While individual women representatives in government have been found to behave differently than men, the causal connection between the increased presence of women in elected offices and the production of women-friendly policies is tenuous at best. This study leverages the variation in women's office holding, government structures, and policy outputs found in American cities to address that puzzle. It argues that when women obtain leadership positions in municipal government and when the positions they hold have greater power relative to other municipal positions, cities will be more likely to produce policy outputs that are often associated with women's interests and needs. Utilizing an original city-level dataset and modeling women's presence as mayors and policy outputs endogenously, the results reveal that empowered female executives in municipal governments influence expenditure decisions made as part of the federal Community Development Block Grant program. The findings suggest that political scientists should consider not only the presence of an underrepresented group, but also the relative amount of power that group has when assessing the effects on substantive representation.

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.

This study aims to advance our understanding of why women are underrepresented in legislatures around the world, and what accounts for the wide variation over time and across countries. Scholars generally agree on many of the favorable conditions for women to enter parliament, including, inter alia, proportional representation, leftism in government, and female employment. However, the mechanisms that link women's seat shares to the supposed explanatory factors are still poorly understood. In this study, we argue that the key link resides in welfare state policies that 1) free women to enter the paid workforce, 2) provide public sector jobs that disproportionately employ women, and 3) change the political interests of working women enough to create an ideological gender gap. The emergence of this gender gap, in turn, creates incentives for parties to compete for the female vote, and one way that they do so is to include more and more women in their parliamentary delegations.We are grateful to Natsu Matsuda for capable research assistance, to Torben Iversen for sharing data, and to Ethan Scheiner and Bing Powell for helpful comments as discussant for this paper at a panel at the 2004 American Political Science Association meetings in Chicago. Thies also acknowledges the support of a grant from the UCLA Academic Senate's Committee on Research.

With critical mass theory increasingly rejected as an explanatory theory of women's substantive representation, new conceptual approaches and methods are being suggested that look toward the role of multiple actors and multiple sites of representation, and which point to the importance of critical actors. Within them, there is particular concern with what constitutes the substantive representation of women (SRW). At the same time, the constitutive representation of gender (CRG) has been advanced as a complementary facet of representation. This article offers the first case study of both the SRW and the CRG in the parliamentary setting. It does so through an over-time analysis of the British Conservative Party. By examining general election manifestos (1992–2005), it considers how the Conservative Party constitutes women's concerns, the relations between the sexes, and the pledges the party makes “for women”. The research, furthermore, suggests that in studying the SRW and the CRG, scholars should both look at changes in the representative claims and pledges that are made by individual political actors, such as political parties, and explore the relationship between the two facets of representation.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, advocates have argued for the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people in humanitarian response efforts. Yet the application of this differential focus has been mixed among international policy guidelines and national programs. This research note details a queer theoretical approach to humanitarian crises that considers the intersectional factors that produce specific vulnerabilities within LGBT communities. We take two examples from distinct LGBT communities during the COVID-19 pandemic to demonstrate the analytical risk of treating the umbrella acronym LGBT, indicating distinct identity groups, as monolithic and not differentiating within identity groups based on other factors. We contend that this monolithic approach risks obviating the way different structural forces further compound precarity during crisis. Thus, we make the case for rooting intersectional approaches in any queer analyses of crisis.

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.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, men have been consistently less likely to report wearing a protective face mask. There are several possible reasons for this difference, including partisanship and gender identity. Using a national live-caller telephone survey that measures gender identity, we show that men's gender identities are strongly related to their views of mask wearing, especially when gender identity is highly salient to the individual. The effects of this interaction of sex and gender are shown to be separate from the effects of partisanship. While partisanship is a significant driver of attitudes about face masks, within partisan groups, men who report “completely” masculine gender identities are very different from their fellow partisans.

In 1995, the fourth and most influential world conference on women delivered the Beijing Declaration, calling for “women's empowerment and their full participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society, including participation in the decision-making process and access to power.” The idea that women needed not just the equal right to vote and participate in politics, but “full participation on the basis of equality,” had been gathering force for a number of years. Activists around the world had long challenged the underrepresentation of women in legislatures and decision-making assemblies. Political parties in the Scandinavian countries had been experimenting with voluntary gender quotas from the early 1980s. In the course of the 1990s, a number of countries, particularly in Latin America, made it a legal or constitutional requirement that something had to be done. Votes for women were the key demand at the end of the nineteenth century; parity of representation was the new demand by the end of the twentieth.

Half a decade into a new global economic crisis, most policymakers, pundits, and scholars discuss the situation in nongendered ways, carting out long-standing criticisms of bloated states or of neoliberalism, despite powerful feminist critiques. At the same time, feminist scholars, particularly those within feminist political science (FPS) studying advanced democracies, have been struggling with a “central paradox . … The widespread formal adoption and development of … gender equality … initiatives … [but] their partial and variable institutionalization in terms of impact on institutional practices, norms, and outcomes” (Mackay, Monro, and Waylen 2009, 254–55). In this article, we make a case for a feminist theory of political corruption that can help explain both the economic crisis and this paradox of “strong equality policy, weak practice.”

Since the 1990s, many countries have adopted policies aimed at combating violence against women; however, despite widespread policy adoption, actual reform has been uneven at best. In this article, I analyze the role played by international organizations and transnational networks in promoting women's human rights. In the first section, I examine the different mechanisms by which states adopt new policies and the implications they have on prospects for implementation. I propose a new model, the umbrella pattern, that accounts for the decoupling of policy and practice caused by states with limited local capacity. In addition, I argue that international organizations can improve the prospects for domestic implementation by engaging in capacity-building strategies, such as resource distribution and the facilitation of transnational networks. In the second section, I present an empirical study of the European Union and its efforts to address violence against women. In regards to policy adoption, I evaluate its efforts at policy promotion and then provide a comparative and aggregate analysis of policy adoption in member and candidate states. To address EU capacity-building efforts, I focus on one particular initiative, the Daphne project, which is the EU's primary mechanism for addressing gender violence.

In this essay, I start to sketch a research agenda about an electoral backlash against women's descriptive representation. Few scholars have considered the possibility of such a backlash. By “backlash,” I mean resistance to attempts to change the status quo. As Jane Mansbridge and Shauna Shames argue in this issue, when actors disadvantaged by the status quo work to enact change, they may be met by a reaction by those seeking to maintain existing power arrangements. In the following pages, I introduce the idea of a backlash against women's representation, propose several preliminary hypotheses about a backlash, and discuss ways of testing them.

Does the descriptive representation of gender affect how constituents respond to their legislators' substantive policy records? Previous work offers two distinctly opposing theories: the first, that descriptive representation may weaken accountability for substantive representation, if it leads female constituents to misperceive the incumbent's positions or give them a “free pass” on policy congruence; the second, that it may strengthen accountability, if it leads female constituents to pay greater attention to the incumbent and his or her record. Using survey data from three electoral cycles, I show that women are more likely to correctly identify their U.S. senators' policy records and weigh that record more heavily in their evaluations when they are represented by women. The descriptive representation of gender thus strengthens the links between the policy positions legislators take in office and how they are evaluated by their constituents.

Women's representation in elected and appointed positions is often seen as a matter of justice and equity (Burrell 1997). Beyond symbolic representation, many believe that a greater presence of women in institutions that have traditionally been controlled by men can facilitate the attention to issues that disproportionately affect women (Dahlerup 1988; Dodson and Carroll 1991; Kanter 1977). As the election of women has grown in the past decade, researchers have shown a renewed interest in understanding under what conditions women's descriptive representation can produce more effective substantive representation of women's interests. A number of feminist scholars argue that increasing the descriptive representation of women in legislatures is essential to remedy existing inequalities suffered by women (Mansbridge 1999). But electoral practices aimed at increasing women and minorities in office, such as majority-minority districts or gender quotas throughout European and Latin American countries, have produced varied results concerning the substantive representation of women and minority interests. Understanding the electoral and institutional features that strengthen or attenuate women's representation, therefore, merits further study.

Conservative political actors appear rather troubling for many gender and politics scholars and feminist activists. What should we make of their claims to represent women? How should we best understand their actions? This article, based on a critical rereading of the empirical literature and informed by contemporary representation theory, develops a new conceptual framework for assessing the quality of women's substantive representation by conservatives. We find that under specified conditions, conservative representatives do further women's substantive representation. A first set of conditions relates to conservative claims to represent women. These are considered to be “for women” when they marry conservative women's concerns in society; when conservative representatives act and do not simply engage in rhetoric; and when their actions are not undercut by other acts, policies, or outcomes unfavorable to women. A second set of criteria considers the quality of the process of women's substantive representation. We contend that a feminist process of deliberation about women's interests can include conservative claims as long as they meet the requirements of responsiveness, inclusiveness, and egalitarianism.

By asserting that oil, not Islam, hurts gender equality, Michael Ross (2008) has made an important contribution to the debate on whether Islam bodes ill for women (Fish 2002; Inglehart and Norris 2003; Spierings, Smits, and Verloo 2009). Ross suggests that oil production decreases the number of female workers in countries with occupational segregation. The more women are left out of the formal economy, the fewer opportunities and resources they have for becoming influential political constituencies. According to Ross, “[t]his leaves oil-producing states with atypically strong patriarchal cultures and political institutions” (p. 107). Employing the same set of countries and data used in Ross (2008), I show that the institution of gender quotas, which is omitted from his statistical analyses, offsets the effects of oil rents on women's political representation. Gender quotas increase women's representation in Muslim majority and non-Muslim majority countries and in countries that are oil rich and oil poor. That “petroleum perpetuates patriarchy” (p. 120) is a tendency, not destiny.

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.

While significant attention has been dedicated to explaining women's election to office, fewer studies have assessed female politicians' access to positions of power within legislatures. This latter topic became particularly salient in the British House of Commons following the 2010 general election, when recently adopted reforms introduced intracameral elections for select committee members and chairs. This article outlines three hypotheses concerning the influence of candidate sex on election outcomes: a gender bias against female candidates, a gender advantage favoring female candidates, and gender-neutral outcomes. Drawing on two original data sets, the results not only fail to support the gender-bias hypothesis but also demonstrate that women were advantaged in the interparty elections for committee chairs. These findings offer new insights into both the position of female legislators in the UK Parliament and gender and the allocation of power within national assemblies more generally.

The essays here reflect on the need to rebuild bridges between two key strands of feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship: feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist (international) political economy (FPE/FIPE). As many of the contributions to this section point out, feminist IR scholarship has long emphasized how gender relations and identities are constituted globally in relation to processes of militarization, securitization, globalization, and governance. In more recent years, however, feminist IR scholarship has come to be dominated by a concern with security (Prügl 2011). Of course, FPE scholarship has continued to provide critical accounts of the gendered nature of global production, work, and financial crises (among other issues). But it is notable that, in doing so, much FPE scholarship has tended to avoid questions of security and/or violence. This CP section, then, looks to the growing divide between FSS and FPE with all of the contributors seeking to analyse how these two traditions of feminist scholarship might be reintegrated and why this reintegration is important.

Questions about the quality of political representation are central to research on women and gender, and to political science in general. Given a certain set of interests, how well do political institutions and political actors address and advance those interests? Research about the quality of political representation relies a priori on the existence of fixed, stable, and measurable interests; we need to know what women want before we can assess how well politicians represent them. Perfect measures of the interests that all women share have proven elusive. The measures of women's interests that scholars commonly employ lend themselves reasonably well to research, but have unfortunate side effects: They essentialize gender norms, exclude certain groups of women, or define women's interests too narrowly. In this essay, I explore the political implications of the empirical measures of women's interests on which scholars have relied in research on women's political representation. I offer a way to measure women's interests that draws upon the United Nations Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW provides a way to think about women's interests that is broad, inclusive, and sufficiently flexible to reflect changes over time. Furthermore, it enjoys the explicit approval of almost every nation in the world; 186 countries have ratified CEDAW since the UN General Assembly approved it in 1979.

A growing body of work on candidate traits shows that people with a given social characteristic tend to prefer candidates or leaders who share that characteristic (Campbell and Cowley 2014; Cutler 2002). However, the existing evidence for whether women vote for women is mixed. For example, Kathleen Dolan found that candidate sex was a driver of voting behavior for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1992, but not in 1994 or 1996 (Dolan 1998, 2001, 2004). Eric Smith and Richard Fox used pooled U.S. data from 1988 to 1992 and found that well-educated women were more inclined to support women candidates in House but not Senate races (Smith and Fox 2001), and others have found that women are more likely to vote for women candidates only when they are perceived as being pro-feminist (Plutzer and Zipp 1996). By contrast Fulton (2014) found that women are not more likely to vote for women candidates in the United States, but that male Independents are somewhat less likely to vote for them. Others have found little evidence whatsoever of an association between candidate gender and vote choice (McElroy and Marsh 2010).