What is the impact on symbolic representation of female leaders who are seen as failures? Do women from political dynasties elicit symbolic representation? I answer these questions by analyzing how Park Geun-hye’s election as the first woman president of South Korea and her subsequent impeachment shaped voters’ perceptions of women’s potential and contribution as political leaders. Utilizing an original survey and focus groups, I argue that South Korean voters overall did not recognize Park’s election as the country’s first female president as a symbol of women’s political empowerment because of her dynastic background and her failure to promote women-friendly policies. Although she received credit for being the historic first, women across the political spectrum were concerned that the epic failure of the first female president would reinforce voters’ reluctance to vote for women. This study emphasizes the importance of adopting an intersectional approach in studying symbolic representation.

There is growing evidence of the international and domestic political benefits for autocrats to advance women’s rights (Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2016; Bush and Zetterberg 2021; Donno and Kreft 2019; Tripp 2019). Research on the adoption of gender reforms in autocracies—including contributions in this Critical Perspectives section by Audrey L. Comstock and Andrea Vilán (2022) and Aili Mari Tripp (2022)—emphasizes the dual role of international pressure (Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2021; Edgell 2017; Okundaye and Breuning 2021) and women’s movements (Giersdorf and Croissant 2011; Htun and Weldon 2012; Tripp 2015). Reforms can be “top-down” if the autocrat advances rights even while suppressing the women’s movement, or “bottom-up” if the regime allies with—and seeks to co-opt—civil society groups.

Electoral gender quotas remain contentious among many publics. One hurdle is the “principle-policy puzzle”: those who espouse gender egalitarianism may nevertheless oppose affirmative action measures because of disagreements about their necessity and worries about government overreach. Based on an original survey in Japan, where women’s underrepresentation is particularly pronounced, we identify two dimensions that drive attitudes toward quotas. First, modern sexism matters: those who attribute underrepresentation to women’s disinterest or who think that quotas will increase the number of unqualified women candidates are less likely to support quotas. Second, appropriateness matters: those who oppose government intervention in gender affairs are less likely to support quotas. Crucially, these differences hold even among those who desire more women in parliament. Our results suggest that public acceptance of quotas depends more on correcting misperceptions about structural gender barriers and the benign consequences of quotas (“policy”), rather than encouraging people to prefer more women in parliament (“principle”).

Like many other countries, Brazil has adopted gender quotas in elections for legislatures at all levels of the federation. However, Brazilian gender quotas have been ineffective at increasing women's participation in politics. Authors usually point to reasons related to the electoral system and party structure. This article analyzes a variable that is rarely considered: the role of the Electoral Court. We argue that the quality and intensity of the control exercised by an electoral court, when called upon to decide on the enforcement of the gender quota law, can influence the efficacy of this policy. We show that, in general, the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court tends to foster the participation of women in politics. However, based on two divides—between easy and difficult cases and between cases with low and high impact—we argue that in the realm of gender quotas, this court takes a rather restrained stance in those cases considered both difficult and with high impact.

The interaction of the legislative and executive is gendered in nature. Gender shapes what actors in these two institutions demand from each other. This pattern is visible, for instance, in the distinct policy priorities of women and men in parliament (e.g., Allen and Childs 2019; Bäck and Debus 2019; Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019) and in the ways that women engage and oversee related government initiatives. At the same time, gender influences the strengths and weaknesses that actors in the legislature and executive ascribe to each other and, hence, their mutual assessment. Members of parliament (MPs) and party gatekeepers, for instance, tend to favor men for the most influential and well-resourced portfolios, since they believe that masculine traits are necessary or suitable to succeed in governmental positions, and membership in men-dominated political networks remains an important route to qualify for ministerial office (see, e.g., Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet 2019; Krook and O’Brien 2012). Change in these dynamics is scarce or occurs only gradually, meaning that the ways in which executive-legislative interactions are gendered are usually stable.

October 3, 2005, marks a dozen years since Argentina started the quota ball rolling via the first use of gender quota legislation applying to all parties for the election of national legislators. For the October 3, 1993, Argentine Chamber of Deputies election, all political parties were required to present closed party lists on which women accounted for a minimum of 30% of the candidates, and furthermore, a comparable proportion of these women had to be placed in “electable” positions on the lists (Jones 1996). Although the initial implementation process was not free of problems (Durrieu 1999), in a short time the gender quota became an established fixture of the Argentine political system. The impact of the quota legislation on the representation of women in the Argentine congress was nothing short of dramatic, with women now accounting for 34% and 44% of the seats in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and Senate, respectively, a marked contrast to the situation prior to the adoption of the quota legislation, when women on average held a mere 5% of the seats in both legislative bodies.

Racial disparities in the justice system, particularly as they relate to the death penalty, have received increasing scholarly and public-policy scrutiny recently. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the role of the defendant's sex in cases of violent crime, though research has been conducted on how the victim's sex affects court decisions. This article seeks to extend this line of inquiry by asking how women accused of killing their spouses or nonspousal intimate partners are treated by the judicial system. I present a theoretical framework that elucidates the impact of intersectionality and sexual stratification on structuring outcomes for women defendants in cases of violent crimes. To test implications derived from this framework, I utilize an original data set of homicide cases from Oakland County, Michigan, from 1986 to 1988. I find that female defendants were convicted more frequently than were male defendants, and that there is an interactive effect with race. Further, I find that the conviction rate was higher if the victim was an alleged batterer of the defendant. Finally, my data indicate that sentencing decisions have a clear racial aspect to them. I conclude with suggestions for future research.

Peer review is a key component of academic publishing, meant to maintain the integrity of the process. Peer reviewers help editors evaluate research—assessing the quality, validity, and original contribution of manuscripts submitted for publication. At its best, peer review can also help raise the quality of published research by providing authors with constructive expert feedback that helps them further develop and polish their project and its presentation.

In this intriguing, multilayered, and eloquent work situated in the Indian landscape, Nivedita Menon argues that “rights,” when bound up with law, are not in the service of emancipatory politics but rather of hegemonic projects, such as patriarchy and capitalist modernity, that legitimize only particular ways of being and doing. Rights are socially constructed and contextualized within particular moral universes, yet they lose their transformative potential when encapsulated in and institutionalized by the law, which is an exacting, universalizing discourse that fixes meanings and identities. Although feminists are increasingly invested in legal redress, any appeals to democracy, equality, and justice through the law, may have reached their discursive limits, requiring a renewed feminist emphasis on political struggle.

Transforming conceptual insights about gender into political practice is a critical element of feminist scholarship in the field of political science. This transformational project often entails engagement with activism and advocacy. Examining particular activist modes of translation has been the focus of my own scholarship beginning with my work in the Women and Politics program and at the Center for American Women and Politics while in graduate school at Rutgers. Feminist theorizing, Grosz explains (2010, 96), “enable[s] us to understand the logic at work in culture, social relations, or individual psychology, its points of vulnerability and its capacity for change.” Moreover, feminist theorizing is self-consciously normative; it is about exposing, explaining, and elaborating that which makes possible systems of injustice, with the goal of bringing forth a more gender-just reality.

Iris Young was a wide-ranging political and social theorist whose works transformed the study of democratic theory, theories of justice, multiculturalism, nationalism, and group rights, among others—all of this in addition to her enormous contribution to feminist theory. Young left not only specific substantive legacies but also her method as a critical social theorist: She sought to undertake projects that helped make sense of the claims and analyses made by progressive social movements, including feminist movements, by providing a philosophical grounding for those claims and analyses. She trained her critical eye on political and social institutions, aiming to expose relations of domination and other injustices.

They do look awfully romantic, those chocolate brides in Victorian gowns and matching pink bouquets. But just as the romance of the wedding often belies the more mundane realities of marriage, the romance of the movement that has come to call itself “marriage equality” may blind us to how difficult and long the struggle for real political equality will be. After all, traditional gender roles have not gone the way of the dinosaur. Why should we expect this to be true of hierarchies based on sexual orientation, particularly if the vehicle for inclusion is the institution of marriage?

As global society has observed the rise of women's rights and their development in a context of globalization, much research has focused on the conditions under which women's rights are acquired (e.g., Fallon 2003; Ferree 2006; Viterna and Fallon 2008). These include domestic conditions, such as democratization, economic development, and women's representation in national politics, as well as transnational conditions, such as neoliberal restructuring and transnational women's movements. Most studies, however, focus merely on one dimension of women's rights or explore one case in depth. Few studies compare cases of women's rights cross-nationally or longitudinally. This limitation can create much confusion in determining the factors that are influential or negligible for women's rights. By replicating and extending a recently published article focusing on women's social rights (Yoo 2011), I seek to distinguish the factors that are more and less influential in explaining women's political, economic, and social rights globally.

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed all aspects of American life, including, for many, how we vote. We explore the question of who supports unrestricted absentee ballots during a pandemic. We argue that women are more likely to support absentee ballots because they allow for greater flexibility and minimize the potential for exposure. We test this theory using the National Panel Study of COVID-19 (n = 1,892), which asked respondents about their preferences for absentee ballots, their worry about the coronavirus, and their household composition. Using multinomial logistic regressions, we find that women are more likely to support allowing absentee ballots compared with more restrictive voting options and are more likely to say they support absentee ballots for all if they know someone who has contracted COVID-19. The policy implications for these findings are discussed along with other sociodemographic indicators in our analysis.

Because of the United States’ minimal domestic engagement with human rights, several subnational initiatives, including the Cities for CEDAW campaign, have formed to infuse human rights into local policy making. Analyzing Miami-Dade County as one locale within the Cities for CEDAW network, this article asks what happens to human rights when they are turned into urban policies. Drawing on literature theorizing the complexities of urban human rights activism and using an interpretivist framework of analysis, the article reconstructs local context features and practices promoting gender equality through the countywide CEDAW ordinance. It develops a narrative based on expert interviews and finds an unusual actor constellation in which a local officeholder led the way rather than community activists. The practices identified work within institutional constraints and highlight data collection to support informed gender policy making. The findings lead to the conclusion that both activists and scholars should think beyond the dynamics of policy formulation and more explicitly about the complexities of implementation.

In contrast to men, women are often assumed to bear the burden of making others feel comfortable through positive emotional displays such as smiling. However, in the literature, the empirical evidence for the relevance of gender stereotypes in explaining electoral outcomes remains inconclusive. By focusing on gender stereotypes regarding facial emotional displays, this study addresses the gendered consequence of candidates’ smiling on their electoral fortunes. I analyze the results of the 2014 Korean local elections and measure candidate smiles on campaign posters by employing a biometric artificial intelligence application detecting facial emotions in images. The results demonstrate that the smiling effect has a powerful positive impact on the electoral performance of women candidates running in a multicandidate race. The positive effect is limited for women running in two-candidate races and for male candidates regardless of the number of competitors. The findings suggest that voters use intuitive cues such as candidate facial displays in electoral posters when choosing among multiple candidates in low-information settings. This study contributes to a better understanding of the activation of gender stereotypes in the electoral process.

The US government was a late adopter of support and advocacy for international sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) human rights. Although US support for SOGI human rights did not begin in the Obama administration, after 2011 such support was expanded, publicized, and institutionalized. Since the 2016 presidential election, many international and grassroots LGBTQI human rights activists have expressed concern about the prospects for US SOGI advocacy in the Trump administration. No definitive policy changes have been made public, but clues to the future of US advocacy for SOGI can be found in a variety of sites. These include the discourse and policy articulations of the secretary and human rights officials in the State Department as well as those of legislators who fund human rights programs and exercise oversight over it.

The point of departure for this study is the recent work of Burden (2008) on the “gender gap” in partisanship in the United States. He shows that the preponderance of Democratic identification among women is partly a function of the measurement of party identification. When respondents were asked “Do you feel that you are” rather than, more traditionally, “Do you think of yourself as” a Democrat or Republican, the sex gap narrowed to statistical nonsignificance. Burden's explanation for this result lies in the psychology of partisanship. The traditional “think of yourself as” (or cognitive) question primes women to consider their partisanship as a social identity, which in turn activates the stereotypical association between women and the Democratic Party. The “feel that you are” (or affective) question encourages a deeper, more personalized response, rendering social identity less relevant and thereby nullifying the effect of that stereotype.

I seek to engage the authors in a deeper interrogation of their claims, particularly that societies can mitigate the evolutionary legacy of patriarchy by limiting the influence of religious/cultural enclaves and instead promoting universalism, as exemplified in CEDAW and international law. I challenge and politicize this alleged “choice” between universalism and cultural/religious enclaves/relativism, as it ultimately rests on a series of too-easy dichotomies (secular/religious, western/nonwestern) that may inadvertently stymie collaborative attempts between “western” and “non-western” feminists to challenge inequitable family law and gender violence. Hudson, Bowen, and Nielsen (2011) do offer critiques of western states. They are careful to point out nuances, subtleties, and complexities with their concept of religious/cultural enclaves. They also convincingly broaden the concept of gender equality beyond formal political rights to the kind of social, legal, and economic justice encapsulated in equitable family law and freedom from violence. And, they provoke an examination of why and how gender equality and gender violence are linked. But I suggest that their empirical research might have better traction by taking seriously two problematic implications of championing the “universal” as necessarily progressive: the failure to recognize patriarchy as part of universalism; and the inattention to why and how religious/cultural enclaves are patriarchal.