Research has shown that voters are willing to stereotype candidates on the basis of their gender, which can sometimes pose obstacles and sometimes prove advantageous for female politicians. But the literature is uncertain about how candidate gender interacts with candidate party affiliation to shape voters' perceptions. In this article, I draw on political psychology, the women and politics literature, and recent work on partisan “trait ownership” to suggest that the application of gender stereotypes will be limited by the salience of partisan stereotypes. I use nationally representative survey data and a content analysis of news coverage from the 2006 U.S. Senate elections to test the argument. Focusing on voter evaluations of candidate traits, I find that party stereotypes are more powerful than gender stereotypes, and that assessments of candidate attributes can be affected by news coverage when candidates are portrayed in ways that challenge traditional partisan images. The results suggest that gender stereotyping is limited by the relevance of party stereotypes, and that as the Republican and Democratic parties continue to polarize at the elite level, the importance of partisan stereotyping is likely to increase.

Research on women in Latin American politics in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s showed that very few women ran for and won political office and that those who did often did not fit the mold of the typical legislator. Yet significant cultural, social, and political changes have occurred over the past 30 years, and few studies have reexamined the types of women who win political office in the region today. In this article, I examine the social backgrounds, paths to power, and political ambition of women and men elected to national legislatures in Argentina, Colombia, and Costa Rica. I argue that women and men are likely to be more similar than different, given the tight constraints imposed on legislative candidates in democratic elections, and empirically examine this hypothesis with data from an original survey of legislators conducted in 2001–2. I find that, indeed, women and men are quite similar on an array of characteristics. Women who win elected office in Latin America today do so by playing the traditional, male-defined, political game.

Building on previous studies of women's formal, descriptive, and substantive representation in Rwanda, this article examines women's symbolic representation, defined as the broader social and cultural impact of the greater representation of women in the Rwandan political system. It explores the cultural meanings of gender quotas by analyzing popular perceptions of women, of women's roles in politics and society more broadly, and of changing cultural practices vis-à-vis gender. Data were gathered over 24 months of ethnographic research conducted between 1997 and 2009 and by ongoing documentary research. The study finds that although Rwandan women have made few legislative gains, they have reaped other benefits, including increased respect from family and community members, enhanced capacity to speak and be heard in public forums, greater autonomy in decision making in the family, and increased access to education. Yet there have also been some unexpected negative consequences, such as increased friction with male siblings, male withdrawal from politics, increased marital discord, and a perception that marriage as an institution has been disrupted by the so-called upheaval of gender roles. Most significantly, increased formal representation of women has not led to increased democratic legitimacy for the government.

“Family law” is the term applied to the legal regulation of marriage and parenthood within a society, and may serve to express a society's accepted ideals concerning male–female relations. Adopting a feminist evolutionary analytic (FEA) approach, we hypothesize that nation-states with higher degrees of inequity in family law favoring men, codifying an evolutionary legacy of male dominance and control over female reproduction, will experience higher rates of violence against women. This hypothesis is borne out in conventional statistical analysis, both bivariate and multivariate, suggesting that policy attention to family law so as to make it more concordant with norms of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) may have salutatory effects on women's physical security over time. These results may also have policy implications for societies with, or contemplating, enclaves of inequitable family law.

On the eve of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin published a satire instructing the British on humbling their American vassals. The British could castrate American males, thereby reducing American population growth. The logistics were simple: “Let a company of sow-gelders, consisting of 100 men, accompany the army. On their arrival at any town or village, let orders be given that on their blowing of the horn all the males be assembled in the market place. If the corps are men of skill and ability in their profession, they will make great dispatch, and retard but very little the progress of the army” (Franklin 1987, 718). Satire aside, Franklin's generation believed that sex and reproduction had a significant impact on the independence, strength, and durability of nations.

In this study, an examination of the legal treatment of “crimes of passion” points to important gendered aspects of the construction of both reason and passion in the law. In crimes of passion, criminal responsibility is mitigated because the perpetrator was in the grip of a strong emotion – in other words, not in his or her right mind. The legal concept of passion is, therefore, society's formal recognition of the limits of reason as a basis for social behavior.

Feminist scholarship has long argued that reason in law is not neutral but reflects dominant social interests. Less attention has been given to passion as reason's recognized opposite. It might be expected that the law's partial toleration of passion would privilege different interests. But this is not the case; in effect, although passion is reason's opposite, its construction in law reflects the same dominant values. Recent efforts to eradicate gender disparities in criminal law have led to some reconsideration of the construction of reason and the recognition of passion in some systems.

We ask whether women's descriptive representation in Congress enhances women's substantive representation through speechmaking on the House floor. Much of the research on women's substantive representation has focused on members' votes for and sponsorship of “women's issues” legislation. We depart from this research by systematically analyzing how members' gender and partisan identities affect gendered rhetoric in their floor speeches. In an era marked by significant increases in the number of congresswomen and partisan polarization, understanding the interactive effect of gender and partisanship on women's representation is particularly important. In an analysis of more than 30,000 speeches from 1993 to 2008, we find that when members speak about issues of their choosing during one-minute speeches, and during specific legislative debates over the most important policies considered on the House floor, congresswomen in both parties are significantly more likely than men to discuss women, enhancing women's representation.

Three issues are central to, but underdeveloped in, theoretical debates about the welfare state. First, the array of welfare services is of equal, or greater, importance than welfare transfers; second, spending varies across substantively different domains; and third, the welfare state is profoundly shaped by gender. While a comprehensive body of research has provided many claims and critiques on these points, their potential for empirical examination has not been fully realized. This article addresses these points by analyzing development according to substantively disaggregated measures of welfare spending, as well as theorizing and testing explicit gender-relevant influences alongside established indicators. Results from cross-sectional and fixed-effect models indicate that established factors are particularly relevant for transfer spending, and much less so for services. Notably, gender measures emerge as strong determinants of services spending generally, but the specific impact of gender varies according to both the substantive spending domain and the aspect of gender being measured. The findings, overall, show strong support for the broader inclusion of gender, and the utility of moving beyond programmatic generalist approaches.

Many cultural stereotypes exist regarding the “modernity” of values possessed by Latino immigrants, particularly in reference to gender norms. Common perceptions about Latin machismo and marianismo (the idea that women should be pure and moral) do not paint a portrait of gender egalitarian dispositions. These assessments are upheld by neomodernization theorists who specifically identify gender attitudes as a critical element of modernity. In applying a revised modernization theory to the issue of comparative gender values, Inglehart and Norris (2003, 10) hypothesize that development “brings about changed cultural attitudes toward gender equality in virtually any society that experiences the various forms of modernization linked with economic development.” The idea that gender equality norms develop gradually, as a function of modernization, gives rise to different expectations about accepted gender roles in developing countries as opposed to those in advanced industrial democracies. Another feature of this modernization process is the emergence of gender gaps in political behavior and attitudes. Inglehart and Norris (2000) distinguish between traditional gender gaps found in postcommunist and developing societies (in which women are more conservative in their behavior and cultural attitudes relative to men) and modern gender gaps evident in postindustrial societies (in which women are more progressive than men).

Diversity management and gender mainstreaming can be considered technologies of government in the Foucaultian sense; that is, they are technologies that guide people to conduct themselves in a particular manner; their purpose is the “conduct of conduct.” This article illustrates the value of applying a Foucaultian “analytics of government” to generate insights on the effects of inserting feminist knowledge into institutional contexts through the practices of gender mainstreaming and diversity management. I first reinterpret these strategies as technologies of government that meet the characteristics identified in the literature on governmentality. Second, I explore the liberal rationality of the contemporary apparatus of gender by juxtaposing it to the disciplinary rationality underlying efforts to govern women at the turn of the nineteenth century. Third, I tease out similarities and differences in the way in which diversity management and gender mainstreaming operate, emphasizing, in particular, the way in which they make difference productive and outlining how one deploys a neoliberal logic and the other a bureaucratic logic. Ultimately, I argue that governance feminism should be interpreted as the governmentalization of feminist knowledge; that is, feminist knowledge has been adapted so that it becomes available for the government of conduct.

The point of departure for this study is the recent work of Burden (2008) on the “gender gap” in partisanship in the United States. He shows that the preponderance of Democratic identification among women is partly a function of the measurement of party identification. When respondents were asked “Do you feel that you are” rather than, more traditionally, “Do you think of yourself as” a Democrat or Republican, the sex gap narrowed to statistical nonsignificance. Burden's explanation for this result lies in the psychology of partisanship. The traditional “think of yourself as” (or cognitive) question primes women to consider their partisanship as a social identity, which in turn activates the stereotypical association between women and the Democratic Party. The “feel that you are” (or affective) question encourages a deeper, more personalized response, rendering social identity less relevant and thereby nullifying the effect of that stereotype.

Patriarchal practices and understandings, especially those based on religious teachings, are seen as serious hindrances to women's access to political power. This obstacle often is seen as greatest in countries where Islam is the dominant religion. This study offers preliminary insights regarding how the sex of political candidates affects voting perceptions and behavior in Turkey, one of the few democratic countries with a Muslim majority population. We designed an experiment in which university students read speeches by candidates from the two major parties (AKP and CHP), randomly varying the sex of the candidates. We find that candidate sex influences respondents' evaluations of areas of competence and perceptions of individual characteristics. It has almost no impact, however, on voting decisions. When it comes to voting, party support and policy stands are vastly more important than candidate sex, even for religiously observant voters.

Unlike earlier attempts to theorize Israeli women's peace activism in civil society, this article examines the involvement of women in backstage roles of formal negotiations during the Oslo Process. On the basis of a qualitative analysis of the organizational structure and gender division of labor in Israeli negotiating bodies, I find that women were placed as midlevel negotiators and professional and legal advisors, and also served as spokeswomen and secretaries. This pattern of participation reveals 1) that the “security logic,” developed by Israeli negotiators led to, and reinforced, a structured gendered division of labor, providing a rational justification for gender inequality; 2) that the ability to control administrative capacities and women workers generated symbolic masculine power and assisted in maintaining asymmetries between Israeli and Palestinian delegations; 3) and that midlevel Israeli negotiators' narratives reveal the extent to which conceptual confusion and self-contradictory approaches toward the Oslo Accords reinforced women's overall invisibility. I conclude that patterns of rigid gender roles in official negotiating structures not only minimize women's meaningful inclusion in peace negotiations but also affect the production of public historical narratives about gender, peace, and war.

One day in the summer of 2004, a shift of activists from Checkpoint Watch (CPW) brought to the checkpoint some cookies that one of them had baked earlier that morning. Checkpoint Watch is an all-women Israeli organization that opposes the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories and the Israeli 1967 occupation more broadly. Its members conduct routine tours to monitor changes in the deployment of checkpoints and stand in regular shifts at the larger, manned checkpoints in the West Bank. As they spend several hours weekly at specific checkpoints, some activists develop acquaintances with both the soldiers who operate them and the Palestinians who regularly pass through them. Many also stop for coffee at the local Palestinian “shacks,” conduct weekly political debates with soldiers, and try to pass the time in conversation. Therefore, it may have seemed trivial, for the activists, to share homemade cookies with the people they encounter weekly. This is precisely what happened on that morning in 2004: a trivial event that probably happened many times before and many times afterwards.

Under certain conditions, women are more likely than men to vote for women candidates, a phenomenon referred to as a “gender affinity effect.” Causal mechanisms connecting women voters to women candidates are gender consciousness, desire for descriptive representation, support for liberal social policy, the use of gender as a shortcut to vote choice among low-information voters, and a “party-sex overlap.” Existing work is focused on American elections, which tend to be candidate centered, so little is known about gender affinity effects between voters and candidates in other contexts. This article focuses on Westminster-style parliamentary systems, using the Canadian federal elections of 2000 and 2004 as test cases. Women in these systems have the same motivations to gravitate toward women candidates, for they are gender conscious and desire descriptive representation. But they do not have the same incentives to cast ballots for women because political institutions and practices tend to discourage candidate-based voting. The article pays particular attention to a segment of the electorate we call “flexible” voters, which is comprised of independents, leaners, and defectors. In Westminster systems, it is this group of voters who should be most sensitive to candidate-based considerations.

The prominence and acceptance of gender as an important subject of inquiry in U.S. politics has been steadily growing in political science. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, small sample sizes of women in politics and disdain from the disciplinary gatekeepers made the serious study of gender in U.S. politics difficult to pursue (Flammang 1997; Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll 2006). The world is clearly different today, as gender politics courses are finding their way into undergraduate and graduate curricula throughout the United States. While the ascension of gender analysis of U.S. politics as a critical variable for study is not complete, the future is bright. Several recent volumes have addressed the current state of the subfield, and most notably, Susan J. Carroll's (2003) edited volume Women and American Politics: New Questions, New Directions focused on the very purpose of laying out a research agenda for those studying gender in U.S. politics (see also Krook and Childs 2010; Wolbrecht, Beckwith, and Baldez 2008). In this essay, I continue the discussion of where the gender and U.S. politics subfield is headed by providing a brief overview of the state of the field and by offering suggestions for future avenues of study, primarily in the area of candidate emergence.