Challenging and transforming political institutions has long been recognized as central to feminist projects of change. Existing institutions can be reformed and/or new institutions created. Over several decades, feminist political scientists, activists, and equality-seeking states have addressed questions of how the existing institutions of governance—global, regional, and local—work in gendered ways and how they can be reformed or redesigned to incorporate gender justice and promote gender equality and women's human rights. We now have a wealth of case studies about efforts to insert new actors, new rules, and new ideas into old institutions. Work has focused on three trends in institutional reform: the adoption of gender quotas, which aim to transform the institutions of political recruitment (see, for example, Franceschet, Krook, and Piscopo 2012; Krook 2009); the creation of women's policy machinery; and the introduction of gender mainstreaming, the last two of which aim to counteract the traditional mobilization of masculinist bias in the institutions of legislation and policy making (see, for example, McBride and Mazur 2010, Squires 2007, True 2003). However, this rich field of research presents us with a puzzle: On the one hand, there's been a rapid proliferation and remarkable diffusion over the past 30 years—for example, quotas (of one form or another) have been adopted in more than 100 countries. On the other hand, however, there have been variable and sometimes unpredictable outcomes in practice, highlighting the difficulty of inserting new claims into old institutions.

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.

How is institutional formation gendered, and does it make a difference? Inspired by new institutionalism's generic claim that “the organisation of political life makes a difference” (March and Olsen 1984), we ask, how does the gendered organization of political life make a difference? The purpose of this article is to build a conceptual framework for understanding the gendered character (and effects) of institutional formation. We test the framework through a case study of Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales (which were introduced in 2012) and consider its potential for further development and wider utility in research on gender and institutional design and change.

Opportunities for innovation are created by broad restructuring processes and by the chance to be in at the start of new or substantially revised political institutions. These intuitions have animated the efforts of women's movement activists and their allies in processes of political transition and constitutional or institutional “engineering” (and reengineering) with the aim of embedding gender rights and freedoms (Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003; Dobrowolsky and Hart 2003). Institutional theory supports these intuitions. Reformers—including feminist change agents—may take advantage of the “permissive” stage of institutional creation. By successfully intervening to insert new actors, new values, and new rules into new institutions, reformers may profoundly influence the future developments of an institution (Goodin 1996; Pierson 2004). By “locking in” elements that promote gender equality and gender justice at the stage of institutional design, the goal is to set off fledgling institutions along progressive paths, thus counteracting historic gender bias and gendered power imbalances found in most traditional political institutions.

What difference do new actors and new institutions make to gender justice outcomes? This article explores this question through an examination of the objectives and influence of “new” international actors on the design and implementation of the “new” victims' rights and gender justice provisions contained in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court's (ICC). Highlighting the role of gender and formal and informal institutions, this article argues that during its first decade in operation, the ICC has produced mixed outcomes in terms of the treatment of victims, especially of conflict-related sexual violence. While there is some sign that the new actors and rules have helped produce some positive outcomes, there are also signs that “old” informal gender rules and the historical context in which the ICC is “nested” has contributed to undermining and distorting news rules aimed at addressing gender injustices. The article suggests that “newness” matters, but so, too, does “oldness” and “nestedness,” and understanding the interaction and relationship between these factors is key to understanding gender justice outcomes.

The aim of the article is to develop our understanding of the role bodies play in processes of institutional change. It does so through developing an approach to the politics of institutional newness that highlights the way in which raced and gendered bodies can become entangled with claims to, or judgements of, “being new.” These questions are explored through South Africa's Constitutional Court, newly established as part of South Africa's transition to democracy in the 1990s and at the center of the broader claims being made about the creation of a new democratic, nonracial, and non-sexist South Africa. Focusing on judicial appointments to the Constitutional Court since 1994, the article draws attention to the ways in which historically excluded bodies, women and black men, have been included into this new space within the judiciary. It is argued that exploring the ways in which institutions lay claim to “being new” through the bodies of historically excluded groups is important for our understanding of the dynamics of institutional change being constituted.

Women's representation in national legislatures varies widely around the world. In 2012, only Rwanda and Andorra had achieved parity in women's representation in the national parliament, with 56% of the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies being female and exactly half the Andorran General Council represented by each sex. In many other countries, women still have little representation in the national legislature, despite being almost 50% of the population. A large body of research has emerged to try to explain the wide variation across countries, with most of it focusing on cultural, socioeconomic, and electoral explanations (e.g., McDonagh 2002; Norris 1985; Reynolds 1999; Rule 1987; Tripp and Kang 2008). Recent scholarship, however, has suggested that the legislature itself is a gendered institution that marginalizes women and argues for greater attention to understanding exactly how legislative institutions affect women's representation (Beckwith 2005; Chappell 2006; 2010; Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1995; Hawkesworth 2003; 2005; Krook and Mackay 2011; Schwindt-Bayer 2010).

We can and should use a wide range of measures and methods to study institutions; we need a combination of approaches to chart such complex phenomena meaningfully. This is true for all kinds of institutions, both formal and informal. In this essay I argue that statistical methods, including large-scale cross-national analyses, can be fruitfully employed by feminists and others seeking new insights into institutional change. Moreover, large-scale cross-national studies offer the opportunity to examine our ideas about institutions in ways that are not possible in smaller, localized studies. Statistical methods and large-scale cross-national studies offer the tools to parse out the degree to which varying elements of the contexts and characteristics of institutions shape their operation and outcomes. They strengthen the power of arguments about the general application of the findings in specific cases and provide tools for assessing the impact of chance. Thus, although qualitative and quantitative techniques are best used together, or at least are best used when they inform each other, statistical techniques in general and large-scale cross-national analyses in particular offer insights not available with other approaches. Here I mainly discuss these arguments as they apply to informal institutions, where methodological challenges are the greatest, but the points I make here should apply to research on all kinds of institutions.

Anthropologists and new institutionalist scholars studying politics share an interest in rules, norms, and power. The former tend to agree more closely with those researchers who rely on inductive empiricism rather than deductive research methods, take an historical perspective, and treat ambiguities as part of the study rather than an inconvenience. As Olivier de Sardan argues, those institutionalist approaches that tend to rely on abstract, predetermined structures contrast with the way anthropologists see social norms as emerging out of interaction between people in specific contexts (2014, 288).

The “institutional turn” in political science reflects a wider consensus among both feminist and mainstream scholars that institutions—broadly defined as the formal and informal “rules of the game”—deeply shape political life. Political institutions are also profoundly gendered. Yet, despite significant advancements in institutional analysis over the past few decades, gender politics scholars continue to grapple with how to “capture” the gendered character and gendering effects of institutions. This contribution explores how insights from feminist institutionalism (see, for example, Kenny 2007; 2013; Krook and Mackay 2011) can help us address these methodological challenges. It argues that a feminist institutionalist approach provides useful insights into the gendered foundations of political institutions, the operation and importance of informal institutions, and the general and gendered mechanisms of continuity and change.

Despite its popularity as a conceptual framework, institutionalism is characterized by a deep methodological uncertainty. Doctoral students struggle to pin down the actual institutions that they wish to study, and, in the work of many established scholars, the operationalization of institutionalist concepts is frustratingly vague or surprisingly flexible. It has been 30 years since “new institutionalists” March and Olsen (1984) argued that “the organisation of political life makes a difference.” They were reacting to “undersocialised” perspectives like behavioralism and early rational choice theory and asserting that informal conventions were as significant as formal structures and procedures. This broad conception of institutions has been both the strength and the weakness of the wave of research that followed. It has enabled new institutionalists to build a more fine-grained and realistic picture of what really constrains political behavior and decision making. But an expanded definition of “institution” runs the risk of “conceptual stretching” (Peters 1999, 216). March and Olsen (1989, 17) themselves make no clear distinction between institutions and social norms in general, while Douglas North (1990, 83) goes as far as to include tradition, custom, culture, and habit in his definition. Researchers also operate at radically different temporal and spatial scales—from microlevel studies of decision making to analyses of whole government systems (like legislatures, for instance) or historical accounts of policy change. Bo Rothstein (1996, 145) cautions that if the concept of institution “means everything, then it means nothing.” Guy Peters (1999, 145) argues that institutionalists need “more rigour in conceptualisation and then measurement of the phenomena that are assumed to make up institutions.”

Consistent with feminist scholarship more broadly, feminist legal methodology is more clearly unified by a common objective—revealing and challenging the role of law in exacerbating women's inequality—than specific methods per se. Nevertheless, common methods and approaches to the feminist legal study of institutions can be discerned. This brief intervention will focus on describing these common methods and approaches, explaining how they differ from feminist political science, and conclude with some reflections on how feminist legal studies might enrich feminist political science study of institutions in order to inform strategies for change.