This article explores the dynamics of antigender mobilization in Poland and shows how gender equality projects are interconnected with the rise of opponents of “gender ideology.” It highlights material and discursive links between the local implementation of gender mainstreaming and the antigenderist backlash. The article points out that particular gender equality policies in non-Western settings result from Europeanization and thus are marked by a significant democratic deficit—that is, they are promoted without engaging a wider audience and elude parliamentary control. The study shows that if gender equality projects, such as gender mainstreaming, are fostered by external international commitments and obscure bureaucratic measures, they may unintentionally provide the impetus for antigender mobilization. Indeed, gender wars are fueled not only by controversies over gender and LGBT equality but also by growing concerns about citizens’ control over the state and its policies. The article is data based, and by employing framing analysis, it provides an explanation of the recent political success of antigenderist campaigns, which take place in a world of reconfigured states and diminishing democracies.

Given that most national executives have been men, it is a commonplace to observe that access to executive power is gendered. Men have historically served as heads of government, and few women have been presidents or prime ministers. Women's numbers are increasing, however, as is research focusing on women who have achieved national executive leadership (e.g., Jalalzai 2013; Murray 2010). Such research has emphasized women's individual resources and credentials, family background, and political experience as factors contributing to their political success; research focusing on the strategic and institutional structural factors that contribute to this success has been rare.

This article uses intersectionality as an analytical tool to explore struggles for institutional space in policy processes in two ostensibly contrasting contexts: “republican” France and the “multicultural” United Kingdom. Specifically, the article undertakes within-case analysis of three policy processes. In France, we discuss the debate over laïcité, or secularism, the subsequent formulation of the March 2004 law banning the wearing of religious signs in state schools, and the creation of the High Authority for the Fight Against Discrimination (HALDE). In the UK, we examine the problem definitions, language, and subject positions constructed by the 2008 Single Equality Bill. The result of these analyses is that institutional actors employ similar (though not identical) practices in relation to intersections, which have similar outcomes for minority groups on either side of the English Channel. Through what we term a “logic of separation,” institutional actors severely curtail the “institutional space” available to minority ethnic groups to make complex and intersectional social justice claims. Even though France and the UK are often portrayed as opposites with regard to constructions of citizenship, we argue that these seemingly differing traditions of citizenship end up having a similar effect of misrecognizing minority women and men's experiences and demands.

Is women's chronic minority status worldwide explained by a lack of women wishing to stand for political office or by party selectors’ disinterest in selecting women candidates? This debate continues among gender politics scholars; however, an increasing number of studies highlight the need to further investigate how the demands of party selectors might shape the supply of women candidates, especially in strong parliamentary democracies where political parties are the key gatekeepers (Kenny 2013; Murray 2010). This concern was already present in Norris and Lovenduski's (1995) original model, which called for a deeper examination of the “interaction effects” between “supply” and “demand.” In engaging with this call, I argue that the constraining effects of supply are reinforced not only by the demands of party selectors, but also by the everyday (gendered) functioning of political parties, which helps us understand the differential chances of women and men eventually becoming candidates.

While the impact of an attorney's sex has been examined with respect to trial court processes (e.g., jury decision making), no one has previously studied its effects on appellate court decision making. In this article, we argue that the application of gender schemas by some justices results in a devaluing of the arguments made by women litigators. Our findings suggest that women orally arguing attorneys are less likely to receive a favorable vote by a justice than are the male counsel they oppose and that conservative justices are more likely than their liberal counterparts to vote against litigants represented by female counsel at oral argument. This suggests that the ideology of elites influences whether they apply gender schemas in a negative fashion. We also find that justices are more likely to side with female lawyers in women's issues cases, indicating that the justices' perceptions of female lawyer expertise are enhanced in those cases. These findings persist even after controlling for multiple factors, including attorney expertise, the sex of the justice, amicus participation, party capability, and judicial ideology.

Gender quotas have become an increasingly prominent solution in recent years to the underrepresentation of women in electoral politics. As research on these policies has grown, scholars have primarily sought to explain how and why quotas are adopted and, more recently, why some quota policies are more effective than others in facilitating women's access to political office. Most studies, however, also consider—often in a less systematic fashion—the normative aspects of quota reform, usually by detailing the various objections leveled against gender quotas and their impact on efforts to adopt and implement quota measures. Integrating insights from a wide range of case studies, I outline these arguments but note that quotas also generate a host of positive implications that remain largely undertheorized in this literature. I observe, further, that more and more countries are adopting gender quotas despite these well-versed normative objections. These developments indicate greater scope for political initiatives to increase women's representation—despite assumed social and economic “prerequisites” for change—and, indeed, signal a broader shift in international norms in support of projects to promote gender-balanced decision making. One of the few countries seemingly unaffected by these global trends is the United States, where proposals for gender quotas have simply not entered into the realm of public debate. After offering several possible explanations for this state of affairs, I draw on this case to emphasize the pivotal role of politics in opening and closing opportunities to pursue gender quotas, as well as to point to a new set of questions for future research.

From the perspective of women's experiences, it is easy to see that democratic representative institutions can be tools of oppression. After all, formal democratic institutions have been either a form of governance that has only ruled over women (e.g., women were formally prohibited from holding elected offices) or a form of governance in which women have ruled and been ruled unequally (e.g., the number of female representatives have been significantly lower than the number of male representatives). Moreover, informal representative institutions, for example, interest groups, do not seem to work for women as well as they do for powerful men (Strolovitch 2007). These facts suggest that democratic representative institutions need to be viewed suspiciously. We should not assume that representative institutions in democracies necessarily benefit all women. We need to recognize how they can divide women, pitting some women's interests and preferences against other women's interests and preferences. Democratic representative institutions can function to preserve the status quo, distributing benefits unjustly among different men and women.

Many cultural stereotypes exist regarding the “modernity” of values possessed by Latino immigrants, particularly in reference to gender norms. Common perceptions about Latin machismo and marianismo (the idea that women should be pure and moral) do not paint a portrait of gender egalitarian dispositions. These assessments are upheld by neomodernization theorists who specifically identify gender attitudes as a critical element of modernity. In applying a revised modernization theory to the issue of comparative gender values, Inglehart and Norris (2003, 10) hypothesize that development “brings about changed cultural attitudes toward gender equality in virtually any society that experiences the various forms of modernization linked with economic development.” The idea that gender equality norms develop gradually, as a function of modernization, gives rise to different expectations about accepted gender roles in developing countries as opposed to those in advanced industrial democracies. Another feature of this modernization process is the emergence of gender gaps in political behavior and attitudes. Inglehart and Norris (2000) distinguish between traditional gender gaps found in postcommunist and developing societies (in which women are more conservative in their behavior and cultural attitudes relative to men) and modern gender gaps evident in postindustrial societies (in which women are more progressive than men).

When Argentine president Mauricio Macri announced in March 2018 that he supported a “responsible and mature” national debate regarding the decriminalization of abortion, it took many by surprise. In a Catholic country with a center-right government, where public opinion regarding abortion had hardly moved in decades—why would the abortion debate surface in Argentina when it did? Our answer is grounded in the social movements literature, as we argue that the organizational framework necessary for growing the decriminalization movement had already been built by an emergent feminist movement of unprecedented scope and influence: Ni Una Menos. By expanding the movement's social justice frame from gender violence to encompass abortion rights, feminist activists were able to change public opinion and expand the scope of debate, making salient an issue that had long been politically untouchable. We marshal evidence from multiple surveys carried out before, during, and after the abortion debate and in-depth interviews to shed light on the sources of abortion rights movements in unlikely contexts.

On the face of it, there is considerable potential for productive dialogue between sociological institutionalism (SI) and institutionally oriented feminist political science (FPS). Both approaches employ broad conceptions of the political and its interconnection with the social: Each is concerned with the interaction between actors and institutions, broadly defined; the interplay between formal rules and informal practices, norms, and “ways of doing things”; and the consequent effects of these dynamics. Each approach takes a “value-critical” stance, sharing an understanding that seemingly neutral institutional processes and practices are, in fact, embedded in norms and cognitive frames, and in wider cultural contexts. In this short essay, we argue that SI provides one fruitful source for tools and paradigms beyond conventional political science (Lovenduski 1998; Mackay 2004), tools that may potentially enhance feminist analyses of key questions such as the following: How are institutions and institutional processes gendered? By what processes and mechanisms are institutions (re)produced and, in turn, reflect and reproduce social systems, including gender relations? How do institutions constrain actors and interests? And what is the gendered potential for, and what are the limits of, institutional innovation, reform, and change in pursuit of gender justice?

Street harassment is a form of sexual terrorism that reminds women of their vulnerability to violent assault in public and semipublic spaces. Black women's experiences of street harassment are complicated by their race, and by the race of their harasser(s). Black feminists' political vocabulary of intersectional analysis offers a useful framework for portraying the indivisibility of race and gender in black women's lives, but the extension of intersectional criticism to capture black lesbians' political vulnerability within black politics and civic life has been neither automatic nor consistent in black feminist theory. This article invokes the 2003 street harassment and subsequent murder of a black lesbian teenager by a black male assailant in Newark, NJ, both to demonstrate black heterosexual women's interest convergence with black lesbians in black civic life, and to urge black feminists to be less equivocal in holding black men and women responsible for their participation in black patriarchy. This requires the retrieval and redefinition of the political language of culture and behavior from black conservatives who rightly flag the associational aspects of black politics, but who fail to question the gender and sexuality dynamics within these associations and fail to perceive the interplay between civic behavior and intersecting structural inequalities, such as racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and spatial poverty.I wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Politics & Gender for their helpful critical feedback. Thanks also to the participants in the Philadelphia Political Theory Workshop, held at the University of Pennsylvania (September 2005), and to Temple University's Conference on Black Civil Society in American Life (September 2005) where I presented an earlier version of this article, as well as to Reuel Rogers and my research assistant Greg Graham.

Candidate dropouts are a crucial and understudied population; they represent a significant source for increasing women's candidacies and addressing the gender imbalance in office. Survey evidence demonstrates that women are discouraged from running in districts in which their party is strong, while men are discouraged from running in districts in which their party is weak. Are women more likely to drop out of an election race than are men? If so, why? Using election records and an original survey, this article examines the experiences of all declared candidates for the state legislature in Florida in 2000 and 2002. The sample includes candidates who won office, who lost their races, or who dropped out along the way. Evidence here shows that women are no more likely to drop out of a state legislative race than are men. Among dropouts, however, women are disproportionately likely to drop out from districts in which their party is strong. The results offer support for the contention that political elites continue to value men's political leadership more than women's, and that increasing the number of female officeholders may require efforts to support declared women candidates in the earliest stages of their candidacies.A previous version of this research was presented as a paper at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. My thanks to Kira Sanbonmatsu for helpful comments on this study.

Yesterday's suffragists and today's female activists who call for more women to be elected to parliament share some ideological grounds: They believe that women exercising the rights of citizenship, whether by voting or by being elected to office, can make a difference in politics. This reasoning was fed by the notion of critical mass, introduced in the political debates in 1988 by Drude Dahlerup. Elevated to lawlike status (or should I say dogma?), the concept of critical mass was quickly made the object of abusive interpretations, becoming synonymous with a relationship of cause and effect between presence and ideas (or between representation and responsiveness), and thus leading one to believe in the existence of a sisterhood among political women and a dialogue on their representational activities. Taking a leaf from the politicians' book, political scientists lost all prudence, abandoning themselves to blind generalizations with the powers that frame female politicians' words and acts. One of these forces is the electoral system. Although it plays a very important role in women's access to parliament, it was completely ignored by those who believe that in greater number, women will change politics.

Feminist criticisms of the Bush Administration distinguish its feminized security rhetoric, which claims to support women's rights in Iraq and Afghanistan, from its actions at home and abroad, which undermine hard-won gains for women. This distinction between words and deeds obscures, on the one hand, the tremendous progress that feminists have made in framing women's rights as an issue that ought to be taken seriously and, on the other hand, the way that this rhetoric is itself a significant form of political action: It aims to influence how Americans will conceptualize the struggle for women's rights. I correct for these problems by developing a political theory of what I call the “framing effect” of rhetoric—its power to shape our worldview. Frames, I suggest, are related to one another dialogically: They build on one another by transposing old rhetorical frames into new contexts. The Bush Administration draws on existing feminist rhetoric, but transforms it by combining it with two other kinds of discourse: a rhetoric of chivalrous respect and a rhetoric of democratic peace. I show that in both rhetorical frames, the Bush Administration bases its concern with women's rights abroad upon the presumption that the women's movement in the United States successfully achieved its goals long ago. My analysis of how current security rhetoric frames women's rights can help us to understand both how the Bush Administration is able to use feminist ideas in new and nonfeminist ways and how we in turn might redeploy the Bush rhetoric so as to challenge the presumption that women at home already enjoy their full rights.The author would like to thank Karen Zivi, Jill Frank, Alison Jaggar, Iris Young, the editors and anonymous reviewers from Politics & Gender, as well as fellow panelists and audience members at the Midwest Political Science Association, the Association for Political Theory, and the Center for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder for their comments. She would also like to thank Steve Chan for his encouragement. This project was funded, in part, by the University of Colorado at Boulder Graduate School CRCW Small Grant.

In recent decades, scholars have documented remarkable changes in women's political representation around the world. At present, however, researchers are ill-equipped to explain these changes in women's representation in politics. In this article, we introduce a broad theoretical framework for reorienting existing explanations of women's formal political representation to account for change over time. We conceptualize stasis and growth in women's political representation as the balance between forces of resistance and forces for change. We also classify forces by timing, distinguishing among those that are continuous, are episodic, and have originated from critical periods. Using data on women in national legislatures from 1945 to 2003, we find that longitudinal forces combine to produce four common trajectories of women's political representation across time. We also discuss how various approaches, including event history analysis, latent growth curve models, and the focused ethnographic revisit, are well suited for modeling the different types of forces that combine to produce these trajectories. Overall, we argue that implementing a longitudinal framework for understanding women's political representation has the power both to alter the way we think about established findings and to suggest new theories for empirical evaluation.

Let us first lay our cards on the table: We are both invested in the “feminist institutionalist project” and have highlighted the potential benefits of such a synthesis in earlier interventions (Kenny 2007; Lovenduski 1998; Mackay and Meier 2003; see also Lovenduski 1998). However, in this essay we sound a cautionary note and urge a more skeptical approach. We pose the questions: Why does feminism need new institutionalism? What do neoinstitutionalist approaches contribute to feminist scholarship on political institutions, broadly defined? When considering the potential for intellectual “borrowing” between feminism and new institutionalism, it is important to consider whether new institutional theory is “an enabling framework—or an intellectual strait-jacket” for feminist scholarship (Mackay and Meier 2003, 6). The question, then, is not only what the new institutionalism can contribute to feminist research but also what scope there is to “gender” the new institutionalism.

Few democratic countries have lower rates of female political representation than Japan, making it an excellent place to seek clues for female underrepresentation. We were surprised to find, based on three experimental surveys, that Japanese voters do not harbor particularly negative attitudes toward female politicians. The problem instead appears to be that women are reluctant to run for office because of socially mandated family roles. An implication of our study is that gender equality in political representation will likely founder in countries with electoral systems that require around-the-clock constituency service and legislative work, at least until citizens no longer have gendered expectations about time-consuming family obligations.

Former Australian Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard was accused of unfairly playing the gender card against then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in her accusations of sexism and misogyny. It was also claimed that she had thereby initiated the first “gender war” in Australian politics. Analyzing Australian politicians’ discursive mobilizations of gender during the Gillard period provides useful insights that are relevant to the broader international literature on gender and politics, particularly given that Gillard's experiences have similarities with those of prominent female politicians in other countries, including Hillary Clinton. The article argues for a much broader understanding of playing the gender card that includes both issues of femininity and masculinity and that also emphasizes the close relationship between issues of playing the gender card and issues of gender performativity.

Women actors and gender concerns have often been absent from the negotiated settlements that bring an end to violent conflicts and create new political institutions. And although scholars and activists argue that both women actors and gender concerns should be incorporated, there is less consensus about how this can happen effectively. Taking up Jane Mansbridge's (2014, 11) recent call for political scientists to analyze “negotiations to agreement” and the institutions that facilitate negotiations, this paper argues that analyzing not only the involvement of women and gender actors and their outcomes, but also the form and structure of the negotiations themselves, will give us a greater understanding of how these processes are gendered. Through a comparative analysis of two negotiated settlements—in South Africa and Northern Ireland—this paper examines how institutional design processes were gendered and the impact that gender actors (understood here as actors organizing around gender interests) had on these “new” institutions/structures. In each case, women, organized as women, attempted to influence from the inside the creation of new institutional frameworks intended to end long-standing conflicts.

Among the most well-documented and long-standing gender gaps in political behavior are those relating to political ambition, as men have consistently been shown to express a significantly higher level of political ambition than women. Although this gap is well established, the reasons for the differences between men and women remain largely unknown. One possible explanation is that negative stereotypes about women's political ability are responsible. Stereotype threat, as it is referred to in the psychology literature, is a phenomenon where individuals of a social group suffer cognitive burdens and anxiety after being exposed to negative stereotypes that relate to their identity. These disruptions have been shown to alter attitudes and behavior. In order to test this possibility, we employed an experimental design whereby we randomly assigned 501 undergraduate students into threat and nonthreat conditions. While men exhibited higher levels of political ambition in both conditions, women in the nonthreat condition expressed significantly higher levels of political ambition than those women who were exposed to negative stereotypes. The results of this study therefore suggest that the gender gap in political ambition may be partly explained by negative stereotypes about women in politics.