Persistent gender inequalities in internal political efficacy have traditionally been attributed to gender differences in resources. This article complements the resource model by focusing on how gendered political socialization occurs during citizenship education and how citizenship education might mitigate, reproduce, or intensify inequalities. Based on multilevel models on a 2016 survey dataset (3898 students across 150 schools) of Belgian senior high school students, we show that citizenship education increases internal political efficacy for both male and female students. However, we also find that citizenship education intensifies inequalities since male students gain more from it than female students, especially in schools with a conservative gender role culture. Our results indicate that the influence of citizenship education depends on the gendered school context in which it is offered. In this respect, citizenship education risks intensifying rather than mitigating gender inequalities.

This article investigates legislators’ willingness to talk about gender and women during policy making discussions, asking whether it is conditional on their sex or partisanship in environments where party discipline does not constrain their speech. The Canadian Senate offers a case of a legislature with low or absent party discipline. A quantitative content analysis of nearly 1,000 Senate committee meetings confirms that sex is a primary indicator of legislators’ inclination to talk about gender and women. Moreover, women senators who sit on committees with a critical mass of women members (30% or greater) are more likely to talk about gender and women, making the case for the importance of women’s descriptive representation. Partisanship and independence had no significant effect on senators’ propensity to discuss women. The findings suggest that partisanship does not constrain legislators’ representation of women in environments with low party discipline.

This study draws together theories of women’s substantive representation and research on politicians’ knowledge of constituent preferences. We ask whether politicians are better at predicting their constituents’ policy preferences when they share the same gender. In doing so, we contribute to knowledge about the mechanisms underlying substantive representation. Using original surveys of 3,750 Canadians and 867 elected politicians, we test whether politicians correctly perceive gender gaps in their constituents’ policy preferences and whether women politicians are better at correctly identifying the policy preferences of women constituents. Contrary to expectations from previous research, we do not find elected women to be better at predicting the preferences of women constituents. Instead, we find that all politicians — regardless of their gender — perform better when predicting women’s policy preferences and worse when predicting men’s preferences. The gender of the constituent matters more than the gender of the politician.

When the analytical lens of intersectionality was first applied to descriptive representation, it documented the increased level of disadvantage for those belonging to more than one underrepresented group. Although ethnic minority women have been slow to benefit from drives to boost ethnic minority or women’s representation, increasingly, political parties seeking to diversify see them as “ticking two boxes,” resulting in a new positive story of relative representational success in many countries and legislatures. However, we argue that the two narratives coexist: intersectional group membership mars the experience of ethnic minority women politicians despite their increased electoral success. Conceptualizing intersectional disadvantage beyond examining differential outcomes, we focus instead on how the mechanisms leading to those outcomes are experienced by ethnic minority women local councillors, from their selection to their working conditions and extra representative burdens. Using 85 interviews with ethnic minority women and men UK local councillors, we demonstrate how gender and racial inequalities leave ethnic minority women fighting two (or more) battles.

Advocates of gender quotas emphasize their transformative potential for women’s political participation. Yet evidence on the symbolic effects of quotas remains inconclusive, with some studies uncovering significant backlash after implementation. Although elite resistance to quotas has been posited as an explanation, the underlying mechanisms generating negative effects remain underexplored. This study proposes the utilization of “moral panic” by elites as a mechanism of resistance. By leveraging their media influence and employing conservative moral rhetoric, elites engineer moral panic, framing women’s political engagement as detrimental to social order and gender hierarchies. Such panic aims to incite public opposition and rationalize elite resistance to progressive changes. Notably, this tactic is more prevalent in countries with reserved-seat quotas, where elites possess limited control over electoral outcomes. Using an original dataset encompassing politician names and genders, I analyze over 150,000 news articles from 2000 to 2021 across 10 sub-Saharan African countries. The findings indicate that quota-induced gains in women’s representation are followed by significant increases in conservative ethical language in news coverage of women politicians, particularly in countries with reserved-seat quotas. These findings bear important implications for gender equality in politics and shed light on the dynamics of backlash after quota implementation.

The gender and politics literature offers diverse views on the causes of gendered practices and the best methodologies for studying them. This article advances efforts to take stock of and systematize this diversity by grounding the feminist institutionalist perspective in critical realism. The article posits that gendered institutions are real entities with independent powers, while also emphasizing the crucial role that human ideas play in upholding and contesting gendered practices. To faithfully capture gendered institutions and their relationship with human agency, the article promotes the use of the abductive-retroductive research design. This approach allows feminist institutionalist scholars to construct and test multiple competing theories about gendered institutions, drawing from various empirical manifestations of institutional power. These expressions range from observable actions to codified rules, socially shared norms, and other subtle discourses. By shedding light on the principles at the heart of realist-oriented feminist research, this work paves the way for a more standardized and transparent approach to feminist inquiries.

We examine cultural and ideological barriers to gender equality in a young democracy, Indonesia, where women’s political representation has increased slowly since democratization, but where survey results point to declining support for women’s political leadership. In both country and comparative literature, the effect of ideological factors—including religion—on voter support for women candidates is contested. Using results of a nationally representative survey, we group respondents according to a “political patriarchy” index. We find that being a Muslim is a strong predictor of holding patriarchal attitudes; university education is associated with gender-egalitarian views. Patriarchal views, in turn, are associated with opposition to increasing Indonesia’s gender quota and with lower levels of self-reported voting for female candidates. Our findings suggest that patriarchal attitudes drive both policy preferences and voter behavior. We conclude that Indonesia’s recent conservative Islamic turn likely underpins widespread—and increasing—opposition to gender equality in politics.

We apply an intersectional framework to explore how connections to marginalized communities interact with candidate demographics to shape vote choice in U.S. politics. In an original experiment manipulating candidates’ race, gender, sexuality, and endorsements, we show that endorsements by organizations advocating for marginalized communities shape voter evaluations to the same, if not greater, degree as candidate demographics. Moreover, the effects are particularly pronounced for candidates receiving an endorsement from an LGBT advocacy organization. Attitudes toward marginalized communities are mapped onto candidates with ties to those communities, whether the candidate is a member or not; we call this process associational affect. Identity has a complex role in shaping vote choice, and, absent an investigation of power and interlocking social hierarchies, it alone is insufficient to explain vote choice.

Systems of state decorations have often been overlooked by political scientists. However, they are highly indicative of dominant social norms and power differentials. While historical research has highlighted gender disparities in award bestowals in individual countries, comparative perspectives and cross-national analyses are still missing. This article provides the most comprehensive comparative analysis of the gender gap in state decorations. Using an original data set of all 11,559 recipients of civil awards in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from 1994 to 2020, it shows that women received significantly fewer awards than men across the three countries, with only moderate progress over time. Even where women and men were recognized in equal numbers, women remained underrepresented among higher classes of awards and were more likely to be recognized for achievements in stereotypically feminine fields. Our findings contribute to research on gendered institutions and highlight the usefulness of award bestowals as an indicator of sociopolitical phenomena.

Bringing home federal spending projects to the district is a common reelection strategy for members of the U.S. Congress, and congresswomen tend to outperform congressmen in securing district spending. However, for legislators to turn distributive benefits into higher approval and electoral rewards, constituents must recognize that public spending has taken place in their community and attribute credit to the correct public official. I theorize that congresswomen face a gender bias when claiming credit for federal projects, and I test this theory through an online survey experiment. Contrary to expectations, I find no evidence that legislator gender influences the public’s reaction to congressional credit claims, indicating that congresswomen can effectively use distributive politics to counter gendered vulnerability in the U.S. Congress. This research advances the literature on gender and politics by investigating whether a gender bias in credit claiming prevents congresswomen from turning their representational efforts into electoral capital.

Female attorneys at the U.S. Supreme Court are less successful than male attorneys under some conditions because of gender norms, implicit expectations about how men and women should act. While previous work has found that women are more successful when they use more emotional language at oral arguments, gender norms are context sensitive. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted perhaps the most radical contextual shift in Supreme Court history: freewheeling in-person arguments were replaced with turn-based teleconference arguments. This change altered judicial decision-making and, I argue, justices’ assessments of attorneys’ gender performance. Using quantitative textual analysis of oral arguments, I demonstrate that justices implicitly evaluate gender performance with different metrics in each modality. Gender-normative levels of emotional language predict success in both formats. Function words, however, only predict success in teleconference arguments. Given gender’s salience at the Supreme Court and in broader society, my findings prompt questions about the extent to which women can substantively impact case law.

We investigate the gender gap in issue attention among members of parliament (MPs) by applying automated text analytic techniques to a novel data set on Italian parliamentary speeches over a remarkably long period (1948–2020). We detect a gendered specialization across issues that tends to disappear as women’s shares in parliamentary groups increase. We then investigate whether women’s access to previously male-owned issues brings with it a different agenda, operationalized as a different vocabulary. We detect a U-shaped pattern: language gender specificity is high when female MPs are tokens in parliamentary groups with a large preponderance of men; it decreases when their shares start increasing and grows again when they constitute a considerable minority. We argue that this pattern is consistent with the theory of tokenism, and it is produced by the interlinkage of commitment to shared norms and the distribution of “activation thresholds” among female MPs.

To advocate for restrictive immigration policies, conservative U.S. politicians have advanced a narrative that Latino immigrants commit violent crimes against White women. This framing of immigrant threat builds on a long history of similar anti-Black discourse and activates racialized ideas about protecting femininity. I demonstrate how the identities of purported victims of immigrant crime connect attitudes about immigration with benevolent sexism—a superficially positive, protective attitude toward particular types of women. An original survey experiment shows that benevolent sexism is activated when victims of immigrant crime are White women. Using nationally representative survey data, I show that the benevolent face of sexism has a notable impact on the immigration attitudes of White Americans, particularly when it comes to the protectionist policy of policing of the U.S.-Mexico border.

This article offers an innovative way of understanding gender balance in parliaments. Motivated by research documenting how newcomers are disadvantaged during their first term in office, while senior members enjoy certain privileges, we want to find out how common women are among senior members of parliaments. We launch an institutional approach comprising three seniority measures to study gender gaps in political endurance to find out whether, where, and when men are more likely than women to be parliamentary seniors. Our analysis using data from seven countries in Western Europe and two countries in North America (1965–2020) shows very high gender gaps across the three measures. Thus, despite an increased level of female representation, women still constitute a small part of the exclusive group of senior members of parliament. Our findings extend the research documenting that women and men largely have equally long parliamentary careers, emphasizing the need to understand gender balance in multidimensional terms.

In the United States, Black women have been touted as the saving grace of the Democratic Party. Using data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, a cooperative, user-driven data set that provides a large and diverse sample of racial and ethnic groups in the United States, we develop a deeper understanding of the role of partisanship and civic duty in Black women’s support for Hillary Clinton and their political participation. We take an intersectional approach and examine Black women’s politics alongside that of their white female and Black male counterparts. We find that Black women are motivated by civic duty to participate in elections, whereas civic duty does not motivate Black men and white women.

Does information about the way victims of gender-based violence (GBV) are treated by the police influence evaluations of government policies to combat gender-based violence? I theorize that because most citizens have incomplete information about such policies, information about procedural fairness should be given more weight when forming evaluations of the government’s performance in this domain. Using original experiments embedded in public opinion surveys collected from Brazil, I find that information about procedural unfairness powerfully predicts more critical evaluations of GBV laws and the government’s performance in helping victims. In addition, these critical opinions influence bystander intervention attitudes. Mediation analysis confirms that views of procedural unfairness are critical in explaining these effects. The implications of the findings for the implementation of specialized services are discussed in the results and conclusion.