Violence against women politicians is increasingly recognized as an issue that undermines women's presence in politics. Latin America has been at the vanguard of this global discussion. In 2012, Bolivia became the only country in the world to criminalize “political violence and harassment against women.” Several other countries have similar legislation in the works. What explains the emergence of these bill proposals? This article argues that the creation of these bills is the result of three processes: activism at the local level used international norms to propose an innovative solution to a problem; women politicians and “femocrats” worked within the state apparatus to overcome resistance; and international actors worked to foster connections among activists and politicians across the region. In this process, international norms have been transformed, with important implications for women's political representation.

A nascent body of literature has highlighted the violence (broadly defined) that women sometimes face as they enter politics. Some interpretations depict this violence as primarily gender motivated: women politicians are targeted because they are women. Another interpretation is that violence in some contexts is an everyday political practice targeting men and women alike. However, because we lack large-scale, systematic comparisons of men's and women's exposure to election violence, we know little about the extent to which—and how—candidate sex shapes this form of violence. We address this research gap by using original survey data on 197 men and women political candidates in the 2018 Sri Lankan local elections. Sri Lanka is a suitable case for analysis because it is a postconflict country in which political violence has been endemic and the number of women candidates has increased rapidly due to gender quota adoption. Overall, we find large similarities in men's and women's exposure to violence, suggesting that violence sometimes is part of a larger political practice. However, we find that women are exposed to forms of intimidation of a sexual nature more often than men. This finding demonstrates the need for gender-sensitive analyses of election violence.

Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been heralded as a success story for gender justice, in practice prosecutions of sexual and gender-based crimes (SGBC) have often ended with acquittal at the court. Gender studies in international relations explain the lack of successful SGBC prosecutions by looking to the influence of older gender biases in international law, which preclude the successful implementation of the novel Rome Statute provisions criminalizing SGBC. This article suggests that “forgetting” the gender justice norm insufficiently explains the outcome of the ICC's SGBC prosecutions. The article argues that ICC judges “remembered” another norm of criminal justice, long forgotten in international trials – strict compliance with the personal culpability principle – which has resulted in tension between different visions of justice in the court's practice: delivering substantive justice for SGBC victims v. safeguarding the defendant's rights by upholding criminal law principles.

This article investigates how legislatures may re-present themselves through claim-making on behalf of the institution. Focusing on claims about gender equality, attention is paid to the Women's Parliament organized by the Parliament of Catalonia, an all-women event through which female members of Parliament and social activists came together to put forth a feminist political agenda. Drawing on a constructivist approach, I disentangle the intentions of the institution, examine the discursive construction and performative enactment of the representative claim, and assess its reception by different audiences. I also reflect on how the symbolic activity undertaken within and by parliaments can recast ideas and practices of representation to promote more radical and inclusive politics. Overall, the article evinces that symbolic representation can be studied as a dimension in its own right and that, rather than being a mere by-product, it does co-constitute descriptive and substantive representation.

Do elites exhibit gender bias when responding to political aspirants? Drawing on theories of gender bias, group attachment, and partisan identity, I conduct the first audit experiment outside the United States to examine the presence of gender bias in the earliest phases of the political recruitment process. Based on responses from 1,774 Canadian legislators, I find evidence of an overall gender bias in favor of female political aspirants. Specifically, legislators are more responsive to female political aspirants and more likely to provide them with helpful advice when they ask how to get involved in politics. This pro-women bias, which exists at all levels of government, is stronger among female legislators and those associated with left-leaning parties. These results suggest that political elites in Canada are open to increasing female political representation and thus should serve as welcome encouragement for women to pursue their political ambitions.

Are women disproportionately more likely than men to have family ties in politics? We study this question in Latin America, where legacies have been historically common, and we focus specifically on legislatures, where women's representation has increased dramatically in many countries. We hypothesize that, counter to conventional wisdom, women should be no more likely than men to have ties to political families. However, this may vary across legislatures with and without gender quotas. Our empirical analysis uses data from the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America survey. We find more gender similarities than differences in legislators’ patterns of family ties both today and over the past 20 years. We also find that women are more likely to have family ties than men in legislatures without gender quotas, whereas this difference disappears in legislatures with quotas.

In contrast to men, women are often assumed to bear the burden of making others feel comfortable through positive emotional displays such as smiling. However, in the literature, the empirical evidence for the relevance of gender stereotypes in explaining electoral outcomes remains inconclusive. By focusing on gender stereotypes regarding facial emotional displays, this study addresses the gendered consequence of candidates’ smiling on their electoral fortunes. I analyze the results of the 2014 Korean local elections and measure candidate smiles on campaign posters by employing a biometric artificial intelligence application detecting facial emotions in images. The results demonstrate that the smiling effect has a powerful positive impact on the electoral performance of women candidates running in a multicandidate race. The positive effect is limited for women running in two-candidate races and for male candidates regardless of the number of competitors. The findings suggest that voters use intuitive cues such as candidate facial displays in electoral posters when choosing among multiple candidates in low-information settings. This study contributes to a better understanding of the activation of gender stereotypes in the electoral process.

Jineolojî, the women's science proposed and developed by the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement, has become central to its transnational organizing both in the Middle East and in Europe and the Americas. Activists in the Kurdish women's movement critique positivist and androcentric forms of knowledge production as well as liberal feminism. They instead propose Jineolojî, which aims to rediscover women's histories and restore women's central place in society. Based on a series of interviews with Kurdish women involved in developing Jineolojî, this article first situates Jineolojî within wider transnational and decolonial feminist approaches and then draws out the main ideas constituting Jineolojî. We focus on the ways Jineolojî speaks to ongoing discussions within transnational feminist knowledge production. Our article critically assesses the claim of Kurdish women activists who present Jineolojî as a new science and paradigm that goes beyond feminism while developing our argument that Jineolojî represents an important continuation of critical interventions made by marginalized women activists and academics transnationally. Moreover, our article illustrates that Jineolojî provides a helpful ideological underpinning for and epistemology of Kurdish women's political struggle for gender-based equality and justice.

Gender gaps in voter turnout and electoral representation have narrowed, but other forms of gender inequality remain. We examine gendered differences in donations: who donates and to whom? Donations furnish campaigns with necessary resources, provide voters with cues about candidate viability, and influence which issues politicians prioritize. We exploit an administrative data set to analyze donations to Canadian parties and candidates over a 25-year period. We use an automated classifier to estimate donor gender and then link these data to candidate and party characteristics. Importantly, and in contrast to null effects from research on gender affinity voting, we find women are more likely to donate to women candidates, but women donate less often and in smaller amounts than men. The lack of formal gendered donor networks and the reliance on more informal, male-dominated local connections may influence women donors’ behavior. Change over a quarter century has been modest, and large gender gaps persist.

This article explores the gender gap in attitudes toward the use of military force in the United States. Given that the United States has been continuously engaged in war for the last 17 years, we revisit the topic and explore whether a gender gap in attitudes persists by utilizing Cooperative Congressional Election Study data for 2006–16. In addition, given the primacy of partisanship to issue attitudes, we go beyond examining the gender gap to explore the impact of partisanship on these attitudes. We find that women are less likely than men to support the use of force in most circumstances. We also find gender gaps in the Democratic and Republican parties and acknowledge the diversity among women and among men in these attitudes because of partisan identity. Finally, we identify points of cross-pressure on individuals whose gender and partisan identities pull them in different directions, namely, Republican women and Democratic men.