As Women and Politics Research enters its third decade as an organized Section of the American Political Science Association, we begin the third volume of Politics & Gender, the official journal of the Section. Our goal as editors, and the mission of Politics & Gender, has been “to publish the very best work on women and politics, and on gender and politics” (I.1: 2). Across the three volumes of our editorship, we are proud to have established a journal that political scientists worldwide recognize as the standard for politics and gender scholarship. From empirical analyses of women's political representation to feminist theorizing to feminist textual analyses of U.S. security rhetoric and health-care reform, Politics & Gender has sought to publish high-quality work that ranges across methodologies, topics, subfields, and disciplines.

This work examines the role of women's organizations in the 2000 elections in Croatia in an effort to understand when and how they play a significant role in promoting democracy and, in particular, the election of female candidates. Croatia offers a crucial case for the study of gender and democratization because it challenges two significant generalizations from the comparative literature on postcommunist transitions: first, that women's organizations have been more likely to succeed in postcommunist countries where democracy has proceeded the furthest and, in particular, where ethno-nationalist conflict and ideologies are least salient; and, second, that widespread opposition to gender quotas in postcommunist countries prevented their use as a tool for promoting women's equality. What conditions were present that facilitated the effectiveness of women's organizations in Croatia in promoting their goal of electing more women? Four factors are key to explaining their success: the organizational strength and unity of women's organizations; the extent of involvement by international organizations and donors; the perceived central role of women's organizations in democratization; and, finally, the character of their alliances with political parties.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Thirteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Scripps College, June 2–5, 2005. I would like to thank Lisa Baldez, Karen Beckwith, Charlie Kenney, Carol Lilly, Andrew Halterman, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Since the 1980s, we have witnessed how the gender gap grows and shrinks in various elections; we address how the context in which the election takes place influences the size of the divide. Studying the gender gap in Senate elections allows us to look at multiple elections across time and space to determine when significant electoral gender gaps arise and when they do not. This contrasts with more traditional approaches that focus either on a single presidential election or on a single year's House or Senate elections. We demonstrate that electoral gender gaps arise from campaign-level factors (such as candidate sex, the presence of an incumbent, and the issues raised in the campaign), state-level factors (demographics and politics of the states), and the complex interaction of these factors.We would like to thank the many people who gave us helpful feedback and comments on earlier drafts of this paper, particularly Suzanna De Boef, Susan Welch, Eric Plutzer, the Gender and Politics Working Group at Penn State University, Margaret Conway, the editors of this journal, and our anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association.

In Canada, as in the United States, the postwar welfare regime recognized the citizenship of the male breadwinner while women, for the most part, remained second-class citizens. This was reflected, inter alia, in Canada's child-care policy, a federal-provincial cost-sharing arrangement that provided subsidies to low-income families able to demonstrate their need, rather than as a public service available to all those who want and need it. While this meant that the Canadian state did not guarantee the right to affordable child care, these intergovernmental arrangements also offered feminists opportunities to challenge federal policy at the provincial and local level. This article examines child-care politics in Toronto, Canada's largest city and the first one in Canada to have a municipal child-care program. It shows how, in the 1970s, Toronto began to break with the liberal assumptions that characterized its past policies. Toronto's child-care program also posed a potential challenge to the national and provincial regimes. This, however, required the movement to secure changes at the provincial and/or federal level, which it thus far has failed to do.

This study tests the hypothesis that collective descriptive representation has important benefits for strengthening and legitimizing democratic society. Specifically, we test whether increased proportions of collective female descriptive representation in the statehouse and the presence of a female state executive are important to female citizens' attitudes toward government responsiveness, or external efficacy. We hypothesize that an increase in female collective descriptive representation in the legislative and state executive branches of government will increase female citizens' external efficacy but will be unimportant to males. We pooled American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1988 to 1998 and used ordered probit techniques to test the hypothesis. In addition to our main independent variable of interest, our model includes state political culture, dyadic descriptive representation, dyadic substantive representation, sociodemographics, political participation, strength of partisanship, and electoral dummy variables as controls. Our results confirm that higher levels of collective female descriptive representation promote higher values of external efficacy for female citizens, suggesting that collective female descriptive representation has important benefits to a democratic society.An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Political Science Association's Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, August 30–September 2, 2001, and the International Society of Political Psychology, Seattle, Washington, July 1–4, 2000. We would like to thank the following people for their comments and support: Anthony Coveny, Randall Partin, and Cherie Maestas.

Where does gender express itself politically? What does gender mean, in political terms, for women? Is it possible to study gender expressed in and by individuals, across the aggregate, without dissecting the methodological and normative assumptions of (at least part of) our subfield?

In this Critical Perspectives section, Nancy Burns and Jane Junn speak to these questions from distinctly different but intersecting viewpoints. Both understand that the political meanings of gender are rooted in power and powerlessness, in “systematic disadvantage and advantage” (Burns, p. 104), and that our task as scholars is to explicate “when social and political contexts can make gender relevant” (p. 105). Both scholars speak primarily to gender in these essays, but also reflect on race as well.

Nancy Burns considers gender in the aggregate and in the individual, and maps how the relationship between the two might be explicated through their interaction with a theorized political context. She delineates a framework for understanding when and under what conditions “politics enables gender to shape individuals' political actions and public opinions” (p. 119). Using Burns's essay as a starting point, Jane Junn cautions us that such a project will face inherent difficulties that result from the conjunction of methodology and normative assumptions that underpin the kind of research Burns advocates. Conceptions about the individual and assumptions of “equality of agency among individuals” (p. 125), Junn argues, not only obscure political inequalities imbedded in gender but also produce unintended consequences.

The literature on gender and political action comes in two forms—one that is aggregate, sometimes institutional, and often centered historically, and one that is individual and largely focused on the here and now. We care about both, of course—about the social organization and deployment of gender and about what gender means in individual lives. In this essay, I argue that we should encourage these two kinds of analysis to engage each other more intimately. This engagement would give political scientists the tools to say more about when, for whom, and for which outcomes gender matters. The conversation would give us better ways to understand how context makes gender relevant.Kate Gallagher provided incredibly thoughtful research assistance for this essay. Support for her work was provided by the Center for Political Studies at Michigan and by the Miller Professorship. I want to thank Jane Junn for a fabulous conversation about how to improve the essay. Lisa Baldez, Karen Beckwith, and Christina Wolbrecht provided important, critical feedback. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences gave me the space in my life—and the amazing library staff—to finish the essay. Of course, all of the mistakes and omissions are mine.

In “Gender in the Aggregate, Gender in the Individual, Gender and Political Action,” Nancy Burns makes the compelling argument to integrate individual- and aggregate-level perspectives in the study of gendered political action. She issues a call for action for the two to assess similarities and differences in approaches, identify unique contributions and weaknesses, and move forward to better understand gender and political action. Beyond this general goal is an ambitious effort to build a theory of politicized context around gender in order to stake out a position for political science to contribute to our understanding of women in action. In this regard, her ambitions are to identify mechanisms that work to strengthen normative goals of enhancing equality and dignity in women's lives, and in politics more generally.For helpful comments, I thank Nadia Brown, Sue Carroll, Mary Hawkesworth, Hannah Holden, Anna Mitchell, Kira Sanbonmatsu, participants at the conference on Political Women and American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame in May 2006, and the editors of Politics & Gender.

The Gender of Democracy: Citizenship and Gendered Subjectivity. By Maro Pantelidou Maloutas. London and New York: Routledge. 2006. 208 pp. $130.00.

In this theoretically provocative (and action-inspiring) study of the relationship between gender and democracy, Maro Pantelidou Maloutas makes an important contribution to both feminist theory and democratic theory. She emphasizes that democracy's emancipatory potential is substantially inhibited by the existing system of dichotomous gender relations. The requisite for us is to deconstruct rather than simply to modernize gender roles (whether through quotas or parity) which is tantamount to a “modernization of oppression” (p. 55).

Feminist Inquiry: From Political Conviction to Methodological Innovation. By Mary Hawkesworth. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press. 2006. 286 pp. $25.95.

In this book, Mary Hawkesworth draws together into an integrated discussion an immense amount of the complex, interdisciplinary research on methods and epistemology accomplished in the past few decades by feminist scholars.

Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments: Women and Elected Office in Contemporary Western Europe. By Miki Caul Kittilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2006. 190 pp. $64.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This is an ambitious book that takes a comprehensive and multimethod approach to understanding the question of women's participation in parliaments. Miki Caul Kittilson proposes a gendered-institutions argument that focuses on political parties as the key mechanism for increases in women's parliamentary representation. She moves away from supply arguments that place the onus on women to run by instead focusing on how parties can be transformed to encourage women to run. She argues that women will be most effective in their efforts to gain a political foothold where they “recognize favorable conditions within the party and party system, and where they devise context-contingent strategies for inclusion” (p. 2).

Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism. By Joan Wallach Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. 2005. 184 pp. $55.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

French women were granted full political rights in 1944, yet 50 years later, they accounted for only 6% of the members of the national assembly. In her book, Joan Scott discusses the constitutional reform adopted in 2000 to answer this chronic underrepresentation of women. Rather than engaging philosophical arguments, Scott adopts the perspective of an “historian of the present” (p. ix). She traces the movement for parité from its inception in the late 1980s among feminist groups and European bodies to the adoption of the law, after the movement lost much of its original trenchancy along its transposition into mainstream political discourse.