While individual women representatives in government have been found to behave differently than men, the causal connection between the increased presence of women in elected offices and the production of women-friendly policies is tenuous at best. This study leverages the variation in women's office holding, government structures, and policy outputs found in American cities to address that puzzle. It argues that when women obtain leadership positions in municipal government and when the positions they hold have greater power relative to other municipal positions, cities will be more likely to produce policy outputs that are often associated with women's interests and needs. Utilizing an original city-level dataset and modeling women's presence as mayors and policy outputs endogenously, the results reveal that empowered female executives in municipal governments influence expenditure decisions made as part of the federal Community Development Block Grant program. The findings suggest that political scientists should consider not only the presence of an underrepresented group, but also the relative amount of power that group has when assessing the effects on substantive representation.

In modern democracies, the representation of voter interests and preferences is primarily the job of political parties and their elected officials. These patterns can, however, change when the issues that are at stake concern the interests of social groups represented by all relevant parties of a political system. In this article we focus on the behavior of female MPs in the parliament of Weimar Germany and, thus, on a parliament where legislative party discipline was very high. On the basis of a dataset containing information on the legislative voting behavior of MPs, we show that gender, even when controlling for a battery of further theoretically derived explanatory factors, had a decisive impact on the MPs' voting behavior on a law proposal to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

How do stereotypes of female candidates influence citizens' perceptions of political fraud and corruption? Because gender stereotypes characterize female politicians as more ethical, honest, and trustworthy than male politicians, there are important theoretical reasons for expecting female politicians to mitigate perceptions of fraud and corruption. Research using observational data, however, is limited in its ability to establish a causal relationship between women's involvement in politics and reduced concerns about corruption. Using a novel experimental survey design, we find that the presence of a female candidate systematically reduces the probability that individuals will express strong suspicion of election fraud in what would otherwise be considered suspicious circumstances. Results from this experiment also reveal interesting heterogeneous effects: individuals who are not influenced by shared partisanship are even more responsive to gender cues; and male respondents are more responsive to those cues than females. These findings have potential implications for women running for office, both with respect to election fraud and corruption more broadly, particularly in low-information electoral settings.

A growing body of literature focuses on the attitudes produced by women's representation. One area of particular interest is the effect of women's representation on perceptions of corruption in government. Multiple scholars have found that citizens view women in government as more trustworthy and less corrupt. Others have suggested that the link between gender and corruption is spurious or dependent upon regime characteristics. Additionally, many studies of women's effect on corruption were published prior to the widespread adoption of gender quotas, when levels of women's representation were considerably lower. We argue that the relationship between women and perceptions of corruption can be better understood by applying an integrated model of representation, which explores the effects of formal, descriptive, and substantive representation on perceptions of corruption. Using a time-series analysis of 140 countries worldwide from 1998–2011, this study finds that women's descriptive and substantive representation are correlated with lower perceptions of corruption. However, gender quotas are correlated with higher perceptions of corruption among political elites.

Much of the scholarship on the modern Civil Rights Movement (CRM) has recaptured dramatic and poignant events through eyewitness accounts and oral narratives—from letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, press releases, photographs, and documentary films that summon vivid images of fire hoses and police dogs, peaceful protestors, and violent rioters (McAdam 1982; Morris 1984; Payne 1994; Robnett 1997; Williams 1988). The conventional approach to (or master narrative of) civil rights history has focused almost exclusively on extraordinary, elite men from W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall to such notable civil rights organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—that led the fight for equal protection under the law, desegregated lunch counters, and the right to vote in local and national elections (Branch 1988, 1998, 2006; Carson 1981; Fairclough 1987; Garrow 1986; Lewis 1993; Reed 1997; Sullivan 2009). Rather than broaden and deepen our understanding of individual and collective forms of resistance, however, such an approach simplifies and distorts a more nuanced and complicated version of civil rights history in the United States. All too often people come to associate the modern CRM with celebrated heroes and a static, fixed understanding of discrimination that is less than critical of hierarchal relationships determined solely (or primarily) by a racial caste system—specifically, an era of Jim Crow when “separate but equal” accommodations were legally sanctioned by the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Far less common is an association of the modern CRM with a richer, more nuanced understanding of discrimination that is critical of hierarchal relationships determined by interlocking systems of oppression—namely, racism and sexism—experienced by forgotten heroines who similarly risked their lives and reputations for equality and justice before the law (notable exceptions being Collier-Thomas and Franklin 2001; Giddings 1984; Gilmore 1996; Ling and Monteith 2004; Olson 2001; Robnett 1997).

Scholars of marginalized groups are experts on attitudes, behaviors, practices, and institutions that resist inclusion and reproduce bias. Many scholars who study marginalization also work from first-hand experience of it. Although academic experiences of marginalization usually occur in sites of middle-class privilege, the effects can be profound. Women in the U.S. political science profession continue to be underrepresented, and women of color severely so. This sends the message to all students that women lack the capacity to be scientists. Women in academe often internalize that message and too rarely seek leadership positions. When they do, their achievements are characterized as tokenism and devalued, revealing a hostile gender climate that enables bias to flourish. That bias is reflected in salary discrepancies, resource distribution, and service responsibilities (e.g., APSA 2011; Monroe et al. 2008).

J. R. R. Tolkien once suggested that “short cuts make long delays.” While Tolkien was not talking about improving the situation of women in political science, this essay argues that those of us interested in making political science less alienating for women would do well to heed his advice.

Advocates have been striving for decades to improve the representation of women and people of color in the academy. The results in political science have been fairly limited. From 1980 to 2010, the proportion of women among white political science faculty grew from 9.6% to 24.8% (APSA 2011, 44). Even with this sizable increase, women constituted fewer than a quarter of white political scientists. Within their respective ethnoracial groups, women of color made up a greater proportion of political science faculty but remain woefully underrepresented in the profession, with only 79 Latino, 161 African American, and 117 Asian American female political science faculty nationally in 2010 (APSA 2011, 44–46). Overall, the proportion of scholars of color within political science during this period, male and female, has remained largely flat; in 2010, 88.9% of political science faculty were white. In this essay, I argue that an intersectional approach to thinking about this issue—one that acknowledges the marginalization and privilege that cut across faculty within departments and universities—raises the possibility of changing the conversation about inclusion, potentially opening up new possibilities for making substantive change within political science departments and universities.

This essay draws on insights from research into human rights activism to propose a feminist human rights account of leadership that could be applied to political science. I advance the view that the practice of leadership is one of building networks and strengthening the capacity of others to advocate for themselves and their communities. In this view, leadership leverages the political and strategic capacities made possible by relative positions of privilege and so transforms the networks, capacities, and privileges of others. Mentoring is an integral part of this activist approach to leadership. In this view, leadership and mentoring are about developing the networks that make transformation possible; they are collective and political. For illustration, I begin with insights about the importance of networks learned through a personal experience in Bangladesh and juxtapose that experience with the experience of Bangladeshi labor rights organizers before providing a more general account of two key aspects of this leadership: building networks and strengthening capacity in others.