Given the growing importance of state subsidies as a source of party income, several countries have introduced policies that link the provision of party funding to the promotion of gender equality in political representation. Variations in the assignment of public funding—that is, financial incentives and cuts—are increasingly employed to promote equal gender participation in intraparty politics and in public office. However, we know little about why and how these equality promotion policies have been adopted in different countries, how they work in practice, and, most importantly, what effects they have on women's representation. To contribute to this debate, after embedding gender-targeted public funding regulations in the broader set of political representation policies and presenting a comparative overview of existing rules in the European Union, the article concentrates on the Italian case. We examine the evolution of Italian regulation of gender electoral financing and the extent to which the Italian parties have complied with the rules over time. The results show that this set of policy instruments, when poorly designed, is nothing more than symbolic policy. The lack of appropriate mechanisms for sanctions and rewards, which can induce parties to change their behavior, has hampered the effectiveness of these policy measures.

In this article, we evaluate gender differences in COVID-19 conspiracy theory beliefs. We find that women are significantly less likely than men to endorse COVID-19 conspiracy theories and that this gender difference cuts across party lines. Our analysis suggests that this gender gap is partially explained by two dispositional factors: learned helplessness and conspiratorial thinking. Our findings qualify past work on the antecedents of conspiracy theory beliefs, which does not uncover robust and significant gender differences. The results highlight the need for work in this area to better theorize about the significance of gender.

This essay asks how the democratic ideal of inclusion can be achieved in societies marked by power asymmetries along the lines of identity categories such as gender and race. It revisits debates of difference democracy of the 1990s, which promoted inclusion through a politics of presence of marginalized social groups. This strategy inevitably entails essentializing tendencies, confining the democratic subject within its physically embodied identity. Difference democrats did not take notice of the parallel emerging discourse on cyberfeminism exploring novel identity configurations on the Internet. This essay augments the politics of presence with digital identity reconfigurations. Neither difference democrats nor cyberfeminists distinguish between various participatory sites. Drawing on conceptions of participatory spaces from development studies and deliberative democracy, this essay generates a typology differentiating between empowered spaces such as parliaments, invited spaces such as citizens' assemblies, and the claimed spaces of social movements. The democratic functions these spaces fulfil are best facilitated by three different modes of identity performance: identity continuation, identity negation, and identity exploration. A pluralization of participatory sites and modes of identity performance facilitates inclusion while tackling the essentializing tendencies in difference democracy.

Leading up to the 2016 election, single women were heralded as the “hot” new constituency. With unmarried women posed to comprise approximately half of the population of adult women and 23% of the electorate (Traister 2016), pundits claimed that the rising number of single women could transform American politics. Building on this recent enthusiasm about single women, this study provides one of the first systematic analyses of how contemporary women's organizations represent single women by analyzing 1,021 comments that women's organizations submitted to rule makers between 2007 and 2013. Using automated text analyses and a series of statistical analyses, it shows that despite the rising numbers of American single women, women's organizations only very rarely explicitly refer to single women during their comment writing campaigns, preferring to highlight the experiences of married mothers instead. Moreover, it shows that the political context unexpectedly has little to no effect on the degree to which women's organizations focus on single women, possibly because they so rarely mention them at all. Altogether, the results suggest that for single women to become politically powerful, they will need more than just large numbers; they may also need niche organizations that can help them organize and articulate their broader policy needs.

Debates on nation, self-determination, and nationalism tend to ignore the gender dimension, women's experiences, and feminist proposals on such issues. In turn, feminist discussions on the intersection of oppressions generally avoid the national identity of stateless nations as a source of oppression. In this article, I relate feminism and nationalism through an intersectional framework in the context of the Catalan pro-independence movement. Since the 1970s, Catalan feminists have been developing theories and practices that relate gender and nationality from an intersectional perspective, which may challenge hegemonic genealogies of intersectionality and general assumptions about the relation between nationalism and gender. Focusing on developments made by feminist activists from past and present times, I argue that women are key agents in national construction and that situated intersectional frameworks may provide new insights into relations among axes of inequalities beyond the Anglocentric perspective.

In Russia and Turkey, the pro-authoritarian regimes have largely relied on nationalistic narratives appealing to cultural authenticity, tradition, and religion for legitimacy and cultural resonance at the mass level. Within this narrative, as it is argued, traditional notions of family and femininity are endorsed so as to represent national power against the West and to invigorate social unity and morality in Russian and Turkish societies. The revival of traditional gender norms and patterns that characterize the prevailing gender climates in Russia and Turkey is visible in the restructuring of gender equality mechanisms, the organization of reproduction in accordance with pronatalist policies, women's employment patterns, and state policy on combating domestic violence. This analysis relies on empirical data obtained through in-depth interviews with academics, representatives of international organizations and nongovernmental organizations, feminist activists, experts from women's shelters, and public officials based in Russia and Turkey. It is supplemented with a review of relevant examples from political discourse employed by political leaders, legal regulations, and public policies on these four areas. The article concludes that the revival of traditional gender categories and stereotypes aggravates the inferior position of women and unleashes discriminatory attitudes toward them at home, in society, and in the labor market.

Using a national survey of Generation Z conducted in late May 2020, we measure attitudes about the impact of the coronavirus on personal health, financial and job concerns, views about shelter-in-place laws, and 2020 voting intentions. Gen Z women express greater health and economic concerns and support for shelter-in-place measures than their male counterparts, but this gender gap is largely mitigated by party and other covariates. Party also mediates the differences between young male and female voters concerning the influence of the coronavirus on their vote choice in 2020. Notably, women have significantly greater concern about the impact of COVID-19 on their personal financial situation, while Gen Z men express more concern about their personal health amid COVID-19 in more fully specified statistical models. This research contributes to the growing literature that examines not only the sorting effect of party on the gender gap but also how different identities—in this case, generation—can help explain the persistent political divides between men and women.

High levels of women in politics and paid work, together with the availability of paid parental leave and public child care, make the gender imbalance in business leadership in Iceland all the more confounding. This study analyzes business leaders’ attitudes toward gender and leadership positions after a gender quota law for company boards was implemented in 2013. We explore support for gender quotas and whether it is related to how respondents explain women's underrepresentation in leadership positions. A questionnaire was sent to 1,349 managers in the 250 largest companies in Iceland. Our findings indicate that women are more supportive of gender quotas than men. The way in which the respondents explain the underrepresentation of women as top managers is strongly related to their support for gender quotas. Those who believe that women are structurally disadvantaged are more likely to support gender quotas than those who adhere to individual explanations. Furthermore, male dominance at higher company levels is related to negative views on gender quotas, whereas this does not apply at lower levels. The research emphasizes the impact of business leaders on the recruitment of women to business leadership positions and, at the same time, has implications for policy interventions.

During the novel coronavirus pandemic, early data suggested that men were slightly more likely to contract COVID-19 than women, less likely to seek medical attention for the disease, and far more likely to die as a result of COVID-19. While several studies have explored this gender gap, none has attempted to isolate the psychological processes underpinning this phenomenon. In this research note, I suggest that sexism partly explains these differences. Using data from a large (N = 100,689) survey of American adults conducted between March and June 2020 by the Democracy Fund and the University of California, Los Angeles (Nationscape), I find that sexist beliefs, a component of masculine norms, are consistently the strongest predictor of coronavirus-related emotions, behaviors, policy attitudes, and ultimately contracting COVID-19. This study highlights how gender ideology can impact health and impede government public health efforts.

Attempts to integrate feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (GPE) were first meticulously studied in the Critical Perspectives sections of the June 2015 and December 2017 issues of this journal. Although the debate has gained presence in workshops, at international conferences, and even on dedicated websites, the diverse contributions have remained rather theoretical (e.g., Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson 2017; Hudson 2015). The aim of these Critical Perspectives essays is to take the integration of FSS and GPE one step further by presenting empirically grounded contributions that help us contextualize the existing theoretical debates. By focusing on postwar contexts, the pieces here take seriously the material conditions of women's empowerment from a perspective attuned to the gendered and racialized logics structuring social orders in postwar states. We believe that these are the spaces where war economies and peace economies meet and where (gendered) structural transformation of societies is possible. Like the two previous collections, we do not understand FSS and GPE as additive (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2017). Rather, we understand them as traditions that share a common goal, namely, to undermine the racialized neoliberalism and patriarchal capitalism underpinning international intervention and postwar reconstruction projects.

Recent debates within Women, Peace and Security (WPS) scholarship (e.g., Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson 2017; Elias 2015; True 2015) have underlined the need to position the WPS agenda in the context of broader feminist security analysis as defined by early feminist international relations scholars (e.g., Tickner 1992). More precisely, this requires integrating feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist political economy (FPE). At the center of these largely theoretical reflections is a concern that gender-responsive peace-building efforts have too often been undermined by postwar neoliberal economic processes. This essay provides an empirical contribution to this debate, taking the case study of Ukraine as an atypical example of how WPS has been adopted and implemented for the first time during an active conflict. The integration of FPE and FSS proves especially relevant for a country in conflict, where economic austerity policies come along with increased military expenditure. The essay illustrates that the bridging of security and economy is entirely absent in Ukraine's WPS agenda, which has largely prioritized military security while failing to connect it to the austerity policies and the gendered structural inequalities deepened by the ongoing conflict.

Growing research shows a correlation between gender, benevolent sexism, partisanship, and COVID-19 public health compliance. We show first that women are more likely than men to engage in protective behaviors to slow the spread of COVID-19. We also find that while Republicans and Independents are less likely to comply with these measures, benevolent sexism moderates the effect of partisanship and can increase compliance. These results suggest that framing public health directives in terms of chivalry and protection activates benevolent sexism, potentially offsetting patterns of noncompliance associated with partisanship. We discuss the negative consequences of these results and posit a need for bipartisan messages to reduce reliance on benevolent sexism in the future.

This essay connects feminist political economy and critical/feminist transitional justice through the analysis of macroeconomic interventions in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Previous contributions to Critical Perspectives have argued for the need to establish a dialogue and bring down divides between feminist security studies and political economy in feminist International Relations (Elias 2015; Chisolm and Stachowitsch 2017) and to look at the spaces where security and political economy intersect as a productive line of research (Sjoberg 2015). To build these connections, feminist scholars have stressed the importance of multidimensional concepts and questioned their unidimensional use whenever relevant. Security is certainly one of the concepts benefiting from a feminist critique that has opened up its meaning, with reference to its referent objects as well as its multiple dimensions (e.g., to include women's economic security alongside physical security; see Chisolm and Stachowitsch 2017; True 2015). Another concept that has been productively reframed as multidimensional by feminist scholars is violence (Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson 2017; Elias and Rai 2015; True 2012).

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered numerous elements of social, political, and economic life. Mask wearing is arguably an essential component of the new normal until substantial progress is made on a vaccine. However, though evidence suggests the practice is a positive for public health and limiting the transmission of COVID-19, there is variation in attitudes toward and practices of mask wearing. Specifically, there appears to be a sex-based divide in mask wearing, with men more likely to resist wearing masks. Utilizing an original survey, we test the correlation between masculinity and mask wearing. We find that identification with norms of masculinity has a significant influence on affective responses toward mask wearing.

Gender is central to the political disputes in Latin America today. Although conflicts concerning women and LGBTQ rights are not new, only recently have they become a dividing line in the public identities of parties, politicians, and candidates. The second decade of the 2000s brought the opposition to gender forward in the platforms of far-right movements and leaders, raising popular support as they mobilized conservative frameworks and antagonized feminist and LGBTQ activism. Their promises to protect the family from a supposed moral disorder made gender a popular category, strategically presented as an “ideology” threatening children, marriage, the natural order, and national values. Elections such as those in Brazil and Costa Rica in 2018 indicate that conflicts concerning gender and sexuality can also produce new electoral cleavages.

In developing a feminist analysis of postwar political economic practices and institutions, my contribution builds on previous Critical Perspectives forums in following Cynthia Enloe's call (2015, 438) to make sense of people's gendered political lives while embracing their “messiness” and Rahel Kunz's (2017) argument for placing life stories at the center of analysis. It focuses on the everyday life of female petty traders involved in the coping economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), including those working at the (in)famous Arizona market in Brčko. By taking postwar gendered everyday experiences seriously, my contribution highlights the need for a gender-just, holistic approach to designing postwar reparative justice measures, labor market interventions, and integration of coping economic practices.