From World War I through the 1960s, U.S. women's organizations regularly trekked to Capitol Hill to influence congressional foreign policy debates. Yet by the 1990s, these groups had largely disengaged from international affairs. Why? Using an original data set of women's group appearances before Congress from 1916 to 2000, this study documents and explains this puzzling development by exploring the mutually reinforcing linkages among women's identity, claims to issue ownership, and interest group evolution. In the case at hand, the advent of citizen and economic groups competing with women's organizations for ownership of foreign policy questions, coupled with the declining legitimacy of gender “difference” arguments and the resurgence of “sameness” arguments, led women's groups to focus on the dimensions of foreign policy affecting women's rights and status, in particular, and to abandon less explicitly gendered foreign policy issues almost entirely. As multipurpose women's associations declined in vitality, and feminist groups fueled by newly available philanthropic dollars staked claim to women's rights-and-status questions, organized womanhood surrendered much of the foreign-policy issue space over which women had long claimed political authority, and women's groups' presence on Capitol Hill waned.

Much scholarship has noted that there are significant differences in the political behavior of women and men. Women, for example, are found to be more likely to identify as and vote for Democrats, less likely to hold conservative issue positions, and more likely to vote for incumbents. One of the more disturbing gender gaps occurs in political knowledge: Specifically, women are typically found to be less knowledgeable about politics and government than their male counterparts. We propose that much of the gap can be explained by theories of risk aversion, which imply that women are less likely to guess on questions for which they are uncertain. Using item response models, we demonstrate that failure to consider these gender-based differences leads to scales that significantly underestimate the political knowledge of women. Consistent with other work in this area, we find that accounting for the higher propensity of men to guess decreases the gender gap in knowledge by around 36%.

In this article, we rely on data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) to examine the impact of gender for U.S. senators running for reelection. We propose a theoretical explanation for why an incumbent's gender may influence how citizens evaluate senators, and we present empirical evidence showing that people develop distinct impressions of men and women senators during campaigns. In the 2006 election cycle, women senators were viewed more positively than their male counterparts. Some of the advantages women senators enjoyed were consistent with established gender stereotypes. In particular, women senators were viewed as more honest and more caring than male senators. Moreover, women senators were viewed as more competent at dealing with health-care issues. However, we did not find evidence for gender stereotypes that traditionally produce more positive views of male senators. For example, we did not find that male senators were viewed as stronger leaders or more experienced than women senators. People did not view male senators as better able to deal with economic issues.

This article partly confirms the long-held view that multiculturalism discriminates against women. Indeed, for a majority of cases where multicultural electoral practices were recently recognized in our Oaxaca, Mexico survey sample, women did not participate in elections. However, female respondent participation in leader selection in multicultural communities was actually found to be higher in the few communities where locally established multicultural norms allowed women to serve in leadership roles. We find that while multicultural norms are often—or even usually—discriminatory, ascription to communal norms may actually encourage the participation of women in the few cases where these locally generated norms do not disenfranchise them. We conclude that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, multiculturalism that adheres to universal suffrage and human rights may not be normatively adverse to women's rights, and we argue for “conditional multiculturalism,” that is, recognition of multicultural norms but only if and when these adhere to broadly accepted human rights norms.

Cultural explanations are frequent in social science research. In gender studies, they are especially common in cross-country comparative research that attempts to explain variations in everyday life situations for women and men. A noticeable example is found in the book Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World, by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2003). Inglehart and Norris construct a gender-equality scale from measurements on attitudes among citizens regarding women as political leaders, women's professional and educational rights, and women's traditional role as mother. The results show that Finland, Sweden, West Germany, Canada, and Norway are the countries most influenced by egalitarian values. At the other end of the spectrum countries like Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Jordan are found (p. 33). The authors demonstrate that egalitarian values are systematically related to the actual conditions of women's and men's lives. They conclude that modernization underpins cultural change, that is, attitudinal change from traditional to gender-equal values, and that these cultural changes have major impact on gender-equality processes.

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.

Immigrants seeking asylum in the United States face an unpredictable area of the law. Nonetheless, gay male applicants for asylum seem more likely to succeed if they present evidence of persecution that includes allegations of rape; gay Asian immigrants are less likely than other men to be granted refugee status even when they report having been victims of rape. These two findings suggest that immigration judges, officials with the Bureau of Immigration Appeals, and appellate court judges read and interpret the gender, sexuality, and persecution of the applicants before them through lenses colored by racial expectations. An intersectional analysis of gender, sexuality, and citizenship shows that whereas immigration law is unstable, Western conceptions of sexuality are static and that ethnicity influences judges' conceptions regarding the gender of citizenship.

Whose responsibility is it—that of the individual, society, or both—to meet the needs of citizens and to what degree, how, when, and why? This article investigates this set of inquiries by examining the ongoing debate over sex education in the United States between advocates for the abstinence-only and the comprehensive approaches, conveyed here through their curricula. The debate reflects a broader ideological struggle over how a democratic political community distributes moral responsibility. Personal responsibility is illustrated by abstinence-only curricula, whereas social responsibility is made evident in the comprehensive approach. These approaches establish a dualistic framework for understanding morality that marginalizes politics, deflecting attention away from the moral assumptions behind the gendered distribution of resources in a political community. Collective responsibility, this article argues, provides an alternative moral groundwork and inclusive conceptual perspective that brings politics and the power dynamics of the distributive function within a community into focus. From a collective perspective, the answer to the question “whose responsibility?” then shifts from either the individual or society to both at the same time.

Between 1993 and 2000, nearly every democracy in Latin America passed a law prohibiting domestic violence. Between 2001 and 2006, five countries strengthened their legislation, and Brazil passed its first law. What explains these advances with respect to women's rights? While other work has focused on domestic or international factors, this article brings to light the role of the region. It reveals that the two inter-American women's rights organizations have been active in both establishing regional norms and promoting their national adoption and implementation. While this suggests that regional governance can promote women's social rights, there is no automatic institutionalization of these norms. Case studies on Chile and Brazil illustrate the impact of national context.

The recent push for more women parliamentarians around the world via positive action measures such as gender quotas naturally begs the question of whether the increased descriptive representation of women in parliament is making a substantive difference, in terms of the types of policies passed, behavioral norms, and procedures. How does the substantive representation of women take place? One way of measuring gendered impacts in politics is to look at the participation of Members of Parliament (MPs) in formal, parliamentary debate on key policy issues. It is reasonable to assume that one (though certainly not the only) measure of a good MP is his or her ability to contribute his or her voice and thoughts to public policy debates in parliament. Furthermore, if we consider women MPs representative of women in particular as a marginalized group, making their voices heard in parliamentary debates is perhaps one of the best ways of acting for women. As Melissa Williams (1998, 138) argues, the unique voice of women is a necessary component for women's political equality:

The most conservative party in Chile, the Unión Demócrata Independiente, has nominated and elected more women to local-level office than any of the other major parties in the country. In this article, I argue that the candidate selection processes used by this party explain how it has proposed more women candidates for municipal office than parties with defined ideological commitments to increasing women's representation. The party's use of candidate selection procedures that are both exclusive and centralized allow women to avoid important obstacles on the path to obtaining candidacies. The case of the Unión Demócrata Independiente is important, first, because it allows us to understand how a party without a commitment to increasing women's participation can nonetheless do so, and second, because it lays bare the causal mechanisms of candidate selection procedures and increases our understanding of the effects that these processes have on female representation.

While there has been little data gathered as to the presence of migrant workers in service occupations on U.S. military bases in Iraq, the data that do exist along with anecdotal evidence gathered by journalists suggest that the division of reproductive labor on military bases reflects an underexplored axis in the global organization of social reproductive labor. Due in part to the privatization of these services, the vast majority of vital support service labor is outsourced to and performed by men migrating from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nepal, and Pakistan. This globalized division of reproductive labor is a site of symbolic politics that reinforces the gendered dimensions of the national identity of the American soldier. This division builds off of a long tradition of gendered dynamics framing military service. The displacement of reproductive labor, which remains coded as effeminate, onto poor migrant men serves to reinforce the aggressive masculine version of American soldiering in a way that smoothes over differences among soldiers along the lines of race, class, rural or urban origin, and even gender. Echoing earlier colonizer–colonized relations, this division of labor in turn supports the increasingly imperial posture that the United States has assumed in the world.

Gender inequality in the Muslim world has become the object of high drama on the international scene. Ghostlike images of women wrapped in burqas and begging in the streets of Afghan cities swept television screens in the United States following 9/11. The number of articles on Muslim women in English newspapers has increased exponentially in the last few years. Although the popular press and the media continue to emphasize seclusion and subordination in their description of Muslim women, scholars have written extensively and persuasively to debunk the myth of the Muslim woman as a victim, passively suffering the subordination imposed on her. Starting in the 1970s and continuing to the present, a rich literature has argued that as elsewhere in the world, Muslim women have not only resisted subordination but have actively shaped their own destiny (e.g., work by Leila Ahmed [1992], Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt [2008, 2009], Elizabeth Fernea [1998], Nikki Keddie [2002, 2007, 2008], and Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji [forthcoming]).

When Hillary Clinton announced her presidential candidacy, questions about the role of gender in presidential politics immediately surfaced. Would gender stereotyping and sexism pervade the electoral environment? Would the media treat Clinton differently than her competitors in the Democratic primary field? Would Clinton's candidacy mobilize women of all types, simply by virtue of its historic nature? And when Clinton lost the Democratic nomination, new questions quickly arose. Was America just not ready to elect a female president? To what extent did Bill Clinton account for Senator Clinton's successes and failures? How would the 18 million women and men who cast their ballots for Clinton vote in the general election? With so many interesting unknowns, political scientists will likely spend the next several years examining Hillary Clinton's campaign and assessing the extent to which her sex affected her experiences and contributed to her primary loss.