While previous studies have examined the factors contributing to the appointment of women in government cabinets, few have investigated the role of political leaders in promoting women's cabinet representation. Drawing on political socialization theory, we argue that political leaders from economically disadvantaged backgrounds are more inclined to appoint female members to ministerial positions than their wealthier counterparts. This propensity stems from leaders’ personal experiences of economic hardship, which foster their interest in improving political equality among social groups and reducing gender disparities by appointing more female ministers. Analyzing an original dataset encompassing leaders’ family backgrounds across 155 countries between 1966 and 2015, we find that leaders who have experienced economic hardship significantly increase the proportion of female ministers in executive cabinets. This finding holds across various model specifications and effectively addresses endogeneity concerns. Our research highlights the crucial role of political leaders in shaping gender politics based on their economic backgrounds.

Through an innovative analysis of audio recordings of plenary speeches, Dietrich, Hayes, and O'Brien (2019) find that women in the U.S. House of Representatives speak with greater emotional intensity about women than other issues. With vocal pitch as a new measure of personal issue commitment, the finding suggests that women legislators' efforts to work on behalf of women result from intrinsic motivation. I ask whether the same is true in an alternative parliamentary setting, the German Bundestag, where personal preferences play a very different role due to strict party discipline. The answer is yes. Analyzing audio and text data from more than 30,000 speeches in the Bundestag between 2011 and 2020, I find that women in the Bundestag address women more frequently and with greater emotional intensity than men. The results suggest that women legislators are more emotionally invested in women-related issues than men.

Although women's representation in Haiti is generally very low, the number of women judges has increased since the demise of authoritarianism and violent conflict in the 1990s. This case study explores why. I find that “gender-neutral” judicial reforms aimed at strengthening the judiciary have done more for women's judicial representation than explicitly gender-targeted policies, which still lack implementation. Donor-supported reforms have introduced more merit-based and transparent appointment procedures for magistrates (judges and public prosecutors) based on competitive examinations. This has helped women circumvent the largely male power networks that previously excluded them from the judiciary. The judiciary remains understudied in the scholarship on women's access to decision-making in fragile and conflict-affected societies; this article contributes to this emerging literature.

Women are underrepresented in legislature almost worldwide, and China is no exception. Although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) implemented its first gender quota in 1933, gender quotas and women's representation in China remain understudied. This study fills the literature gap by examining the subnational variation in gender quota implementation and women's representation in the county-level people's congresses (CPC). Through a comparison of four county-level units in Hunan and Hubei with similar socioeconomic features yet contrasting results in the numbers of female representatives elected in the 2016 CPC election, this study argues that women's access to CPCs is affected by the CCP's adoption and enforcement of grassroots quotas. The fieldwork shows that although all cases introduced a 30 per cent gender quota, only CPCs in Hunan province were able to meet the quota requirements. This was because the grassroots quota threshold was raised in Hunan and strictly enforced, partly as a response to the 2013 Hengyang vote-buying scandal. In contrast, CPCs in Hubei province nominated a large number of “first hands” (yibashou) candidates, very few of whom were women.

It is common wisdom that the increase in the number of women in parliament brought along a new diversity of perspectives presented in legislatures. So far, however, we know little about the implications of women's presence on party cohesion. Moving towards a more complete understanding of how women affect political processes, this article addresses the question, does gender affect vote defection from party lines, and if so, under what circumstances? We argue that the actual and perceived risk associated with vote defection in roll-call votes is gendered and that this is constraining the leeway of women to rebel. Analysing roll-call vote data of the German Bundestag (1953–2013) provided by Bergmann et al. (2018), we show that gender exerts a consistent effect only if electoral safety and policy content are considered: it is in feminine policy areas and at high levels of electoral security that women are more likely than men to rebel. This finding implies that taking different incentive structures into account is key if we want to understand gendered legislative behaviour.

Decades of research has debated whether women first need to reach a “critical mass” in the legislature before they can effectively influence legislative outcomes. This study contributes to the debate using supervised tree-based machine learning to study the relationship between increasing variation in women's legislative representation and the allocation of government expenditures in three policy areas: education, healthcare, and defense. We find that women's representation predicts spending in all three areas. We also find evidence of critical mass effects as the relationships between women's representation and government spending are nonlinear. However, beyond critical mass, our research points to a potential critical mass interval or critical limit point in women's representation. We offer guidance on how these results can inform future research using standard parametric models.

The COVID-19 pandemic has gendered implications for women's time and resources. The use of informal institutions that pose obstacles to women's electoral viability may also be particularly consequential at a time of rapid change, when election dates and procedures are being amended because of health concerns. Together, these dynamics suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic may impact women's electoral participation, support, and viability in meaningful ways. The November 2020 Brazilian municipal elections provide an opportunity to explore this. Employing data from an original survey of eligible individuals and aspirant candidates, we find that the main obstacle to women's representation is not personal political ambition or efforts but women's perceptions of their access to support for their candidacies. In the face of greater challenges, resilient aspirants are choosing to work harder to compensate for potential losses in campaign support and funds.

Even before the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, was declared a pandemic, prominent women mayors in the United States enacted proactive and innovative policies to prevent local outbreaks and soften the social and economic repercussions. Several Black women mayors, in particular, have led the way in local pandemic response efforts. This article identifies four major features of these and other women mayors’ early responses. First, women mayors demonstrated proactive leadership even when faced with pushback. Second, these mayors advocated for transparent and evidence-based decision-making at all levels of government. Third, they enacted measures to protect vulnerable communities and reduce disparities. Fourth, they actively shared advice on best practices and lessons learned, and provided examples for other local leaders to follow. The article concludes by situating these responses in the larger research on gender and leadership and asks whether these women's actions are unique or part of a systematic trend of gendered responses to the pandemic.

Women's parties have a unique and important role to play in the representation of women and women's issues and interests. They are neither a new nor a rare phenomenon and have emerged in a variety of contexts across time and space. And yet we know relatively little about them. This article argues that women's parties matter and that the study of women's parties matters. We contend that women's parties constitute a discrete party family; while there is a diverse range of women's parties, they can be viewed as a coherent group with similar origins, ideology, and naming patterns. This article offers the first research framework for the comparative study of women's parties. Building our knowledge of women's parties, we argue, is important for those interested in gender and politics, particularly those concerned with the representation of women's issues and interests.

The intraparty mechanisms through which parties recruit, motivate, and select their candidates are central explanatory factors for the representation of women. This article analyzes the effects of intraparty factors on women's representation by measuring the impact of (1) parties’ non-quota strategies at the regional level—such as establishing women's sections, mentoring programs, or campaign funding for women—and (2) central party gatekeepers at the local level. Exploiting an original, newly compiled data set consisting of 1,475 electoral lists from the 2014 local council elections in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, this article shows that parties’ non-quota strategies and central gatekeepers play crucial roles in determining the share of women on local party tickets. This means that who runs for office is, in this case, a question of intraparty dynamics. These dynamics are caused by different mechanisms of non-quota strategies and gender-biased candidate selection combined with interparty effects of local party competition and left-party strength. The almost consistent conditions that the subnational level provides show that the parties’ capacities (or lack thereof) for gendered recruitment is one major explanatory factor and should be tested at least in cross-national comparisons.

The substantive representation of women has attracted limited attention in cases in which women are present in politics in small numbers over an extended period of time. This article aims to fill this gap by focusing on two policy episodes in a postcommunist state where female descriptive representation has remained low and static and the regime's democratic backlash can also be observed. The two analytical questions refer to the agency and regime aspects of women's substantive representation under unfavorable conditions. Who is representing women under these conditions, and where and how is their representation taking place? How do the regime's characteristics explain the evolving representation patterns? The article will first argue that the same descriptive representation levels can imply different substantive representation patterns in terms of both actors and space. Second, by reconnecting descriptive representation and substantive representation, the article demonstrates that the decline of a regime's democratic credentials is detrimental to female substantive representation.

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.

In this article, we address the question of how electing women to national or subnational parliaments affects future female candidate selection in an open-list proportional representation system, using the example of Poland. We consider three potential effects of electing a woman. First, based on existing theories of the incumbency advantage, elected women should have higher chances of reselection and reelection in future elections (incumbency effect). Second, as a result of becoming more powerful within their party, elected women might have a stronger influence on future list composition, and thus more women should run for office on these lists (empowerment effect). Finally, we argue that other parties might adjust their candidate selection patterns in response to the election of women on other party lists (contagion effect). We find strong evidence for the incumbency effect and some support for the contagion effect. The empowerment hypothesis, however, finds no empirical support.

Congruence and responsiveness between the policy preferences of citizens and elites are considered key characteristics of democracy. Although these relationships between citizens and elites have been thoroughly examined, little attention has been devoted to differences in the representation of women and men in studies of congruence and responsiveness. Herein, I evaluate the presence of a gender gap both in terms of party congruence and party responsiveness with respect to the relationship between female and male supporters and the party they voted for. In addition, I examine whether the presence of elected women in parties decreases the gender gap in party congruence and responsiveness. My analyses of the data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and several national elections studies indicate that parties are generally as close and as responsive to the preferences of male supporters as to those of female supporters on the left–right ideological scale. However, the presence of elected women in parties favors women's representation and may thus reduce inequality in gender representation.