Studies of press coverage afforded women running for public office indicate that historically, women tend to garner less coverage overall and that the coverage they do receive tends to focus disproportionately on their appearance, personality, and family status at the expense of their qualifications and issue positions. This study examines newspaper coverage of U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Notably, Clinton did not allege that she was receiving too little coverage or coverage that focused disproportionately on her clothing or appearance. Rather, she charged that she was being treated negatively relative to her chief rival, U.S. Senator Barack Obama. More than 6,000 articles from 25 leading newspapers from across the country were content-coded from Labor Day through Super Tuesday in order to assess Clinton's coverage on two dimensions: traditional and tonal. On a range of traditional indicators of bias, such as coverage amount and mentions of candidate appearance, Clinton's coverage clearly broke established patterns typically afforded women presidential candidates. However, the tone of Clinton's coverage was decidedly negative relative to her male competitors. Normative implications of this mixed bag of fairness and bias are discussed.

The effect of negative campaigning on voter turnout has been a major focus of research in recent years. The general finding from this large literature is that negative campaigning does not depress voter turnout overall; however, it may still be that certain portions of the electorate are differentially mobilized or demobilized by negativity. In particular, scholars have neglected to examine whether men and women react differently to campaign attacks. This article begins by showing that evidence drawn from a variety of relevant fields outside of political science point toward the general expectation that men will be mobilized by negativity to a greater degree than women. Associated hypotheses are then tested using data from both real campaigns and experiments. In each analysis, the evidence supports the hypothesis that a “negativity gap” exists. Specifically, men are disproportionately mobilized by the most negative campaign messages as compared to women. Partisanship is also found to interact significantly with gender and message tone to affect the likelihood of voting. These results highlight the importance of studying subgroup differences when establishing the effects of campaign tone on the public.

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.

This article examines the use of gender in constitutions and its significance for gender equality. New democracies, and some older ones, are increasingly including gender provisions in their constitutions. What is the impact of these provisions on women's political and economic status? Does constitutionalizing gender serve to empower women? If so, what kinds of provisions have an empowering effect and under what conditions? To address these questions, we trace the political use (legislation, policy, and judicial interpretation) of gendered constitutional provisions in Botswana and South Africa, countries that differ substantially with respect to how they have “constitutionalized” gender. The case studies demonstrate how constitutional provisions provide a legal basis and legitimacy for women's rights advocacy and how they influence the content of legislation and judicial review of laws and policies.

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.

This article argues that systematic rape should be conceptualized not only as a war crime, but also as a destructive and increasingly deployed war weapon. As such, rape becomes a subject of arms control and thus directly relevant to security studies. Consequently, I argue that international relations should consider rape as a weapon of war for two major reasons. First, the categorization of rape as a weapon of war fits with core disciplinary theoretical definitions and assumptions. Namely, rape as a weapon of war compromises state security, operates in a conception of power defined as material/“power-over”/zero-sum, and corresponds with a rational actor model. Second, although wartime rape has often been marginalized as a “women's issue,” empirical evidence persuasively demonstrates how this categorization is incomplete; rather, women, girls, men, and boys all suffer direct and/or indirect consequences from the increasing prevalence and brutality of this weapon's deployment. Overall, the article maintains that excluding rape from security studies precludes comprehensive, accurate analysis within areas of theoretical and practical concern to IR. Thus, I conclude by suggesting avenues of research, from diverse theoretical perspectives, that may persuade IR scholars to view rape as an increasingly relevant and analytically rich topic of study.

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.

Social scientists are increasingly taking a more complex theoretical approach to the role of stereotyping in the electorate's evaluation of political candidates. Within this literature, most studies investigate the impact of one stereotype on the public's evaluation of candidates from an underrepresented group. We build on and extend this literature by exploring what we term “intersectional stereotyping”: The role of stereotypes in shaping the electorate's evaluation of political candidates who share dual membership in stigmatized groups—women and sexual minorities. We empirically examine the impact of intersectional stereotyping in a unique 2003 survey of national adults. Our results indicate that gender, both of the respondent and the candidate, plays a key role in shaping attitudes toward gay and lesbian political candidates. These findings suggest that intersectional stereotyping plays a nuanced role in evaluations of candidates; in certain contexts gender stereotypes are more significant, and at other times stereotypes about sexual minorities appear to be driving evaluations of candidates.

The Ministry of Women's Affairs in Aotearoa/New Zealand was established as a stand-alone agency in 1986. It has remained institutionally intact for more than 20 years, unlike many women's policy agencies that have been downsized or eliminated. It has survived significant economic and state sector restructuring and weathered the extension of neoliberal orientations into the reform of social policy. We analyze New Zealand's version of state feminism during three political periods since its inception. For each period, we identify significant developments both in the broader political context and within the ministry itself, and examine how effective Women's Affairs has been in advancing the substantive interests of diverse groups of women. Our analysis identifies three key features of the Ministry of Women's Affairs—its political context, its political and bureaucratic leadership, and its institutional design—as important in explaining both the ministry's continued existence and the limits on what it has been able to achieve.

In this article, I explore the political consequences of being a parent for men and women seeking political office. Although a long-standing body of research has concluded that family obligations constrain the political careers of women but not of men, almost no research examines how family status can affect voter evaluations of political candidates. Using an experiment in which I varied the candidate's gender and parental status, I find that on a number of indicators, voters rate childless female candidates substantially lower than childless male candidates, mother candidates, and father candidates. Childless women also lose the traditional “female advantage” on child-care and children's issues. Additionally, while mothers of young children are not significantly disadvantaged compared to mothers of older children and women with no children, they are disadvantaged in comparison to male candidates with young children. Furthermore, this study finds evidence that male candidates may receive a “fatherhood penalty” compared to men with no children. Thus, there are political consequences of being a parent, but the consequences are dependent on the candidate's gender. These findings have important implications for candidate campaign strategy and how female candidates should think about presenting their family lives to voters.

Our analysis investigates the ideological differences in the voting records of male and female members of the U.S. House of Representatives using a relatively novel natural-experiment research design to account for variations in district-level factors. We ask whether it makes a difference when a woman succeeds a man or a man succeeds a woman in a given congressional district. To answer this question, we created a database consisting of predecessor-successor pairs in all elections to the House between 1937 and 2008. In the case of intraparty change, we find that there is no significant difference in the voting scores of female and male members of the House; the roll call scores of female Democrats who replace male Democrats are virtually identical, as are the scores of male Democrats who replace female Democrats. The same results hold for Republicans. We also demonstrate that when interparty change occurs in a district, there is no evidence that the resulting ideological change is greater when the successor or predecessor is a woman. In other words, the voting records of consecutive members of Congress that come from a particular district are virtually the same regardless of their gender.

The introduction of France's “parity” law in 2000 raised fears of electing inferior women candidates via a gender quota. France has since held two legislative elections, with the proportion of women in parliament rising from 10.9% to 12.3% in 2002, and 18.5% in 2007. These rises permit an empirical evaluation of whether “quota women” measure up to those elected without a quota. New women parliamentarians are compared to their male counterparts and to women elected before 2002 to see whether there are any noticeable differences in their background (profession, age, and prior experience) and their levels of parliamentary activity (including numbers of bills, reports, and questions introduced).

The findings challenge the notion that parity is producing weak politicians. The slightly different profiles of men and women politicians reflect wider barriers to women's political careers that would not have been overcome without the parity law. Once women are elected, the volume of activity shows no evidence of being gendered, suggesting that women are as effective in the job as men. These findings imply that sex is a barrier to entry but not to performance, reinforcing claims for the use of quotas to overcome entry barriers and negating claims that quotas produce second-rate parliamentarians.

From Dwight Eisenhower to John McCain, presidential candidates have appealed to female voters by highlighting motherhood in their campaigns. The most recent example of this has been the “hockey mom” trope introduced by the first hockey mom to earn a slot on the GOP presidential ticket, Governor Sarah Palin. These appeals, while motivated by political gamesmanship, imply that mothers see the political world a bit differently from other women. They suggest that women with children have different political priorities and concerns and, at times, different positions on political issues. This article takes this proposition seriously, and asks the question: Does becoming a mother have a transformative effect on women's political attitudes? Using longitudinal data from the four-wave 1965–97 Political Socialization Panel Study, I track the movement of women's political attitudes on partisan identification, ideological identification, and policy issues. I find that the effects of motherhood on women's political attitudes, while not uniform in nature, do push some women to adopt more conservative political attitudes. Thus, these results suggest that while motherhood does not transform women's political attitudes, for some women motherhood does promote interesting attitudinal shifts.

I explore the notion of ascriptive autonomy as a conceptual and political tool that can be used to understand and enact potentially liberatory practices that enable marginalized people to have greater individual autonomy. “Ascriptive autonomy” refers to the sense in which autonomy is partly constituted by the conferral of the status of “autonomous individual.” Autonomy is both a capacity to determine one's own ends and a status conferred by virtue of being recognized by others. I focus on the link between these two facets of autonomy insofar as recognition may enable the development of capacity. In certain situations, autonomy may be ascribed even if one lacks some requirements associated with the capacity for autonomy because of either institutional or psychic constraints that follow from oppression. In such instances of “selective, purposeful misrecognition,” ascription may lead to the cultivatation of the capacity for autonomy while opening up a space for politics. To demonstrate this, I recast the feminist debate over sexuality using the terms of ascriptive autonomy. When viewed through the lens of misrecognition, we can better respond to critiques that charge proponents of the “pro-sex”position with focusing on sexual pleasure at the expense of sufficient attention paid to the constraints faced by women.

When policymakers invoke liberal democratic tropes while endorsing welfare reform, and, in particular, “paternafare”—the mandatory child support and paternity identification requirement—are they contradicting themselves? Can paternafare be defended in liberal democratic terms? In this article, I propose to set aside, for the sake of argument, my own radical egalitarian commitments and to speak directly to the liberal feminist in her own terms. Because the capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum is one of the less demanding liberal democratic theories of justice, insofar as it permits a relatively large degree of inequality, it provides a particularly helpful framework for this feminist dialogue. I construct a hypothetical world in which the needy single mother has an entitlement to a basic income under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, and I draw up my own version of an undue burden test on the basis of Nussbaum's theory. I explore whether the paternafare rule within this hypothetical world would pass the capabilities-oriented undue burden test. Finally, I argue that Nussbaum's nonfungibility principle can yield surprisingly robust redistributive results within specific historical conditions.

I began to write this essay as confirmation hearings opened for President Barack Obama's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, and long before he nominated Elena Kagan. The nominations have made the gender and ethnic identities of judges and senators alike salient. In their opening statements, senators burst with pride about a great country where anyone can achieve anything, regardless of gender, class, or ethnicity, while some equated empathy with prejudice and difference with partiality. In a New York Times Magazine interview the Sunday before, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stressed the importance of more women on the bench (Bazelon 2009). Opponents' carefully orchestrated media attacks against Sotomayor, arguing that she lacked judicial temperament (too mean) and was racist, came straight from the misogynist playbook well thumbed from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. I share Nancy Maveety's disappointment that the hearings squelched, rather than explored, the questions of what Martha Minow (1987) has so aptly named “the dilemma of difference”—how women can be both equal to and different from men—and the nature of judging, which has to do with how one's social location and life experiences inevitably shape judgment. The dullness of the actual hearings stood in sharp contrast to the euphoria in the Latino community where many sported the latest fashion: “Wise Latina Woman” T-shirts, dispelling any doubt about the symbolic importance of such appointments.

Households are an enduring feature of human history. They are the building blocks of social formations in every era and at all scales: from small communities to the global economy. Like families, they “order” social relations in particular ways. But households differ from families by allowing for nonkinship members and by not presuming shared group residence. The emphasis lies, rather, in the pooling of diverse (material and nonmaterial) resources with the purpose of ensuring the continuity of the collective unit. Michael Douglass (2006, 423) deploys the term householding to underscore how “creating and sustaining a household is a continuous process of social reproduction that covers all life-cycle stages and extends beyond the family.” Global householding references the many ways in which these processes increasingly occur across national boundaries, for example, through transborder marriages, overseas education, labor migration, and war displacements. The psychological, sociocultural, economic, and political implications of these processes are extraordinarily complex and arguably involve as much as one-quarter of the world's population.