In a healthy democracy, one would expect to see roughly equal levels of political participation among men and women. Yet—aside from voting—women are significantly less politically engaged than men at both the mass and elite levels (Atkeson 2003; Bennett and Bennett 1989; Burns, Schlozman, and Verba 2001; Lawless and Fox 2010; Verba, Burns, and Schlozman 1997). The political engagement gender gap suggests that some form of “adverse selection” is at play in the system (Mansbridge 1999, 632). This takes many forms: women have traditionally had less access to resources, more burdensome family obligations, and fewer relevant role models. However, emerging research demonstrates that even when accounting for many of these factors, women remain less engaged with politics than similarly situated men. This suggests that changing these structural factors is not enough to close the gender gap in political engagement—we must address the “gendered psyche” that prevents many women from fully participating in civic life (Lawless and Fox 2010, 12).

We ask whether women's descriptive representation in Congress enhances women's substantive representation through speechmaking on the House floor. Much of the research on women's substantive representation has focused on members' votes for and sponsorship of “women's issues” legislation. We depart from this research by systematically analyzing how members' gender and partisan identities affect gendered rhetoric in their floor speeches. In an era marked by significant increases in the number of congresswomen and partisan polarization, understanding the interactive effect of gender and partisanship on women's representation is particularly important. In an analysis of more than 30,000 speeches from 1993 to 2008, we find that when members speak about issues of their choosing during one-minute speeches, and during specific legislative debates over the most important policies considered on the House floor, congresswomen in both parties are significantly more likely than men to discuss women, enhancing women's representation.

When Hillary Clinton announced her presidential candidacy, questions about the role of gender in presidential politics immediately surfaced. Would gender stereotyping and sexism pervade the electoral environment? Would the media treat Clinton differently than her competitors in the Democratic primary field? Would Clinton's candidacy mobilize women of all types, simply by virtue of its historic nature? And when Clinton lost the Democratic nomination, new questions quickly arose. Was America just not ready to elect a female president? To what extent did Bill Clinton account for Senator Clinton's successes and failures? How would the 18 million women and men who cast their ballots for Clinton vote in the general election? With so many interesting unknowns, political scientists will likely spend the next several years examining Hillary Clinton's campaign and assessing the extent to which her sex affected her experiences and contributed to her primary loss.

Current research shows that female legislators serve as role models for women. Understudied is how and the extent to which female ministers inspire women to participate in politics. We argue that with their high visibility and greater ability to influence policy, female ministers also serve as role models, but their influence differs depending on the form of political engagement. Using the World Values Survey and additional national-level variables, we employ multilevel modeling techniques to explore how women in the cabinet influence various forms of women's political engagement. We find that the proportion of women in the cabinet has a stronger effect on participation than the proportion of women in parliament. All else being equal, a higher proportion of women in the cabinet increases women's conventional participation (voting and party membership), petition signing, and engagement in peaceful demonstrations, but it does not influence women's participation in strikes or boycotts. Our findings add to current studies of women's political representation, in which ministerial representation is often underexplored or not differentiated from parliamentary representation, and help distinguish various forms of participation. Future research should consider examining a wider variety of women's political roles in other areas of the political arena.

In October 2012 the Danish Socialist People's Party chose Annette Vilhelmsen as its leader. With her ascension to power, women simultaneously headed all three of Denmark's governing parties for the first time. Though an exclusively female-led coalition government remains exceptional, in developed democracies the number of female prime ministers and party leaders has grown in recent years. Since 2000, women have governed in Denmark, Germany, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, and Australia and have commanded coalition partner parties in Austria, Ireland, and Sweden. Just as there are now more female leaders, governments are also nominating more women to cabinets than ever before. Women recently held half of all ministerial posts in Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Spain. Female ministers are also serving in high-prestige portfolios from which they were traditionally excluded, including finance and foreign affairs.

In this article we measure the impact of gender on women's legislative behavior by utilizing a unique research design. We compare whether women and men of the same political party represent the same congressional district differently with respect to women's issues. Using bill sponsorship and floor remarks during the 104th to 107th sessions of the U.S. House of Representatives as measures of legislative behavior, we find that female legislators who replace men in the same district introduce more women's issues bills in Congress. Although our conclusion that women legislators represent women's issues more frequently in the House supports existing research, our results do so in a new and more effective way by controlling for the competing explanations of party identification and district opinion as factors determining a legislator's behavior.

Efforts to understand the political implications of categorical prejudices—like racism and sexism—are complicated by the intersectional nature of social groups. Evaluating attitudes toward members of a single social category (e.g., African-Americans) in isolation can produce misleading conclusions, as racial cues commonly coincide with gender cues and create meaningful subgroups (McConnaughy and White 2014). The idea that different subgroups of women experience distinctive forms of discrimination is reflected in the concept of “double jeopardy.” Double jeopardy suggests that black and Hispanic women experience discrimination differently from white women or men of color because they simultaneously belong to a low-status gender group and a low-status racial/ethnic group (King 1988; Levin et al. 2002; cf. Sidanius and Veniegas 2000). As a result, women who are racial or ethnic minorities face a cumulative discrimination that extends beyond racism or sexism alone (King 1988; Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach 2008).

Women's groups emphasize the view that women are viable candidates in American politics with the popular slogan “when women run, women win.” What do party leaders believe about women's electoral chances? Do parties know that “women win”? In an analysis of state legislative election results, I find few gender differences in candidates' vote share and success rates—two widely used measures of the status of women candidates. Yet I find that many party leaders report that one gender has an electoral advantage. These party leader perceptions are related to the objective measures of women's electoral success to some extent. However, most analyses reveal a gap between elite perceptions and objective measures of women's status as candidates. This disjuncture suggests that scholars may have overestimated the extent of party leader and voter support for women.I thank Timothy Frye, Claudine Gay, Kathryn Pearson, Beth Reingold, Lisa Sanbonmatsu, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. I also thank Nanaho Hanada, Heidi Bruns, Lyndsey Young, Huma Khan, and Tina Pierce for research assistance.

Gender is central to the political disputes in Latin America today. Although conflicts concerning women and LGBTQ rights are not new, only recently have they become a dividing line in the public identities of parties, politicians, and candidates. The second decade of the 2000s brought the opposition to gender forward in the platforms of far-right movements and leaders, raising popular support as they mobilized conservative frameworks and antagonized feminist and LGBTQ activism. Their promises to protect the family from a supposed moral disorder made gender a popular category, strategically presented as an “ideology” threatening children, marriage, the natural order, and national values. Elections such as those in Brazil and Costa Rica in 2018 indicate that conflicts concerning gender and sexuality can also produce new electoral cleavages.

Violence against women is considered a systemic social practice. Aware of the presence of systemic violence “at the horizon of social imagination,” members of some groups, women in this case, learn that they might suffer it any time “simply because they are members of that group” (Young 1990, 62). This understanding encompasses physical attacks as well as humiliation, harassment, intimidation, and stigmatization. Systemic violence targets women because they are women, although they are differently affected and have gendered experiences that are also shaped by race, class, sexuality, generation, and nationality (Collins 2015).

The literature on gender and political action comes in two forms—one that is aggregate, sometimes institutional, and often centered historically, and one that is individual and largely focused on the here and now. We care about both, of course—about the social organization and deployment of gender and about what gender means in individual lives. In this essay, I argue that we should encourage these two kinds of analysis to engage each other more intimately. This engagement would give political scientists the tools to say more about when, for whom, and for which outcomes gender matters. The conversation would give us better ways to understand how context makes gender relevant.Kate Gallagher provided incredibly thoughtful research assistance for this essay. Support for her work was provided by the Center for Political Studies at Michigan and by the Miller Professorship. I want to thank Jane Junn for a fabulous conversation about how to improve the essay. Lisa Baldez, Karen Beckwith, and Christina Wolbrecht provided important, critical feedback. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences gave me the space in my life—and the amazing library staff—to finish the essay. Of course, all of the mistakes and omissions are mine.

This article examines the instrumentalization of women's rights and the transformation of the gender rights regime in the context of democratic backsliding in Turkey. I show how the Islamically rooted Justice and Development Party governments and their allies used women's rights in constructing authoritarian rule and promoting a conservative gender agenda. The governing elites had different needs at different political stages and instrumentalized women's rights to meet those needs. First, they needed to legitimize their rule in a secular context, so they expanded liberal laws on women's rights. Second, in the process of backsliding, they sought to construct and legitimize their conservative ideology, so they reinterpreted existing laws to promote conservative goals. Finally, they wanted to mobilize conservative women in support of the newly authoritarian regime, so they built new institutions and marginalized existing women's NGOs. The article contributes to the literature on regime types and gender rights by shifting the focus from regime type to regime change.

This essay proposes an integrated discursive institutionalism as a framework for feminist political analysis. Both historical institutionalism and discourse analysis have merits and limitations, and both perspectives complement each other and offer solutions to their respective deficiencies. Traditionally there has been a strong demarcation between the two perspectives. A common way to divide both approaches is between investigating “causal regularities” and “understanding meaning.” I argue that a feminist institutionalism needs to deconstruct the dichotomy of causal explanation versus meaning and description and to reformulate the concept of causality. There is no adequate explanation without “meaning,” and the stretching of institutionalism toward “ideas” exemplifies this inadequacy.

Cultural explanations are frequent in social science research. In gender studies, they are especially common in cross-country comparative research that attempts to explain variations in everyday life situations for women and men. A noticeable example is found in the book Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World, by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2003). Inglehart and Norris construct a gender-equality scale from measurements on attitudes among citizens regarding women as political leaders, women's professional and educational rights, and women's traditional role as mother. The results show that Finland, Sweden, West Germany, Canada, and Norway are the countries most influenced by egalitarian values. At the other end of the spectrum countries like Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Jordan are found (p. 33). The authors demonstrate that egalitarian values are systematically related to the actual conditions of women's and men's lives. They conclude that modernization underpins cultural change, that is, attitudinal change from traditional to gender-equal values, and that these cultural changes have major impact on gender-equality processes.

How is institutional formation gendered, and does it make a difference? Inspired by new institutionalism's generic claim that “the organisation of political life makes a difference” (March and Olsen 1984), we ask, how does the gendered organization of political life make a difference? The purpose of this article is to build a conceptual framework for understanding the gendered character (and effects) of institutional formation. We test the framework through a case study of Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales (which were introduced in 2012) and consider its potential for further development and wider utility in research on gender and institutional design and change.

Despite its popularity as a conceptual framework, institutionalism is characterized by a deep methodological uncertainty. Doctoral students struggle to pin down the actual institutions that they wish to study, and, in the work of many established scholars, the operationalization of institutionalist concepts is frustratingly vague or surprisingly flexible. It has been 30 years since “new institutionalists” March and Olsen (1984) argued that “the organisation of political life makes a difference.” They were reacting to “undersocialised” perspectives like behavioralism and early rational choice theory and asserting that informal conventions were as significant as formal structures and procedures. This broad conception of institutions has been both the strength and the weakness of the wave of research that followed. It has enabled new institutionalists to build a more fine-grained and realistic picture of what really constrains political behavior and decision making. But an expanded definition of “institution” runs the risk of “conceptual stretching” (Peters 1999, 216). March and Olsen (1989, 17) themselves make no clear distinction between institutions and social norms in general, while Douglas North (1990, 83) goes as far as to include tradition, custom, culture, and habit in his definition. Researchers also operate at radically different temporal and spatial scales—from microlevel studies of decision making to analyses of whole government systems (like legislatures, for instance) or historical accounts of policy change. Bo Rothstein (1996, 145) cautions that if the concept of institution “means everything, then it means nothing.” Guy Peters (1999, 145) argues that institutionalists need “more rigour in conceptualisation and then measurement of the phenomena that are assumed to make up institutions.”

As a strategy to promote gender equality, gender mainstreaming has received considerable attention worldwide. The language of gender mainstreaming has been quickly adopted (True and Mintrom 2001), which is why, in the beginning, many hopes were pinned on this strategy. Scholars have shown that gender mainstreaming has triggered organizational and procedural changes within state bureaucracies, non-governmental organizations, and international organizations. Gender equality units have been established, new policy tools have been introduced, and new procedures have been created. But feminist scholars also have shown that, all these changes notwithstanding, gender mainstreaming has not proven to be successful in achieving gender equality (cf. True and Parisi 2013). More than 15 years after the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action, there are serious problems in translating the commitment into action. This is, as many scholars argue, not only a result of institutional and political resistance to substantially changing gender relations, but also a matter of conceptual clarity (Daly 2005; Lombardo and Meier 2006; Meier and Celis 2011; Subrahmanian 2004).

Between 1993 and 2000, nearly every democracy in Latin America passed a law prohibiting domestic violence. Between 2001 and 2006, five countries strengthened their legislation, and Brazil passed its first law. What explains these advances with respect to women's rights? While other work has focused on domestic or international factors, this article brings to light the role of the region. It reveals that the two inter-American women's rights organizations have been active in both establishing regional norms and promoting their national adoption and implementation. While this suggests that regional governance can promote women's social rights, there is no automatic institutionalization of these norms. Case studies on Chile and Brazil illustrate the impact of national context.

The post-civil rights era has left an important dilemma in U.S. politics. Despite the fact that the United States has become more integrated across racial and gendered lines since the 1960s, inequality, particularly economic inequality, has grown. Although much of that inequality continues to fall along racial, gender, and class lines, the opportunities afforded by the “rights revolution” have also created an important heterogeneity of privilege within marginal groups. As social scientists, how best can we identify the sources and results of this inequality? More specifically, how can we better understand the crosscutting political effects of both marginalization and privilege within and among groups in U.S. society? I contend that intersections theory may be a useful place to begin, and that the idea of intersectionality could provide a fruitful framework with which to understand issues of inequality in the post-civil rights era. Such a framework would help address some of the theoretical problems that sometimes arise within empirical work on marginal groups in political science and, ideally, allow scholars to understand better how experiences of marginalization and privilege affect the shape and character of American political life.