In recent decades, scholars have documented remarkable changes in women's political representation around the world. At present, however, researchers are ill-equipped to explain these changes in women's representation in politics. In this article, we introduce a broad theoretical framework for reorienting existing explanations of women's formal political representation to account for change over time. We conceptualize stasis and growth in women's political representation as the balance between forces of resistance and forces for change. We also classify forces by timing, distinguishing among those that are continuous, are episodic, and have originated from critical periods. Using data on women in national legislatures from 1945 to 2003, we find that longitudinal forces combine to produce four common trajectories of women's political representation across time. We also discuss how various approaches, including event history analysis, latent growth curve models, and the focused ethnographic revisit, are well suited for modeling the different types of forces that combine to produce these trajectories. Overall, we argue that implementing a longitudinal framework for understanding women's political representation has the power both to alter the way we think about established findings and to suggest new theories for empirical evaluation.

Economic, cultural, and political opportunity structures have been separately shown to facilitate and constrain abortion rights. We examine two central and related questions: First, which factors explain liberalization of different types of abortion laws? Second, which factor or set of factors is the most important in explaining abortion laws? The cross-national literature suggests a three-pronged explanation for the existence of abortion rights, including politics, economics, and culture. We parse these out into the structural and empowerment components of each, and posit a theory of rights in which empowerment factors are at least as important, if not more important, for explaining change than structural factors. To test this, we examine the impact of these components on the liberalization of abortion rights globally utilizing a distributed lag model. We find that an empowerment approach explains the liberalization of abortion laws better than a structural approach in terms of politics, but that a structural approach is a better predictor in terms of culture, and that both empowerment and structural factors are important predictors when economic factors are taken into account. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for understanding policy change and human rights on a global scale.

The pipeline theory predicts that women serving in lower levels of political office will leverage political resources and experience gained at those levels to advance to higher office. On the basis of this theory, several prominent scholars have predicted that the election of increasing numbers of women to state legislatures will result in proportionate increases in women's representation in Congress. This study analyzes patterns of congressional advancement among state legislators in five states and finds that female state legislators are less likely to advance to Congress than their male colleagues. There are gender-related differences in the occupational backgrounds and family situations that hinder the advancement of female state legislators to Congress. In addition, female legislators are older and less likely to have a background in the “springboard” professions of business or law. Given these findings, the pipeline theory should be refined to better account for the impact of gender-based differences on congressional advancement.

Iris Marion Young was a fighter for justice and against oppression. A strong commitment, a commitment there as long as any of us had known her, fueled her writing and her activism. Her feminism was part of that commitment to justice. Her attention and sensitivity to the oppression of others was informed by an acute eye to the ways she herself—and all women—have to face the threats of economic exploitation, social marginalization, powerlessness, cultural hegemony, and systematic violence.

Iris Young was a wide-ranging political and social theorist whose works transformed the study of democratic theory, theories of justice, multiculturalism, nationalism, and group rights, among others—all of this in addition to her enormous contribution to feminist theory. Young left not only specific substantive legacies but also her method as a critical social theorist: She sought to undertake projects that helped make sense of the claims and analyses made by progressive social movements, including feminist movements, by providing a philosophical grounding for those claims and analyses. She trained her critical eye on political and social institutions, aiming to expose relations of domination and other injustices.

How do we make sense of the contradictory claims embedded in these two views articulated by the same scholar over a 15-year interval? Is the mature feminist philosopher writing in the leading journal of feminist scholarship in 1994 repudiating the neophyte socialist feminist who published in Socialist Review? Are we glimpsing a familiar feminist trajectory from Marxism to socialist feminism to poststructuralism? Do these two claims represent a discursive shift in how one writes feminist theory or a change in philosophical views?

In this brief contribution, we highlight some of the ways Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference has served as both a touchstone and a challenge to feminist political theorists struggling to deal with the complexities of “equality” and community. We look briefly at three seemingly different cases, showing how Young's critique of impartiality in this book helps to illuminate what is wrong with the recent Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. It also helps us clarify our thinking about how to remedy unequal access to reproductive technologies and shows how the recognition of group difference is an important counterweight to a false universality.

In 1990, the same year Iris Marion Young published Justice and the Politics of Difference, she also published a volume of essays called Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. The title essay in this volume, along with several others in the same volume, explores a range of women's embodied and sentient experiences, using a style of phenomenology explicitly indebted to the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

I would like to begin with an observation about Iris Marion Young's legacy. She has set us very high standards. Her approach to justice was far from the Rawlsian notion that the way to proceed is to consider what principles we would agree to if we were in some ideal, hypothetical situation. She was concerned with the here and now: What does justice ask of us in a very unequal, unjust, and hardly democratic world? She insisted that justice has exacting requirements. She questioned “the common intuition that the moral claims of justice ought not to be too demanding on individuals” (2004, 383). As members of the privileged rich part of the world's population, we have a responsibility to do all that we can to further justice, but she also argued that the oppressed too should do whatever they could. She wanted us to get out of our academic offices, at least sometimes, into the real world—and, unusually, she did so. She practised what she preached.