Bringing home federal spending projects to the district is a common reelection strategy for members of the U.S. Congress, and congresswomen tend to outperform congressmen in securing district spending. However, for legislators to turn distributive benefits into higher approval and electoral rewards, constituents must recognize that public spending has taken place in their community and attribute credit to the correct public official. I theorize that congresswomen face a gender bias when claiming credit for federal projects, and I test this theory through an online survey experiment. Contrary to expectations, I find no evidence that legislator gender influences the public’s reaction to congressional credit claims, indicating that congresswomen can effectively use distributive politics to counter gendered vulnerability in the U.S. Congress. This research advances the literature on gender and politics by investigating whether a gender bias in credit claiming prevents congresswomen from turning their representational efforts into electoral capital.

Female attorneys at the U.S. Supreme Court are less successful than male attorneys under some conditions because of gender norms, implicit expectations about how men and women should act. While previous work has found that women are more successful when they use more emotional language at oral arguments, gender norms are context sensitive. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted perhaps the most radical contextual shift in Supreme Court history: freewheeling in-person arguments were replaced with turn-based teleconference arguments. This change altered judicial decision-making and, I argue, justices’ assessments of attorneys’ gender performance. Using quantitative textual analysis of oral arguments, I demonstrate that justices implicitly evaluate gender performance with different metrics in each modality. Gender-normative levels of emotional language predict success in both formats. Function words, however, only predict success in teleconference arguments. Given gender’s salience at the Supreme Court and in broader society, my findings prompt questions about the extent to which women can substantively impact case law.

We investigate the gender gap in issue attention among members of parliament (MPs) by applying automated text analytic techniques to a novel data set on Italian parliamentary speeches over a remarkably long period (1948–2020). We detect a gendered specialization across issues that tends to disappear as women’s shares in parliamentary groups increase. We then investigate whether women’s access to previously male-owned issues brings with it a different agenda, operationalized as a different vocabulary. We detect a U-shaped pattern: language gender specificity is high when female MPs are tokens in parliamentary groups with a large preponderance of men; it decreases when their shares start increasing and grows again when they constitute a considerable minority. We argue that this pattern is consistent with the theory of tokenism, and it is produced by the interlinkage of commitment to shared norms and the distribution of “activation thresholds” among female MPs.

To advocate for restrictive immigration policies, conservative U.S. politicians have advanced a narrative that Latino immigrants commit violent crimes against White women. This framing of immigrant threat builds on a long history of similar anti-Black discourse and activates racialized ideas about protecting femininity. I demonstrate how the identities of purported victims of immigrant crime connect attitudes about immigration with benevolent sexism—a superficially positive, protective attitude toward particular types of women. An original survey experiment shows that benevolent sexism is activated when victims of immigrant crime are White women. Using nationally representative survey data, I show that the benevolent face of sexism has a notable impact on the immigration attitudes of White Americans, particularly when it comes to the protectionist policy of policing of the U.S.-Mexico border.

This article offers an innovative way of understanding gender balance in parliaments. Motivated by research documenting how newcomers are disadvantaged during their first term in office, while senior members enjoy certain privileges, we want to find out how common women are among senior members of parliaments. We launch an institutional approach comprising three seniority measures to study gender gaps in political endurance to find out whether, where, and when men are more likely than women to be parliamentary seniors. Our analysis using data from seven countries in Western Europe and two countries in North America (1965–2020) shows very high gender gaps across the three measures. Thus, despite an increased level of female representation, women still constitute a small part of the exclusive group of senior members of parliament. Our findings extend the research documenting that women and men largely have equally long parliamentary careers, emphasizing the need to understand gender balance in multidimensional terms.

Do female legislators have different policy preferences than male legislators? Despite a large body of literature from liberal democracies and recent studies of electoral authoritarian regimes, this topic has received little attention in the context of single-party regimes. Based on quasi-experimental methods and regression models, we analyze original data from 38,383 proposals introduced during China’s 12th National People’s Congress and test the effect of gender on policies concerning conventionally selected feminine issues and “political stance,” issues that are unique to single-party regimes. The analysis confirms the effect of gender on policy preference across several feminine issues. However, the effect of gender is null on issues concerning political stance. Our findings suggest that while single-party regimes allow gender differences to emerge among legislators on issues that are not politically important, they tend to discourage such differences on politically prominent issues. This study advances the literature on both gender politics and authoritarian politics.

In the United States, Black women have been touted as the saving grace of the Democratic Party. Using data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, a cooperative, user-driven data set that provides a large and diverse sample of racial and ethnic groups in the United States, we develop a deeper understanding of the role of partisanship and civic duty in Black women’s support for Hillary Clinton and their political participation. We take an intersectional approach and examine Black women’s politics alongside that of their white female and Black male counterparts. We find that Black women are motivated by civic duty to participate in elections, whereas civic duty does not motivate Black men and white women.

This article examines women’s perceptions of and experiences with institutional norms in political science departments and their institutions. Conceptually, it builds on feminist institutionalism. Specifically, it examines the broad institutional norms, formal and informal, that define political science departments within their larger institutions, as well as potential avenues for change. I argue that a “critical mass” of women in academic departments and the presence of “critical actors” in departmental and university leadership positions sympathetic to the cause and powerful enough to implement change can bring about institutional reforms. To that end, I conducted a survey among 1,273 female PhD students and faculty members in political science departments across the United States. The survey questions revolve around women’s perceptions of institutional gender norms, the way they are judged by them, their ability to have professional success under them, and their (or others’) ability to change them. After discussing the survey results within the context of feminist institutional theory, I offer some conclusions about the positions of women in political science departments in the United States, the implications of this for the profession at-large, and some thoughts on avenues for future research on the issue.

Does information about the way victims of gender-based violence (GBV) are treated by the police influence evaluations of government policies to combat gender-based violence? I theorize that because most citizens have incomplete information about such policies, information about procedural fairness should be given more weight when forming evaluations of the government’s performance in this domain. Using original experiments embedded in public opinion surveys collected from Brazil, I find that information about procedural unfairness powerfully predicts more critical evaluations of GBV laws and the government’s performance in helping victims. In addition, these critical opinions influence bystander intervention attitudes. Mediation analysis confirms that views of procedural unfairness are critical in explaining these effects. The implications of the findings for the implementation of specialized services are discussed in the results and conclusion.

This article introduces new quantitative fine-tuned indicators to objectively measure political parties’ preferences on gender issues. We assess the validity and reliability of these new empirical indicators by analyzing the relationship between ideology and gender positions in decentralized Spain. Using data collected by the Regional Manifestos Project, which for the first time has incorporated a fully fledged gender domain into its coding scheme for content analysis of regional manifestos, we analyze parties’ gender positions on four fundamental dimensions: welfare and the labor market, violence, representation, and values and identity. The results suggest that there is a persistent left-right divide on the last three dimensions: Spanish left-wing parties score significantly higher than right-wing and regionalist parties. However, ideology does not drive parties’ gender positions on welfare and labor market policies; support for gender equality policies on this dimension is so widespread that it can be considered a “valence issue”—all parties, irrespective of their ideology, endorse the same (positive) position.

Women who ran for office in 2018 used a variety of strategies on the campaign trail, with some highlighting more masculine traits and others more feminine traits, but the latter was more common than in prior years. We ask how effective these strategies are for trait evaluations, perceptions of leadership and competence, likeability, and vote choice and how this effect varies based on respondent’s views about the role of women in society. To explore these relationships, we use data from a two-wave panel conducted in the winter of 2019. Results from our experiment show that female candidates who highlight more masculine traits are perceived as more agentic, less communal, and more competent, and, importantly, they do not appear to suffer from a backlash effect. Those higher in sexism also evaluate women who display these qualities as more competent, though as less warm and likable.