A higher percentage of women consistently run as candidates and serve as the lieutenant governor when running on the same ticket with the governor than for any other state elective office. In this article, we provide the first examination of how running with a woman affects vote choice. We conclude that running-mate sex does influence vote choice in gubernatorial elections, even when we take into account a wide range of individual-level and electoral characteristics that are related to voter preference. Further, voter preference for tickets containing women running mates is not consistent, but rather depends upon certain electoral circumstances. Our findings have implications for assessing how voters respond to women candidates and how gender plays into strategic calculations in state-level politics.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 American Political Science Association Meeting. This research was funded by a grant from the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Union College. We thank Mark Anderson, Alla Abramov, Rhobie Langwig, and Nish Patel for assistance with data collection and Jeff Koch and the anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on the project. Special thanks go to Bruce Connolly, Courtney Seymour, and David Gerhan of Schaffer Library, Union College, for locating data that was especially difficult to find.

“Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” This battle cry erupted at one Donald Trump rally after another throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump even threatened to jail Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) if he won the election. “Crooked Hillary” emerged as Trump's disparaging nickname for his Democratic opponent. Taking a further moralistic step, Trump equated HRC with pure evil, calling her the “devil” at an August 2016 campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

For feminists interested in questions of freedom, the current era is as exciting as it is paradoxical. As we move into the second decade of the millennium, we find ourselves witnessing enhanced opportunities for women in many areas of life: More women than ever are earning college degrees and attending graduate and professional school, more women are now represented at the highest levels of government, and women continue to make major gains in the workplace (Rosin 2010a, 2010b). And while this progress is far from equal among the various populations of women, it is safe to say that within the United States, women today face fewer restrictions and have more options and opportunities to act in the world than ever before. Yet despite the increased presence of women and people of color within various elite circles, this is also a time of widening economic inequality. This condition of enhanced opportunity for an increasingly diverse elite alongside widespread and deepening inequality has important implications for the ways that feminists understand the dynamics of freedom today.

A scholarly consensus depicts strong, autonomous domestic women's movements as critical for the passage of gender equality reforms, alongside openings in domestic and international political contexts. What, then, is a nascent women's movement seeking gender equality reforms to do if it lacks strength or a history of autonomous organizing? A long-term analysis of the Guatemalan women's movement's push for reforms to address violence against women demonstrates that one potential road forward is through a “politics of patience,” rooted in the pursuit of cumulative, incremental victories. Adopting a politics of patience allows nascent domestic movements in developing and post-transition contexts to achieve incremental victories that create future political openings while simultaneously building movement strength and autonomy over time. This finding highlights the temporal and strategic power of women's movements, as well as the iterative and potentially reinforcing nature of social mobilization and political reform.

On August 6, 2016, the week of the South African public holiday Women’s Day, an extraordinary protest held the nation spellbound. Then president Jacob Zuma was announcing the results of local government elections live on national television when four young women walked out of the throng of election officials and politicians. They stood in front of the president, silent but visible on the televised screen. They held up placards: “I am 1 in 3,” “Ten Years Later,” “Khanga,” “Remember Khwezi.” Although the protesters stood for the duration of the broadcast, they were forcibly removed by security agents immediately after Zuma left the stage and the cameras moved offscreen. Hustled to the back of the room, they were lambasted by senior women leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) for their “inappropriate” action. This was a spectacular demonstration: silent and nonviolent, its tactics and timing pierced the performance of presidential authority and made visible a new form of feminism.

Bringing home federal spending projects to the district is a common reelection strategy for members of the U.S. Congress, and congresswomen tend to outperform congressmen in securing district spending. However, for legislators to turn distributive benefits into higher approval and electoral rewards, constituents must recognize that public spending has taken place in their community and attribute credit to the correct public official. I theorize that congresswomen face a gender bias when claiming credit for federal projects, and I test this theory through an online survey experiment. Contrary to expectations, I find no evidence that legislator gender influences the public’s reaction to congressional credit claims, indicating that congresswomen can effectively use distributive politics to counter gendered vulnerability in the U.S. Congress. This research advances the literature on gender and politics by investigating whether a gender bias in credit claiming prevents congresswomen from turning their representational efforts into electoral capital.

American political activism has surged recently among young citizens, particularly among women and people of color. At the same time, record numbers of women and minority candidates have been running for office. Does seeing more diverse candidates in terms of age, gender, and race propel more interest in political engagement among Generation Z, particularly women? Using a survey experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey of Generation Z citizens, we present respondents with Democratic politicians who vary based on these three criteria. Women who identify strongly with their gender express greater political engagement when presented with any candidate who does not fit the stereotypical image of a politician (older, white, male). They are spurred not only by role models who represent them descriptively, but by all politicians belonging to historically marginalized groups. These effects, which are not specific to just Democratic women, provide insights that can inform engagement efforts targeting younger Americans.

We draw on a comprehensive dataset of metadata about journal articles substantively related to gender and politics published in 37 political science journals through the end of 2023, including Politics & Gender, to characterize and compare trends over time and the most prominent topics addressed by these journals. We show that the volume of work published by Politics & Gender has increased over time, has become increasingly quantitative in nature, and tends to focus on questions related to women running for political office and the nature of women’s political representation. These patterns closely reflect broader tendencies in the gender and politics research published by general-interest political science journals. Other journals dedicated to research on gender and politics tend to publish more qualitative research on topics including care work, the diffusion of equality norms, and conflict.

This article cautions against the strong impulse in the #MeToo movement to desexualize politics. Informed by queer theory, the article argues that the public desexualization imperative, represented by indignation toward President Donald Trump's pussy-grabbing antics and the concomitant, albeit justified, movement to expose decades of his sexual harassment of women, casts a shadow across queer citizens that chills sexual expression in democratic discourse and public life. The public desexualization imperative presents a double bind that creates, on one hand, public spaces that are less threatening and discriminatory to women and, on the other, public spaces that—from a queer white cisgender man's perspective, one whose only “marking” is his sexuality—erase queers’ valued differences. The author uses personal narrative to describe and apply tools (conceptualized as fagchild tools) that help navigate tensions between women's equality movements and queer efforts to gain fuller, more open sexual citizenship. The article focuses, first, on softening the body politic (implicitly a white cisgender heterosexual male body) to provide sociopolitical space for sexual pluralism. Second, the article uses the sexualization of House Speaker Paul Ryan to argue that making space for queer sexualities may require accommodating the expression of nonqueer sexualities, including those that most of us find offensive.

This essay considers the rapid uptick in anti-trans legislation that targets transgender girls and women as an occasion to critically interrogate the ways that gender is conceptualized and operationalized in political science (Murib 2022). I argue that the disciplinary tendency to view gender as a single-axis facet of identity that is static and rooted in biology needs to be reconsidered in light of two problems. First, collapsing biological sex and gender naturalizes the gender of non-trans women and men as static, normal, and self-evident; transgender people, in contrast, are locked into perpetual processes of gendering themselves against this biological baseline (Enke 2012). Second, and as a result of this limited view of gender, political scientists face difficulties anticipating, understanding, and addressing recent mobilizations invested in maintaining White, heterosexual, and reproductive families as the cornerstone of what it means to be a proper citizen (Alexander 1994).

Jane Mansbridge’s (1999) “contingent ‘yes’” amplified a chorus of voices discussing the substantive and symbolic functions of historically marginalized groups’ presence in political office. In her essay, Mansbridge points to contexts of mistrust and uncrystallized interests as domains where presence enhances “adequate communication” and “innovative thinking” for these social groups (628). In this and many other accounts, the linchpin between descriptive and substantive representation for these functions is group members’ shared experiences, alternatively framed as the perspectives informed by those experiences. Shared experiences cannot and do not produce identical effects (they are filtered through many lenses), but they are widely understood to inform and indeed often to authenticate political representation.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, one of the most provocative thinkers on religion, political philosophy, feminism, and ethics, died August 11, 2013. She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School, Political Science, and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. The contributors to this section participated in a retrospective roundtable on her work at the 2014 American Political Science Association.