What effect do social welfare policies have on women's active involvement in the economy and politics? Though there is much policy and scholarly debate on a wide spectrum of socioeconomic and political outcomes of welfare spending, little research has explored the possible impact that social welfare policies have on one of the supposed major beneficiaries of such policies—women. Combining data on welfare spending in three areas—social security, health, and education—with data on women's labor force participation and share of seats in national legislatures, this article examines the extent to which welfare spending might affect women's economic and political status. The results from a panel of 97 countries for the years spanning 1990 to 2010 indicate that the government's fiscal commitment to social policies is positively related to female participation in the total labor force and national politics. The findings are robust to different model specifications, sample selection, and the use of instrumental variables. One major policy implication of the findings is that the government's fiscal commitment to key social welfare areas are likely to contribute to women's economic and political empowerment, which might in turn help address gender imbalances in the economy and political sphere.

Theories of democracy commonly assume that citizens must have a certain degree of information and factual knowledge to be able to understand the functioning of institutions, the performance of the incumbent government, and the actions of the main political actors. Political knowledge helps people to better assess their interest as individuals and as members of groups (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Moreover, governments have more incentives to be responsive when they can be held accountable, but citizens are able to hold governments accountable for their actions only when they know what governments are actually doing.

While there is much research examining gender gaps in political attitudes, there is less examining how gender gaps differ within social groups. This article helps fill that void by examining gender gaps among American Indians. Using two surveys, the initial findings suggest that among American Indians, women have a stronger American Indian identity, are more likely to support women's/compassion issues, and are more likely to be Democrats. It further finds that the gender gap in party is more likely the result of the gender gap in compassion issues than in American Indian identity. Additional analysis finds that among American Indians who prioritize their American Indian identity, the partisan gender gap is reversed, with men being significantly more likely to be Democrats. Although this study finds some similarities between the gaps among American Indians and whites, it also finds some unique gaps among American Indians. This suggests the need to look at the intersectionality of gender and social groups to fully understand the gender gaps.

Gender mainstreaming (GM) is a strategy used by governments to promote gender equality. It entails integrating gender and intersectional considerations into all aspects of policy work, including policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation. However, its success in achieving gender equality and social transformation has been limited. Drawing on implementation research and narrative analysis, this article explores the micro-level dynamics and the local actors that help shape the character and outcome of gender mainstreaming. Using narrative analysis, we explore how GM specialists within the Canadian public service make sense of their role, and we identify the strategies they use to make gender matter in policy work. By examining their stories of isolation, disempowerment, and resistance, we uncover the administrative and political forces that shape not only the “space” for gender work but also the opportunities for individual activism and resistance. These stories convey how, by engaging in these micro-level strategies, GM specialists both challenge and reinscribe, at the macro level, technocratic representations of GM and of policy work in general. We conclude with some reflections on the insights that micro-level analysis and implementation research can bring to the study of gender mainstreaming.

This article examines the relationship between urbanization and women's empowerment through the Turkish case. The article first tests statistically the overall impact of urbanization on women's empowerment by tapping into educational, economic, and political indicators at the province level. The results yield a positive relationship between urbanization and women's empowerment. We argue that these empowerment indicators demonstrate the necessary conditions of women's empowerment, yet whether these are sufficient for women to feel empowered needs to be further tested. To do so, the article utilizes an extensive original survey of 334 well-educated urban women in 43 out of 81 provinces of Turkey to examine the extent to which the results found in the quantitative section are paralleled by the actual experiences of women. The survey analysis reveals prospects and obstacles that well-educated women face in old and new urban centers. This nonrandom, purposive sample of seemingly empowered urban women shows that the barriers faced by these women would easily multiply when lower strata of society are reached. The Turkish case demonstrates that societal transformations such as urbanization have an imprint on the fates of women, yet further women's empowerment needs collective action at the political, legal, and societal levels.

The purpose of these Critical Perspectives is to consider gender gaps in politics with a specific focus on men, as opposed to the traditional focus on women. The study of gender and politics implies the gendered study of both sexes, yet very little scholarship within this large body of research has men as its primary object of study. We argue that a critical focus on men is necessary to understand the nature of male dominance, the way that male power is wielded and perpetuated, and the negative effects this has for politicians and citizens of both sexes. Reframing the question of gender and representation permits the identification of new research agendas focusing explicitly on men's dominance in politics rather than women's marginalization or underrepresentation. New questions and research areas within the field of gender and politics are invoked, and these essays will demonstrate that the study of men, masculinities, and politics is fertile ground for research, requiring much greater exploration.

Research on gender and politics has made use of Pitkin's (1967) distinction between descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation to conceptualize and understand the different facets of women's underrepresentation and misrepresentation. The corresponding overrepresentation of men has seldom been explicitly recognized in this literature. We explore what the critical study of men and masculinities could contribute to the study of different forms of representation. Researching the descriptive overrepresentation of men implies recognizing male dominance and turning our attention from the factors that constrain women from entering politics to the factors that enable and reproduce men's presence. Researching the substantive representation of men also implies investigating how men represent men and identifying whether hegemonic masculinities privilege the representation of some men while neglecting others. Finally, a study of the symbolic representation of men implies identifying and describing the masculine signals and symbols that permeate political life but remain largely invisible because they constitute the political norm. Naming them as “masculine” will facilitate a gendered analysis of political institutions, practices, and discourses that are seldom questioned. We also consider the symbolic representation of men who do not conform to hegemonic masculine ideals and are not represented descriptively.

While the same formal candidate selection rules are generally in place throughout a state, there is often intracountry variation in male descriptive overrepresentation. To explain this variation, scholars cannot focus exclusively on women (e.g., how do women respond to formal institutional opportunities?) or femininity (e.g., how do norms governing appropriate female behavior affect women's odds of being selected as a candidate?). Rather, scholars must attend to the ways that informal norms regarding masculinity operate across space and time within a country. Drawing on the insights of feminist institutionalism, this essay examines two intracountry sources of variation in candidate selection: the spatial urban-rural divide and temporal differences between first-time recruitment and renomination. While the formal candidate selection rules are uniform, informal institutions vary depending on where and when we look, leading to different levels of male overrepresentation.

Men are overrepresented in most legislatures of the world. However, in parliaments in which women reach a “critical mass” or even approach parity with men in terms of numbers, they still must contend with and adapt to the symbolic representation of men. Using the cases of the Australian and Polish parliaments, we point to the need to deconstruct the parliamentary standard by shifting the theoretical and empirical focus from women's disadvantage in politics to problematizing men's advantage and power (Eveline 1994, 1998; Murray 2014). Rather than placing the problem and solution with women, we address the practices that maintain men's unearned power, or privilege. Privilege is the “systematically conferred advantages” that individuals enjoy by virtue of their membership of a dominant social group (Bailey 1998, 109). Institutions in the form of taken-for-granted practices and gendered discourses embed a “masculine blueprint” in political institutions that legitimizes men's place as parliamentarians and privileges men, enhancing their power and advantage in the election process. By focusing on men's dominance, it becomes evident that sustaining gender inequality through practices and discourse advantages men as a group.

Progress toward gender equality in politics is striking. With the help of electoral gender quotas in more than 130 countries, women's national legislative representation more than doubled in the last 20 years. Other historically marginalized groups—racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, immigrants, and indigenous peoples—are also increasingly making their way into our parliaments. Political institutions are, then, more inclusive today than they have ever been. Yet equal representation has not been fully realized: some marginalized groups have seen a decline, and men from dominant social and economic groups—hereafter “elite men”—remain numerically dominant. Globally, there are no known cases in which elite men do not hold a disproportionately high share of positions in national elective office (Hughes 2015).

Given the predominance of men among elites, it is remarkable how little scholarship there is on the challenges of qualitative empirical work on elite men, especially work that interrogates the intersection of gender and class. We have both sought to include elite men as subjects, noting that the gender of our subjects, their social power, and our own gender performance have played a central role in defining our efficacy as researchers. Darren has researched top French corporate boards (e.g., Rosenblum and Roithmayr 2015). Janet has researched male dominance in the politics of Iceland and Russia (e.g., Johnson 2016; Johnson, Einarsdóttir, and Pétursdóttir 2013). This essay elaborates the challenges in researching elite men and explores the tactics we developed in response to the dynamic gender performances in the interviews, bringing Darren's insights as a legal scholar looking at economic elites to questions about male overrepresentation in politics.