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.

Scholars have studied how women’s domestic and transnational civil society activism addresses the gendered nature of transitional justice. In contrast, they have paid scant attention to women’s impact on transitional justice policy-making in institutions. We leverage the feminist institutionalist perspective that makes visible gendered norms, rules, and discourses in institutions. Homing in on women’s influence in parliaments where women are outnumbered by men and marginalised by adversarial discourse, we develop a conceptualisation of women’s discursive agency. Foregrounding discourse in women’s ability to drive change, women’s agency is enacted through their linguistic communication style and substantive normative positions that constitute micro- and macro-level structures of domination. Quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis is applied to a corpus of parliamentary questions about transitional justice in the Croatian parliament from 2004 to 2020. Our results show that women adopt the adversarial style of questioning, which they use to broaden the scope of entitlements and press for reparations for female and male victims. They overcome constraints posed by partisanship and ideology, while constraints of nationalism are less easily broken. The article advances feminist transitional justice by demonstrating how women’s language contributes to dismantling men’s policy domination in institutions, with implications for mixed-sex interactions in non-institutional domains.

This article examines women’s perceptions of and experiences with institutional norms in political science departments and their institutions. Conceptually, it builds on feminist institutionalism. Specifically, it examines the broad institutional norms, formal and informal, that define political science departments within their larger institutions, as well as potential avenues for change. I argue that a “critical mass” of women in academic departments and the presence of “critical actors” in departmental and university leadership positions sympathetic to the cause and powerful enough to implement change can bring about institutional reforms. To that end, I conducted a survey among 1,273 female PhD students and faculty members in political science departments across the United States. The survey questions revolve around women’s perceptions of institutional gender norms, the way they are judged by them, their ability to have professional success under them, and their (or others’) ability to change them. After discussing the survey results within the context of feminist institutional theory, I offer some conclusions about the positions of women in political science departments in the United States, the implications of this for the profession at-large, and some thoughts on avenues for future research on the issue.

Women’s access to political leadership positions has increased greatly in recent decades, which calls for research concerning the conditions of women’s political leadership in more gender-balanced contexts. This article responds to this need by exploring the leadership ideals, evaluations, and treatment of men and women leaders in the numerically gender-equal Swedish parliament (the Riksdag). Drawing on interviews with almost all the current top political leaders in the Swedish parliament, along with an original survey of Swedish members of parliament, we reveal a mainly feminine-coded parliamentary leadership ideal that should be more appropriate for women leaders. Masculine practices remain, however, and women leaders continue to be disadvantaged. To explain this anomaly between ideals and practices, we argue that a feminist institutionalist perspective, which emphasizes how gender shapes a given context in multiple ways, contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the conditions for women’s political leadership than that provided by the widely employed role congruity theory.

Gender-based violence is a prevalent and persistent societal problem in Canada that permeates all spaces, including politics. Yet sexual harassment, sexual assault and/or gender-based violence research is rarely found in mainstream political science in Canada or elsewhere. This article argues that this absence is highly problematic for a discipline that purports to centre itself on understanding power—who has it and who doesn't, and how to access it. It further argues for a normative intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, highlighting promising avenues of research in feminist institutionalism and Indigenous feminism to help achieve elusive solutions to gender-based violence in the future.

Do parties relegate female ministers to portfolios that are politically less important for them? This research note contributes to this debate and examines whether the issue salience of parties for specific policy areas has an effect on the nomination of a female minister. Previous theoretical work assumes that party leaders will be more likely to select men for those portfolios that are highly salient for the party. To test this assumption empirically, the paper analyzes the appointment of women cabinet members in the German states between 2006 and 2021. Notably, the findings contradict the theoretical expectations as well as previous empirical results from a cross-national study: On the German sub-national level the nomination of a female minister is more likely if the respective portfolio is highly salient for the governing party. Parties and their policy-preferences seem to be an important factor in explaining the share of women in sub-national cabinets.

In recent years, Brazil and Poland have elected governments that are sceptical of both the liberal international order and gender. In both cases, contemporary administrations have bolstered the pre-existing anti-gender offensive of religious and secular conservative forces and converted this into legislation and public policy. Yet, at the same time, both have also created National Action Plans around the UN's Women, Peace and Security agenda. Why is this the case? Why do two governments that see gender as an ‘ideology’ continue to work on WPS? Using a feminist institutionalist framework, this article draws on content analysis of the NAPs and semi-structured in-depth interviews with stakeholders in Brazil and Poland to explore this puzzle. We argue that the WPS agenda has survived in these political contexts due the presence of key ‘femocrats’ within the state; the influence of international institutions; and the symbolic power that the WPS agenda gives to these countries on the world stage. As such, the article makes a key contribution to the literature on the WPS agenda and also bolsters the argument for a complication of the idea of gender ‘backlash’ – in domestic and international audiences, states are willing to adopt different attitudes to gender if it furthers their interests.

This article develops an analytical framework to study the power struggles between status quo and gender equality actors underpinning the implementation of gender equality policies. While resistance to gender equality policies in different institutions has received considerable scholarly attention, examining this struggle in light of a multifaceted concept of power that encompasses both domination and individual and collective empowerment, we argue, offers a more accurate account of the possibilities of a feminist politics of implementation. Our analytical framework also accounts for the factors that enable resistance by dominant actors and counter-resistance by gender equality actors and the informal rules that are being upheld or challenged, respectively. Applying our framework to the study of Spanish universities, we identify both the forms and types of resistance that hinder gender reform efforts in higher education institutions and the counter-action strategies that seek to drive implementation forward and achieve institutional change.

Because gender equality actors rarely have sufficient power to create new institutions, this article asks how they can achieve positive gender change in constrained circumstances when the creation of new rules is not possible. Building on a feminist institutionalist approach to analyzing gendered institutional dynamics, power, and resistance, we open the “black box” of one executive: Michelle Bachelet’s first presidency in Chile (2006–10). Using theory-guided process tracing and primarily qualitative data, we examine key reforms in three policy areas—health, pensions, and childcare—that were central to Bachelet’s first program. By analyzing how efforts to incorporate positive gender change fared differently in each area, this study shows how far utilizing, subverting, or converting existing rules—more “hidden” forms of change, often away from legislatures—can be effective, if limited, strategies when gender equality advocates face resistance.

The U.K. Women's Equality Party (WEP) was established in 2015 to “bring about change by winning—support, votes and seats.” It has thus far recruited tens of thousands of members and run candidates in European, national, devolved, and local elections. This article provides one of the first empirical analyses of this new actor in U.K. politics. Adopting a feminist institutionalist lens, we examine the extent to which WEP “does things differently” by looking at its discourse, formal party rules, and informal ways of doing things “on the ground.” Drawing on a set of semistructured interviews, observations of local and national party meetings, and document analysis, we argue that while WEP has to some extent tried to set up alternative participatory structures and new “ways of working,” it has also at times fallen back on more traditional, centralized, and hierarchical modes of party organizing, as well as informal practices that are more typically associated with male-dominated parties.

Quota laws have been widely adopted in Latin America, with significant increases in the number of women elected to parliament in some countries. However, it is far from clear whether the laws have produced the modifications in the gender regimes which inform internal party power structures and dynamics that would allow women to participate – as aspirants or selectors – on an equal footing with their male counterparts in the processes of candidate selection. This article seeks to identify critical nodes where the interplay between the different institutions – systemic, normative and practical – of candidate selection intersects with gendered power relations to facilitate or hinder not only women’s access to elective posts, but the terms of their access. Employing a feminist institutionalist analytical framework, this article presents the findings from qualitative case study research on candidate selection in Uruguay in 2009 and 2014 and situates them within the existing – albeit small – body of studies of gender and candidate selection in the Latin American region.

This contribution evaluates the theoretical and methodological challenges of researching the gendered dynamics of candidate selection in comparative perspective. It argues that comparative studies should take into account not only the gendered nature of political parties and their wider institutional context, but must also investigate the informal aspects of the selection process and their gendered consequences. The article explores these dynamics by revisiting original in-depth research on the candidate selection process in two different settings – Thailand and Scotland. Using a common analytical framework, the article reflects on this work and points to two key aspects of the interaction between formal and informal rules – the gendered consequences of informal party recruitment and of local influence over candidate selection – which are critically important for understanding the continuity of male political dominance and female under-representation. The article concludes by outlining a research agenda for comparative work on gender, institutions and candidate selection and pointing to future directions for work in this area.

This contribution takes a look back at the supply and demand model of selection and recruitment, developed by Joni Lovenduski and Pippa Norris in Political Recruitment: Gender, Race and Class in the British Parliament (1995). The core understanding of this model was that candidate selection was an interactive process in which both selectors and aspirants affected outcomes that were organized in several sets of institutions. The model illuminates power in particular institutions – British political parties – and was designed to examine the various effects of the selection process. This contribution reflects on the model and puts forward ideas and arguments about what might be done differently, taking into account the theoretical and methodological innovations of the succeeding generation of scholars who have used the model. It also identifies remaining challenges for research on candidate selection and suggests that the supply and demand model is sufficiently flexible that it can still travel across national, system and party boundaries.

About two decades after the introduction of party quotas, in the mid-2000s both Portugal and Spain enacted legislative gender quotas. The simultaneous implementation of party and legislative quotas raises questions about the potential interactions between two types of candidate quotas sharing the same goal – granting gender equality in political representation. Following a feminist institutionalist approach, this article aims at disentangling under what circumstances compliance with legislative quotas is greater. By looking at the different party institutional contexts in which candidates are selected, a double comparative framework is set. Firstly, we examine within country how legislative quotas affect political parties with dissimilar strategies to pursue equal gender representation. Secondly, we analyse across countries how they impact on political parties with differently institutionalized voluntary quotas. The article shows that legislative quotas are nested in political parties’ candidate selection process and that existing gendered practices and norms limit the effective compliance with such measures.