This article uses an original dataset to sketch a portrait of women mayoral candidates and women elected as mayors in Italy in the period 1993–2021. The analysis highlights several significant findings. Women must compensate for their political marginality by deploying other resources, such as higher levels of education. Nevertheless, women are penalised not only by the reluctance of parties to put them forward as candidates, but also by the elections themselves. More specifically, the electoral presence and strength of women decreases when the population size of the municipality grows, except for municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Moreover, women candidates are most disadvantaged in geographical areas where the socioeconomic condition of women is more marginal. However, women mayors running for a second mandate have the same chance of winning as men. Finally, it is the protest parties, rather than the left-wing parties, that are revealed as doing the most to promote women.

Federal law clerks play a vital role in the development and implementation of the law. Yet, women remain underrepresented in these positions. We suggest that one reason for this underrepresentation may be differences in hiring practices among judges in the federal judiciary. Specifically, we hypothesize that male judges and conservative judges may be less likely to hire female law clerks than female judges and liberal judges for two reasons. First, gendered attitudes held by judges may make some judges prone to hire women and/or others more resistant to these hires. Second, due to ideological asymmetries between the law clerk pool and judges in the federal judiciary, conservative judges and male judges may be less likely to hire women law clerks. Using data on clerks hired in the federal judiciary between 1995 and 2005, we find support for both mechanisms.1

We study a new driving factor of women's inclusion in politics: the economic empowerment of their mothers. We evaluate Swedish microdata on politicians and their parents over fifty years. The results demonstrate a strong intergenerational dynamic from mothers to daughters. Female politicians come from households where their mother is more likely to be employed, earns more in the labour market, and earns a larger share of household earnings. This pattern was strong among parliamentarians in the 1970s and 1980s when female numerical representation increased rapidly in Sweden but is not present in national politics after the introduction of gender quotas in the early 1990s or in local politics.

This study investigates the subjective effects of gender quotas by examining how quotas affect party elites’ perceptions of quota beneficiaries. Furthermore, it proposes to distinguish between objective and subjective quota effects. Subjective effects were studied by randomizing information on whether politicians got into office through a gender quota. Elites then were asked to rate politicians based on an audio clip and an experimental vignette. Whereas the two treatment groups were told that gender quotas or ceiling quotas for men were employed during a politician’s election, the control group did not receive this information. This experiment was conducted in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. More than 1,000 party elites participated overall. Contrary to expectations, being framed as a “quota woman” only has a negative impact among elites of the radical right. In contrast with the center right, the radical right is opposed not only to quotas but to quota beneficiaries as well.

Drawing on a reading of MERIP's articles related to women's and gender studies over the course of its 50-year history, this piece reflects on how MERIP's forays into this field formed part of its overarching aspiration to place scholarship in the service of progressive political projects. I explore how intellectual trends and political commitments worked together to shape the topics and approaches related to gender that appeared in MERIP's pages. The political purposes of knowledge production were omnipresent in the minds of authors and editors, and we see evidence of a conscious program of critique of past scholarship on women and gender in the region, as well as sustained attention to research and writing that could connect, or perhaps even be useful, to struggles in the Middle East region and the amelioration of U.S. policy. The framing of issues varied over time, from a focus on political economy to political action to broader cultural questions, in rhythm with shifts in scholarly paradigms and events on the ground.

How can we understand the signing of legislation targeting violence against women in postcommunist countries where women are electorally marginalized? Although women are underrepresented in Kyrgyzstan, the country's parliament has passed bride theft and domestic violence legislation. This article proposes a theory of transactional activism: in postcommunist countries where women are electorally marginalized, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can instigate legislative change if the state satisfies three necessary conditions permitting lateral links between NGOs working on behalf of women and vertical links between these nonstate actors and critical actors in parliament. The state must (1) establish a regulatory framework for NGO activity permitting the articulation and representation of women's interests; (2) demonstrate a rhetorical commitment to improving women's lives; and (3) facilitate the election to parliament of critical actors sympathetic to women's interests. In other words, women's substantive representation can occur without strong descriptive representation in the formal legislative arena if the state satisfies these conditions.

The postconflict period in Timor-Leste is significant for the status of women and the struggle for gender equality. Women today face cultural and political pressure to conform to patriarchal demands, driven by a complex history of conflict, colonialism and changing customary practices. The contemporary East Timorese women's movement, largely a coalition of local NGOs, key women leaders and parliamentarians, has successfully driven the introduction of progressive egalitarian laws and policy, but it continues to grapple with the deeper changes in social practices required for systemic change. We argue that a better understanding of the history of the women's movement, forged within an anticolonial, nationalist independence movement, alongside a conceptualization of the intersecting structures that have shaped the capacity for East Timorese women to effect social change in their communities and nation, is necessary to fully realize the movement's goals and potential. Situating the movement within this framework provides new perspectives on these successes and on strategizing for the transformation of gender relations to make gender equality a lasting reality in everyday practice in contemporary Timor-Leste.

This paper examines the extent to which ambivalent sexism toward women influenced vote choice among American women during the 2016 Presidential election. I examine how this varied between white women and women of color. The 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) features several measures from the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI)—a scale developed by Glick and Fiske (1996) to assess sexist attitudes toward women. An index of these measures is used to examine the extent to which ambivalent sexist attitudes influenced women's vote choice for Donald Trump, controlling for racial resentment, partisanship, attitudes toward immigrants, economic anxiety, and socio-demographics. On the one hand, my findings indicate that ambivalent sexism was a powerful influence on women's Presidential vote choice in 2016, controlling for other factors. However, this finding, based on a model of all women voters is misleading, once an intersectional approach is undertaken. Once the data are disaggregated by gender and race, white women's political behavior proves very different than women of color. Among white women, ambivalent sexist views positively and significantly predicts vote choice for Trump, controlling for all other factors. However, for women of color, this relationship was negative and posed no statistical significant relationship to voting for Trump. Scholarship in gender and politics that does not account for group differences in race/ethnicity may present misleading results, which are either underestimated or overestimated.