Building on Mark Granovetter's concept of weak ties, we argue that diverse social networks can enhance the propensity of women to vote for a party of the Left. Using data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study, we test two hypotheses: First, the wider the range of women known, the more likely women are to vote for the Left, and second, the wider the range of higher-status women known, the more likely married women are to vote for the Left. We argue that socially communicated cues may be particularly consequential for women because they tend to know less about the parties and their platforms than men do. Accordingly, casual acquaintances can be an important source of new information for women. Women with more diverse ties to other women, we argue, are more likely to encounter women who are voting for the party of the Left and to recognize their shared interest in voting similarly. Our second hypothesis builds on Susan Carroll's argument that women require sufficient autonomy to express their gender-related interests in their choice of party. We argue that married women's political autonomy can be enhanced if their social networks include a range of women who do enjoy such autonomy. Ties with higher-status women can be a source of psychological resources that facilitate voting for a party of the Left. We find support for both of these hypotheses.

In this article we measure the impact of gender on women's legislative behavior by utilizing a unique research design. We compare whether women and men of the same political party represent the same congressional district differently with respect to women's issues. Using bill sponsorship and floor remarks during the 104th to 107th sessions of the U.S. House of Representatives as measures of legislative behavior, we find that female legislators who replace men in the same district introduce more women's issues bills in Congress. Although our conclusion that women legislators represent women's issues more frequently in the House supports existing research, our results do so in a new and more effective way by controlling for the competing explanations of party identification and district opinion as factors determining a legislator's behavior.

To what extent do women's organizations share a common commitment to organizational participatory democracy? Research suggests that women appear more likely than men to prefer democratic decision-making processes, yet these studies generally compare women's and men's behavior in organizations that are not only numerically dominated by men but that were also initially formed by men. I examine the electoral and policymaking rules of 37 membership-based women's associations in order to determine the extent to which the bylaws of women's groups exhibit the high levels of democracy predicted by the theoretical and empirical literature. I find that levels of democracy in women's associations vary more than research on women's governance would suggest. I then explore factors that influence the observed variation in women's groups. I find that the extent to which a women's group relies on membership dues, the year it was founded, and, to a lesser extent, its size affect how democratically it is structured. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for the representation of women's diverse political and economic interests.

This journal, Politics & Gender, rests on the presumption that gender, like race, class, and ethnicity, exists as a discrete category of political identity and political analysis. We can learn things about politics, in other words, by focusing on the ways in which the differences between men and women become relevant to politics. Research on gender, like research on race, class, and ethnicity, has earned independent standing within political science. For many scholars, gender constitutes the primary focus of their research. Looking through a gendered lens has given birth to a large body of scholarship. Gender has its own research sections in our professional associations and its own journals. Political scientists can and regularly do consider the effect of gender independently from other variables in their research.

The post-civil rights era has left an important dilemma in U.S. politics. Despite the fact that the United States has become more integrated across racial and gendered lines since the 1960s, inequality, particularly economic inequality, has grown. Although much of that inequality continues to fall along racial, gender, and class lines, the opportunities afforded by the “rights revolution” have also created an important heterogeneity of privilege within marginal groups. As social scientists, how best can we identify the sources and results of this inequality? More specifically, how can we better understand the crosscutting political effects of both marginalization and privilege within and among groups in U.S. society? I contend that intersections theory may be a useful place to begin, and that the idea of intersectionality could provide a fruitful framework with which to understand issues of inequality in the post-civil rights era. Such a framework would help address some of the theoretical problems that sometimes arise within empirical work on marginal groups in political science and, ideally, allow scholars to understand better how experiences of marginalization and privilege affect the shape and character of American political life.

In the 10 years that I have conducted intersectional research, my views have changed significantly in terms of how I conceptualize the subspecialization. Originally I thought of intersectionality as a content-based specialization that emphasized the subjectivity of women who reside at the intersections of race-, gender-, class-, and sexual orientation–based marginalizations (and other categories of difference). Thinking of it in this way, with a focus on content, follows the logic of much groundbreaking work in women's studies and women and politics scholarship. The primary pursuit of this focus is inclusion – incorporating previously ignored and excluded populations into preexisting frameworks to broaden our knowledge base regarding traditional questions of political science. For example, examining gender differences in voting behavior, party identification, candidate recruitment, and social movements has contributed critical knowledge to the discipline of political science.

On a hot 90-degree day during the summer of 2006, my six-year-old daughter looked at me and asked, “Why can boys run around without a shirt and I can't?” After I explained, or at least attempted to, society's rules and regulations, she quietly looked at me and said, “Oh! It's because I have a vagina. Well, that's not fair.” About a year earlier, as she was watching a popular children's show she asked me, “Why are there no little girls that look like me on the ‘WXY’ show?” I am still unsure as to how to answer her on her question on the omission of race. What my daughter is questioning is how does her gender and race, and their intersection, influence how she is treated in society. It is difficult to tell an impressionable child that because of factors beyond her control, her gender and her race, she will be treated differently than little boys—black or white and little girls—particularly white. My daughter is like so many other women of color and other marginalized groups who confront this issue of their omission from so many practices, structures, and institutions of society. Many theorists not only have sought ways of discussing the issues raised by my daughter but also have articulated strategies useful in addressing these “unfair” practices. Much of this theorizing has been given the name “intersectionality.”

Research interrogating the simultaneity of oppression in American politics is rare. Political scientists, as compared to scholars of other disciplines, have paid far less attention to the ways in which race and gender operate in tandem to produce and maintain the unequal distribution of power and privilege in the American political system. Far too often, political scientists have treated race and gender as separate, dichotomous variables in regression models that employ either/or versus both/and identity categorizations. That is to say, political science as a discipline historically has had limited relevance and prescriptive utility for individuals and groups that confront interlocking systems of oppression, as it has largely ignored the intersection (or interaction) of race, class, and gender in American politics. For example, political scientists have seldom studied those who struggle with dual identity—specifically, African-American women—with a critical eye attentive to the ways in which race, gender, and class shape their public opinion and political behavior, as well as election campaigns and legislative decisions. Feeling called upon to both articulate and translate the complexities of life for African-American women, scholars from Jewel Prestage and Mae King to Linda Williams and Shelby Lewis have played a critical role in bringing to the academic fore the study of intersecting patterns of discrimination, as they unveiled a “portrait of marginality” and provided the theoretical framework on which intersectionality research is based today. The recent publication of several books and articles on and by African-American women in political science clearly attests to this fact (see, for example, Berger 2004; Hancock 2004; Jordan-Zachery 2003; Simien 2006; Smooth 2006). These works, concentrating as they do on race and gender, are excellent examples of intersectionality research authored by political scientists.

The distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor has always been critical in the context of American poverty policy. Recent work by Martin Gilens (1999), Ange-Marie Hancock (2004), and Deborah Ward (2005) has demonstrated the ways in which this distinction has been racialized. Such work illustrates the promise of an intersectional approach for fields ranging from the study of public opinion to historical institutionalism and contemporary policy analysis. Indeed, at this point in our disciplinary history, it is difficult to imagine how research in any of these areas can be done in either an empirically satisfying or normatively responsible way without attention to intersectionality.

For a series on comparative politics, Jane Bayes and her coauthors have written a text that is long overdue: the comparative history and politics of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, with women at the center, in the global neoliberal era. The book offers a deep critique both of economic neoliberalism (not the peculiar U.S. use of the term liberalism) and of traditional conceptions of democracy, which, they argue, should become “thicker” in women-inclusive, gender-mainstreamed ways. While the book focuses on secondary research rather than new, original research, it repackages the traditional ways that feminist researchers, especially Americanists, view the three nations of North America.

In her book, Lisa H. Schwartzman engages several liberal theorists as well as some “postmodernists” from a feminist perspective. She makes use of a number of feminist thinkers to assist her in developing her arguments and clarifying her theoretical alliances. The author agrees with some liberal feminists that liberalism may be able to accommodate many feminist claims. However, she argues that even a reformed liberalism cannot meet the higher standard of being able to root “out problems that stem from systems of oppression” (p. 161). Schwartzman does not find that postmoderism, as she understands it, can meet this test adequately either. She claims, therefore, to offer an alternative method for a liberally informed feminist theory that seeks to end the structural domination of women based in the concrete experiences of women themselves. The book is tightly written and coherently argued. Each chapter is well organized and the prose is clear.

Why has the pace of electing women to the U.S. Congress been so slow? This is the central question addressed by Barbara Palmer and Dennis Simon. Their volume is a welcome addition to the gender and politics scholarly literature and is the first book since Barbara Burrell's 1994 A Woman's Place Is in the House to provide a broad overview of the role of gender in congressional elections.

Over the past 15 years, gender quota debates have emerged in national politics all over the world. More than 40 countries have reformed their constitutions or passed new electoral laws requiring that women comprise certain percentages of aspirants, candidates, or legislative seats, while in many other countries, political parties have adopted quotas on their own. This phenomenon raises both normative and empirical questions, ranging from whether gender quotas are appropriate to why countries adopt them and how effective they have been. Drude Dahlerup's edited book addresses these concerns with the first worldwide compilation of gender quota studies. The editor brings together a diverse group of authors who examine quotas in seven regions of the world, and she brackets their contributions with theoretical chapters on quota adoption and implementation. The result is the most comprehensive resource on gender quotas to date.