This article advances and tests an original theory of a “feminine homestyle” to explain how female legislators develop relationships with constituents that both mitigate the potential for gendered biases and fulfill the communal goals that motivate women to run for political office. We use an original audit study that tests legislator responsiveness to direct email communication. We show that female lawmakers are more responsive to constituent communication and more likely to display compassion and empathy in responses compared with male legislators; but we also find important differences in women’s responsiveness across the race and ethnicity. Further, we find that responsive female lawmakers can change the behaviors of their male counterparts by creating stronger norms of responsiveness within legislative institutions. Our findings have important downstream implications for democratic accountability among voters and illustrate how female lawmakers substantively represent through direct communication with constituents.

Many studies have investigated why countries adopt gender quotas for their elections. In this article, we answer a different question: why do political parties comply with gender quotas when the costs of noncompliance are absent or minimal? To answer this question, we analyze data from 1,600 party lists and 106 parties competing across 121 cities in the 2015 municipal elections in Ukraine. Our subnational approach tests whether contextual factors flagged by the broader gender literature explain variation in compliance across localities. The results of our models support our contention that Ukrainian political parties behaved strategically in terms of nominations and quota compliance. We find that urbanization and female incumbency fueled quota compliance. Parties, however, were less likely to comply with quotas in cities with more Ukrainian speakers. We suggest that the politics of memory explain this outcome, as Ukrainian speakers are more likely to remember of the costs of Soviet rule.

Electoral gender quotas remain contentious among many publics. One hurdle is the “principle-policy puzzle”: those who espouse gender egalitarianism may nevertheless oppose affirmative action measures because of disagreements about their necessity and worries about government overreach. Based on an original survey in Japan, where women’s underrepresentation is particularly pronounced, we identify two dimensions that drive attitudes toward quotas. First, modern sexism matters: those who attribute underrepresentation to women’s disinterest or who think that quotas will increase the number of unqualified women candidates are less likely to support quotas. Second, appropriateness matters: those who oppose government intervention in gender affairs are less likely to support quotas. Crucially, these differences hold even among those who desire more women in parliament. Our results suggest that public acceptance of quotas depends more on correcting misperceptions about structural gender barriers and the benign consequences of quotas (“policy”), rather than encouraging people to prefer more women in parliament (“principle”).

The Colombian peace process was internationally celebrated for its unprecedented focus on women's experiences of war, but the everyday violence women that may face in their homes was not acknowledged. This article explores the links between exposure to local armed conflict violence and individual women's experiences of intimate partner violence. I combine pooled nationally representative data on individual women's experiences of intimate partner violence with information about the intensity of conflict during 2004–16. Results of fixed-effects linear probability models show that conflict was generally linked to a slightly elevated risk of women experiencing emotional, physical, and sexual violence perpetrated by their partner. Among women who had experienced intimate partner violence, conflict was related to an increased probability of being partnered at interview, which could reflect women staying in abusive relationships because conflict normalizes violence or increases women's reluctance to leave those relationships.

Moral rhetoric presents a strategic dilemma for female politicians, who must navigate stereotypes while appealing to copartisan voters. In this article, we investigate how gender shapes elite moral rhetoric given the influence of partisanship, ideology, gender stereotypes, and moral psychology. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we examine how female and male representatives differ in their emphasis on the five foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and purity. Using the Moral Foundations Dictionary, we analyze a corpus of 2.23 million tweets by U.S. Congress members between 2013 and 2021. We find that female representatives are more likely to emphasize care and less likely to emphasize authority and loyalty than their male peers. However, when subsetting by party, we find that gender effects are most pronounced among Democrats and largely negligible among Republicans. These findings offer insight into the rhetorical dynamics of political leadership at the intersection of gender and partisan identities.

Abortion is a divisive issue in American politics. Studies analyzing attitudes toward abortion have found that abortion attitudes are relatively stable over time compared with attitudes on other issues and that religiosity and partisanship are key factors influencing abortion attitudes. Recent research has also found a role for benevolent sexism in abortion attitudes. This article expands on the literature and examines the role of hostile sexism—dislike toward women who are seen as usurping men’s authority—in attitudes about abortion in the United States. Using data from the 2012, 2016, and 2020 American National Election Studies, we find that hostile sexism is significantly related to abortion attitudes, even after controlling for theoretically relevant covariates such as partisanship, ideology, religiosity, and sociodemographic variables. As hostile sexism increases, people are more likely to express pro-life attitudes rather than pro-choice attitudes.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have increased their promotion of women in public life. The expansion of women's rights in these states functions as a central policy tool to stimulate modernization processes. This article investigates how the Gulf governments steer women's empowerment through the press. Regulated by the state, media outlets in GCC countries primarily serve to affirm and amplify the legitimacy of the government. Focusing on 15 English-language newspapers from 2008 to 2017, this article analyzes the degree to which women's empowerment in various arenas of society was addressed and the valence with which it was reported. Moreover, it analyzes whether foreign and domestic news were addressed differently. The article finds that once nondemocracies focus on women's rights, positive media portrayals, especially of domestic news, become central for legitimizing both women's empowerment and the regime. The article contributes to the growing literature on women's rights legislation and the state-media nexus in autocracies.

The topic of gender blindness is increasingly gaining the attention of researchers. Even in fields that do not commonly engage with gender, gender blindness has been recognized as a factor that has potential to limit the validity of research findings. This article explores the prevalence and implications of gender blindness in quantitative research for political science outcomes. We first reanalyze three articles recently published in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) to illustrate the impact of gender blindness on quantitative research. Next, we classify all articles with quantitative methodology published in the AJPS in 2018 and 2019 by the degree of gender blindness in the research design. Our findings demonstrate how gender blindness impacts outcomes and estimate its prevalence in political science. They show that accounting for gender yields more accurate results and facilitates a better understanding of political behavior and phenomena.

Do voters rely on gendered stereotypes when evaluating candidates in Brazil? The literature shows that gendered stereotypes about politicians can result in women being consistently judged as unfit for office. This article investigates the influence of gendered stereotypes on voters’ preferences in a context that combines severe female underrepresentation and incentives for voters to rely on politicians’ personal attributes. In two survey experiments, I identify the gendered stereotypes of politicians in Brazil and estimate how they influence voters’ behavior toward hypothetical candidates who do or do not comply with those stereotypes. The findings suggest that voters hold positive stereotypes of women and a broad pro-female bias.

American political activism has surged recently among young citizens, particularly among women and people of color. At the same time, record numbers of women and minority candidates have been running for office. Does seeing more diverse candidates in terms of age, gender, and race propel more interest in political engagement among Generation Z, particularly women? Using a survey experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey of Generation Z citizens, we present respondents with Democratic politicians who vary based on these three criteria. Women who identify strongly with their gender express greater political engagement when presented with any candidate who does not fit the stereotypical image of a politician (older, white, male). They are spurred not only by role models who represent them descriptively, but by all politicians belonging to historically marginalized groups. These effects, which are not specific to just Democratic women, provide insights that can inform engagement efforts targeting younger Americans.

The level of women’s parliamentary representation often increases after armed conflict, but do voters in postwar societies actually prefer female electoral candidates? We answer this question by analyzing a unique data set containing information on nearly 7,000 candidates running in three elections with preferential voting in postwar Croatia. Our analysis demonstrates that voters’ gender bias is conditional on the local electorate’s ideology and exposure to war violence, with voters of right-wing parties and voters in areas more affected by war violence being more biased against female candidates. These effects of ideology and exposure to war violence also exhibit a strong interactive relationship, suggesting that bias against women is strongest among right-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence and reversed among left-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence. Our findings highlight the need to better understand the relationship between gender, ideology, and violence in postconflict societies.

When a party selects an out lesbian as its leader, do women and LGBT people evaluate that leader more positively? And do they become more likely to vote for that party? We answer these questions using the case of Kathleen Wynne, premier of Ontario, Canada, from 2013 to 2018. We draw on four large-sample surveys conducted by Ipsos before and after the 2011 and 2014 Ontario elections. We compare shifts in best premier choice and vote choice among non-LGBT men, non-LGBT women, LGBT men, and LGBT women from 2011 to 2014. We find gender and LGBT affinity in leader evaluations. However, we find that only non-LGBT women and LGBT men were more likely to vote Liberal after Wynne became leader. This article contributes to research on affinity by examining LGBT affinity in a real-world election and the intersection of gender and LGBT affinity.

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.

Gender and politics scholars are increasingly making appeals to ethnographic methodology to bring important contributions to understand the reproduction of gender, gender hierarchies, gendered relations, and their redress in parliamentary settings. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in the U.K. House of Commons and the European Parliament and finds distinctive gendered cultures and norms in debating and working parliaments. Focusing on one dimension of this distinction—the parliamentary debating chamber—the article argues that parliamentary ethnography provides novel empirical insights into this conceptual distinction and into empirical understandings of gendered debating and working parliaments. While parliamentary ethnography is a fruitful innovation, the article discusses the drawbacks of this methodology and provides feminist reflection on ways to make it more accessible.

While female representation in the top diplomatic circles was almost nonexistent during the Czechoslovak era, the number of female diplomats in the Czech Republic has steadily increased since the fall of the state-socialist regime. Women are currently solidly represented in the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), but very few (14%) reach highest diplomatic positions. This study examines the main challenges that influence the careers of top diplomats using quantitative and qualitative data, including official statistics and documents of the Czech MFA and interviews with top diplomats and officials. The results indicate that work-family conflicts are the main challenge for all diplomats. However, women are apparently affected more disproportionately because of the existing “double burden” and a specific “concept of motherhood” vested in a deeply essentialist understanding of gender roles. These barriers have origins at the personal, institutional, and state levels that are strongly interrelated and historically and politically path dependent.

Although mayors can have important impacts on citizens’ daily lives, local politics remains understudied, especially compared with national and regional politics. This study focuses on Canadian mayors’ digital political gender performance—or self-presentation—on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and the context in which this gendered performance arises. Overall, results confirm that mayors’ gendered performances are on a continuum rather than binary. Results from a visual content analysis of nine Canadian mayors’ social media accounts show that, broadly speaking, women mayors gravitate toward congruent, mixed gendered performances and avoidance strategies, whereas men mayors also display mixed performance of their gender, while more freely exploring congruent and incongruent approaches to gendered stereotypes. Additionally, semistructured interviews with these mayors show that women mayors still work under added constraints because of their gender, which translates into comments on their appearance, attitude, and lifestyle choices; increased aggression and lack of respect; and a generally greater mental load.

Decentralized finance, including cryptocurrency and other blockchain-based applications, promises participants benefits such as financial freedom, security, privacy, and wealth accumulation. More recently, it has also offered the promise of participation, lowering financial barriers, and empowerment—especially to women, the poor, and those residing in the Global South. I argue that the rise of decentralized finance as an alternative development platform is explicitly gendered and calls for feminist analysis. I discuss how cryptocurrency-based approaches to development rest on foundations that are gendered, interacting with hierarchies of race/ethnicity and class. I also explore how they are part of a lineage of neoliberalism, leveraging neoliberal beliefs about entrepreneurialism, financial inclusion, and gender roles. The discussion further introduces the concept of neolibertarianism as an extension of neoliberal logics that advocates for bypassing states entirely in favor of private actors. The current analysis compares this new model of decentralized finance to similarly problematic development trends and assesses how it has—as of yet—failed to deliver on the promises of participation, lowering financial barriers, and empowerment. This analysis concludes with a call to action for feminist and critical scholars, encouraging further work on the topic.

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.

Parliaments are still often criticized for being gendered—that is, for maintaining problematic inequalities between male and female officeholders. While research highlights how female members of parliament (MPs) take the floor less often than men, especially during debates on “hard” policy domains, much remains unknown about the role that political parties play in fostering such differences. Drawing on a novel data set on the use of parliamentary questions in Belgium (N = 180,783), this article examines gendered patterns in the substantive focus of MPs’ parliamentary work. It confirms that differences in the issue concentrations of male and female MPs exist, but they are larger when access to the floor is more restricted and party control is stronger. Our findings yield important insights into the gendered side effects of parliamentary procedure and shed some light on the “choice versus coercion” controversy with regard to women's substantive focus of parliamentary work.

Politics is increasingly dominated by crises, from pandemics to extreme weather events. These Critical Perspectives essays analyze crises’ gendered implications by focusing on their consequences for women’s descriptive and substantive representation. Covering multiple kinds of crises, including large-scale protests, climate shocks, and war and revolution, the contributions reveal three factors shaping both the theoretical conceptualization and empirical analysis of crisis and women’s representation: (1) the type of crisis, (2) the actors influenced by the crisis, and (3) the aftermath of the crisis. Together, the contributors urge scholars to “think crisis, think gender” far beyond the supply of and demand for women leaders.