Cultural explanations are frequent in social science research. In gender studies, they are especially common in cross-country comparative research that attempts to explain variations in everyday life situations for women and men. A noticeable example is found in the book Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World, by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2003). Inglehart and Norris construct a gender-equality scale from measurements on attitudes among citizens regarding women as political leaders, women's professional and educational rights, and women's traditional role as mother. The results show that Finland, Sweden, West Germany, Canada, and Norway are the countries most influenced by egalitarian values. At the other end of the spectrum countries like Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Jordan are found (p. 33). The authors demonstrate that egalitarian values are systematically related to the actual conditions of women's and men's lives. They conclude that modernization underpins cultural change, that is, attitudinal change from traditional to gender-equal values, and that these cultural changes have major impact on gender-equality processes.

The recent push for more women parliamentarians around the world via positive action measures such as gender quotas naturally begs the question of whether the increased descriptive representation of women in parliament is making a substantive difference, in terms of the types of policies passed, behavioral norms, and procedures. How does the substantive representation of women take place? One way of measuring gendered impacts in politics is to look at the participation of Members of Parliament (MPs) in formal, parliamentary debate on key policy issues. It is reasonable to assume that one (though certainly not the only) measure of a good MP is his or her ability to contribute his or her voice and thoughts to public policy debates in parliament. Furthermore, if we consider women MPs representative of women in particular as a marginalized group, making their voices heard in parliamentary debates is perhaps one of the best ways of acting for women. As Melissa Williams (1998, 138) argues, the unique voice of women is a necessary component for women's political equality:

When Hillary Clinton announced her presidential candidacy, questions about the role of gender in presidential politics immediately surfaced. Would gender stereotyping and sexism pervade the electoral environment? Would the media treat Clinton differently than her competitors in the Democratic primary field? Would Clinton's candidacy mobilize women of all types, simply by virtue of its historic nature? And when Clinton lost the Democratic nomination, new questions quickly arose. Was America just not ready to elect a female president? To what extent did Bill Clinton account for Senator Clinton's successes and failures? How would the 18 million women and men who cast their ballots for Clinton vote in the general election? With so many interesting unknowns, political scientists will likely spend the next several years examining Hillary Clinton's campaign and assessing the extent to which her sex affected her experiences and contributed to her primary loss.

The earliest political behavior researchers documented the powerful effects of group attachments and other socioeconomic factors on vote choice and partisan identification in the 1940s and 1950s (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960). Yet, research interest in the group-based origins of political behavior has waxed and waned in the intervening decades (Huddy 2003). The existence of both an African-American and female frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 provides an opportunity to consider the contemporary electoral consequences of in-group loyalties and out-group antipathies. We take advantage of select survey and poll data collected during the 2008 Democratic primaries to evaluate the power of gender and race as both positive and negative influences on voter calculus in an election in which the two major candidates were differentiated less by their issue positions and beliefs than by their skin color and gender.

Most will agree that scholars of political science will examine the two-year cycle of this American presidential election for generations to come. The essays in this symposium are “first reads,” and due to time and space constraints can only identify a handful of trends. Suffice it to say that Senator Hillary Clinton and Governor Sarah Palin's candidacies are a boon to women and politics scholars, offering a wide swath of research questions and data to mine. The use of gender as an analytical category (Hawkesworth 2006; Scott 1986) will enhance examinations of the vast difference in Clinton's and Palin's ideologies, candidacies, and gendered performances in a way that illuminates, rather than obscures, the ideological diversity among women in the United States (see Schreiber 2008). Yet the deep attention paid to Clinton and Palin has so far focused on gender despite the candidates' own allusions to race and class identities as complicating factors in their gendered self-presentations. To focus solely on their positions as female candidates obscures some important macro-level questions about the 2008 election as a watershed moment, whether the focus is on “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” or the shift in target voters from soccer moms into hockey moms.

Race and gender have never been more visible on the national political stage than during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, particularly during the months when Democratic Party rivals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled in the party's state nomination caucuses and primaries. Clinton stood in for gender, representing all women, while Obama took his place in the category of race, standing in for all people of color. The success of these candidates and the addition of Sarah Palin as vice presidential nominee on the Republican ticket was a source of pride for many women and minority Americans. The “default” category for presidential candidates—the white male—had finally been displaced from the top of the ticket on the Democratic side and from the second in command for the Republicans.