baldwin, John Christman, Brandon Fogel, Traci Levy, William Roberts, Michael Zuckert, and four anonymous reviewers for Politics & Gender for their helpful criticism and insightful commentary on previous drafts of this article. Conversations with Terri Horning proved invaluable to its theoretical development.

Do men and women respond differently to negative political communication? Only a limited collection of studies into the effects of negative campaigns have investigated this research question, and the conflicting results produced from such studies have prevented the development of a widely accepted answer. As campaigns transition to new media environments, further problems arise, as any potential gender gap may be magnified on the new political communication battlefield of social media. The present article contributes to this sparsely investigated area through an empirical study of men's and women's reactions on Facebook to US presidential candidate attacks during two general election campaigns (2012 and 2016) and two primaries (2016 Democratic and Republican). Across nearly 400 million reactions and 40 million unique users, women demonstrate lower receptivity to candidate attacks than men. Two potential explanatory factors for the gap are examined, but neither fully captures the magnitude of the differences observed. Conceptualizing the gender gap composition in terms of differential receptivity most accurately explains these findings and potentially resolves the competing explanations for the gap within the existing literature.

Citizen protests are common political phenomena, ranging in size, kind, and impact. This essay focuses on a unique kind of citizen protest that reaches a crisis threshold: massive uprisings accompanied by violence and system-level critiques, expressed in phrases such as “It is not 30 cents, it is 30 years,” used by protesters in Chile in 2019–20. Crises meeting this definition have occurred in countries as diverse as Iceland in 2009, Hong Kong in 2019, Chile, and Colombia in 2019–21. In contrast with economic crises (Strolovitch 2013), protesters—not necessarily elites—perform the discursive work of (re)interpreting material and political conditions. Protesters’ framing of their grievances may overwhelm elite attempts to reinterpret these crises for their benefit. We argue that protest-driven crises can alter gendered opportunity structures, but outcomes are likely multifaceted and potentially contradictory.

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.

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.

We can and should use a wide range of measures and methods to study institutions; we need a combination of approaches to chart such complex phenomena meaningfully. This is true for all kinds of institutions, both formal and informal. In this essay I argue that statistical methods, including large-scale cross-national analyses, can be fruitfully employed by feminists and others seeking new insights into institutional change. Moreover, large-scale cross-national studies offer the opportunity to examine our ideas about institutions in ways that are not possible in smaller, localized studies. Statistical methods and large-scale cross-national studies offer the tools to parse out the degree to which varying elements of the contexts and characteristics of institutions shape their operation and outcomes. They strengthen the power of arguments about the general application of the findings in specific cases and provide tools for assessing the impact of chance. Thus, although qualitative and quantitative techniques are best used together, or at least are best used when they inform each other, statistical techniques in general and large-scale cross-national analyses in particular offer insights not available with other approaches. Here I mainly discuss these arguments as they apply to informal institutions, where methodological challenges are the greatest, but the points I make here should apply to research on all kinds of institutions.

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.

To what extent do women's organizations share a common commitment to organizational participatory democracy? Research suggests that women appear more likely than men to prefer democratic decision-making processes, yet these studies generally compare women's and men's behavior in organizations that are not only numerically dominated by men but that were also initially formed by men. I examine the electoral and policymaking rules of 37 membership-based women's associations in order to determine the extent to which the bylaws of women's groups exhibit the high levels of democracy predicted by the theoretical and empirical literature. I find that levels of democracy in women's associations vary more than research on women's governance would suggest. I then explore factors that influence the observed variation in women's groups. I find that the extent to which a women's group relies on membership dues, the year it was founded, and, to a lesser extent, its size affect how democratically it is structured. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for the representation of women's diverse political and economic interests.