A large body of literature in political science documents differences between elected men and women in their substantive policy preferences, representation styles, and effectiveness as legislators. We know far less about whether female and male representatives respond differently to being held politically accountable for their decisions. Although it is a difficult concept to evaluate empirically with incumbents, this absence of research is nevertheless surprising considering the central role of accountability in legislative behavior and the nonelite evidence that women and men respond differently to attributions of accountability. I provide evidence for the existence of such an accountability gender gap in an experiment with 377 incumbent legislators in three countries, in which they were asked to choose between economic policy plans alternately presented as the status quo, with varying levels of implied task accountability. Elected women and men reacted significantly differently when the political accountability levels of the task increased: female politicians exhibited a stronger preference for policies presented as the status quo, whereas male politicians were more likely to abandon the status quo and favor change. This pattern is unique to politicians and is not observed in nonelites. I discuss processes that motivate this divergence and the implications for research on gender and political representation.

Possible gender differences in the self-presentation of political candidates have been a recurring research topic for many years. Yet studies that compare large numbers of candidates have mainly used data from the United States. This article uses a unique data set from the run-up to the 2016 general election in Ireland to compare the self-presentation of male and female candidates. The data are based on video statements of almost 90% of the candidates who ran in the election. With its lack of party polarization and recent introduction of a gender quota, Ireland is a particularly interesting case for analyzing possible gender differences in political campaigning. Findings confirm previous research that has found few gender differences in issue priorities but contradict it in other respects, especially regarding differences in stressing political experience and personal background. The results suggest that female candidates saw electoral benefits from conforming to expectations about women as caregivers, but they wished to avoid a stereotype limiting them to this role by also emphasizing their occupational background. Their strong personalization may also indicate an attempt to stress individuality in a context in which the gender quota drew special attention to women as a category.

The question of whether social movements can catalyze change has preoccupied researchers but an understanding of how such change can be created is equally important. Specifically, there has been little investigation of how women's movements engage in the process of implementation of women's rights laws. We use a case study of Ghana's Domestic Violence Coalition to examine the challenges that movements face in the policy implementation process. The Domestic Violence Coalition, a collective of women's rights organizations, was instrumental to the passage of Ghana's Domestic Violence Act in 2007. Our study investigates the coalition's subsequent attempts to influence the act's implementation. Drawing from the social movement literature, we apply an analytical framework consisting of three internal factors (strategies, movement infrastructure, and framing) and two external factors (political context and support of allies) that have mediated the coalition's impact on implementation. We find that changes in movement infrastructure are most significant in explaining the coalition's relative ineffectiveness, as these changes adversely affect its ability to employ effective strategies and take advantage of a conducive political context and the presence of allies. This article advances the literature on rights advocacy by women's movements by analyzing the challenge of translating success in policy adoption to implementation and explaining why women's movements may have less impact on implementation processes.

Do men and women respond differently to negative political communication? Only a limited collection of studies into the effects of negative campaigns have investigated this research question, and the conflicting results produced from such studies have prevented the development of a widely accepted answer. As campaigns transition to new media environments, further problems arise, as any potential gender gap may be magnified on the new political communication battlefield of social media. The present article contributes to this sparsely investigated area through an empirical study of men's and women's reactions on Facebook to US presidential candidate attacks during two general election campaigns (2012 and 2016) and two primaries (2016 Democratic and Republican). Across nearly 400 million reactions and 40 million unique users, women demonstrate lower receptivity to candidate attacks than men. Two potential explanatory factors for the gap are examined, but neither fully captures the magnitude of the differences observed. Conceptualizing the gender gap composition in terms of differential receptivity most accurately explains these findings and potentially resolves the competing explanations for the gap within the existing literature.

The global diffusion of #MeToo has sparked case studies and scholarly discussions (Fileborn and Loney-Howes 2019; Lee and Murdie 2020; Noel and Oppenheimer 2020), but the East Asian experience remains understudied, especially from a comparative perspective within and outside the region. The internet hashtag movement emerged from quality investigative journalism, and the movement has done what the law could not (MacKinnon 2018). Examining tweets that include the English version of the hashtag, Lee and Murdie (2020) found that women are more likely to engage in #MeToo in countries where their political rights are better protected. This finding, however, does not seem to fit East Asia's experience. The region's earliest and longest democracy, Japan, had a much milder movement than neighboring South Korea. Many South Korean women publicly named their perpetrators, but Japanese women, when sharing their experience of being harassed, mostly remained anonymous (Hasunuma and Shin 2019). Moreover, Taiwan, arguably the most gender-equal country in this region—if measured by women's political representation (42% in the national legislature) or by policies toward sexual minorities (it was the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage)—has had virtually no #MeToo movement.

Amid the global #MeToo movement, the #MeToo movement in China started in early 2018. For over a year, several influential cases, broad civic participation and engagement, as well as extensive discussions shocked and shook the whole country, creating a sociopolitical dynamic that was unusual in the context of persistent suppression of civil society and strict restrictions on freedom of speech. As feminist activists and researchers—Jing living and working in China, Dušica doing her fieldwork in Taiwan at the time—we were astounded by the powerful challenge that #MeToo has posed to misogynistic societies around the globe. What we have been trying to understand is how the #MeToo movement emerged and grew even as so many other social movements were suppressed in China, and what strategies the survivors, volunteers, and activists in the #MeToo movement used to break through the overwhelming censorship and restrictions.

The #MeToo movement in Hong Kong emerged in late 2017, subsequently converged with the Anti-Extradition Law protest in 2019, and evolved into the #ProtestToo campaign against police violence and sexual assult. This essay traces the development of the #MeToo movement and analyzes the collaboration among the government, civil society, and the media in fostering the movement to combat sexual violence. It argues that whether the collaborative model succeeds or fails depends upon sociocultural and political circumstances: the failure of existing measures in preventing, investigating, and prosecuting the alleged sexual assaults inflicted on protesters in 2019 reveals how a shift to authoritarian governance may cripple the established anti–sexual violence collaboration.

The #MeToo movement has shaken Korea over the last two years (Hasunuma and Shin 2019). Prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun's public testimony in January 2018 charged a former Ministry of Justice official with sexual harassment and catalyzed the #MeToo movement. Hundreds of Korean women came forward and spoke up about being sexually abused by powerful men. Social media platforms were flooded with hashtags such as #WithYou to support the movement and to express solidarity with victims of sexual violence. Women have taken to the streets for months demanding government action to prevent and punish sexual violence.

The #MeToo movement gained global prominence after Hollywood celebrities came forward with their experiences of sexual violence and encouraged others to do the same. This was by no means the first time a woman had told the world of her experience of sexual violation, but this time, the powerful were paying attention: “Women have been saying these things forever. It is the response to them that has changed” (MacKinnon 2020, 7). High-quality investigative journalists vetted the women's accounts and provided more stories of sexual abuse and predation. Many survivors have since come forward with their own names and their perpetrators’ names, leading some prominent men to be deprived of their fame and positions of power. The #MeToo movement makes two things matter and count: what the victims say and what the perpetrators did. It has raised the perpetrators’ accountability and the victims’ credibility and reversed the scenario of sexual violation: making the perpetrator, not the victim, pay for the sexual harm.