Gendered inequalities in campaign finance are generally considered an important impediment to the equal representation of women in parliament. A multivariate analysis of 11,897 Flemish candidates in the Belgian elections from 1999 to 2019 provides strong new evidence of the gender gap in campaign spending, showing that women candidates are significantly outspent by men. But this gender gap is only present after the introduction of strict quota and is limited to non-incumbents. It takes 16 years and five elections after the introduction of strict quotas before this gender gap narrows. In terms of the funding of their campaigns, women draw significantly less money from their personal wealth and receive less money from their parties when strict quotas are in place.

A growing number of states are adopting a feminist foreign policy (FFP). While this change has excited much scholarly attention, the process by which countries decide to adopt FFP remains unclear: How can we explain their journey toward the formal adoption of FFP? What factors create an environment in which these states were willing (and able) to declare their foreign policy feminist? We bring together literature on FFP and foreign policy change to identify the factors that lead to the uptake of FFP. The roles of a favorable domestic context, policy entrepreneurs, a new governing coalition, and the international context for feminism are highlighted as having clear impact on the decision to adopt FFP. The paper focuses on two different cases: Sweden, which pioneered the idea of FFP until a rollback on its position following domestic elections in 2022, and Chile, which only adopted FFP in 2022.

We seek to unpack and complicate traditional findings of Black Americans’ ambivalent progressivism of immigrants and immigration by seriously considering gender as an analytic tool. Specifically, we aim to highlight how Black women’s political and social uniqueness contextualizes their perception of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. We argue that Black women’s unique race and gendered experiences inform Black women’s attitudes and preferences regarding immigration and immigrants. Further, we take their heterogeneity seriously because Black women are not a monolith. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey (CMPS), we argue that perceptions of shared disadvantage, high levels of woman of color (WoC) linked fate and intersectional solidarity, and strong Democratic identification will positively influence African American women and Black immigrant women’s progressive attitudes toward immigrants and immigration compared to Black women who have lower levels of shared discrimination, WoC linked fate, intersectional solidarity, or have weak Democratic identification.

Is gender violence considered a part of advancing Indigenous self-determination in Alaska? What are the key jurisdictional, institutional, infrastructural, and community level challenges in combating violence against Alaska Native women? Few studies have considered the relationship between gender violence and Alaska Native sovereignty. I address this gap by employing the theory of relational Indigenous self-determination and drawing on research interviews with Indigenous women in Alaska and analyzing the data in light of two recent legislative changes: the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, and the legislation that formally recognizes Alaska Native tribes in the state of Alaska. The findings demonstrate that persistent questions about Alaska Native jurisdiction stemming from the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) limit considering violence against Indigenous women and Indigenous self-determination as issues that need to be addressed in tandem.

Scholars of gender have long realized that questions regarding gender, women, and politics require a multi-method, nuanced approach. When a plurality of white women voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, social scientists increasingly began to recognize the urgency of undertaking new approaches to understanding gender, race, and voting behavior in the United States.1 Since then, researchers have helped us understand why so many white women support right-wing candidates and policies that aim to suppress their autonomy, offering explanations such as the influence of belief in traditional gender roles (Christley 2022), “possessive investments in white heteropatriarchy” (Strolovitch, Wong, and Proctor 2017, 354), and “gendered nationalism” in American politics (Deckman and Cassese 2021, 278). In more recent years — as election results and polling suggest growing numbers of men of color have shifted rightward — there has been increased interest in employing an intersectional approach to analyze the gulf between men and women of color.

Femonationalism, or the selective use of feminist discourse to advance far-right causes, has often been analyzed through the lens of party politics. Shifting the focus to grassroots activists, this article studies a group of far-right female activists in France organized as a women-only collective of “identitarian feminists” to explore how these grassroots activists articulate anti-feminist frames while also appropriating selective aspects of feminism. The study relies on three types of empirical data: a long-term digital observation of the collective, a critical analysis of documents, and 10 semi-structured interviews. These data reveal that these activists diverge from traditional anti-feminism and instead reflect a femonationalist appropriation of feminism. This appropriation can be seen in three interconnected frames used by the collective in the fight against street harassment: an opposition to intersectional feminism, the use of postfeminist frames, and the racialization of sexism.

What does it mean to be a brave woman? In 2020, we saw Belarusian women take to the streets dressed in white to oppose the violent dictatorship that had been in power for twenty-six years. In 2021, our television screens showed the Fall of Kabul, and the takeover by Taliban fighters, who overnight began to reverse decades of women’s empowerment. In response, and despite the risks, women demonstrators took to the streets in Kabul to demand their rights to work, education, and political participation. And in late 2022, we saw Iranian women fight for freedom, cutting their hair and burning their headscarves as they called for women’s rights in the context of brutal repression. These are but a handful of the myriad examples of women transgressing what is societally expected of them. They go out into the streets, they post on social media, they protest governments and make demands for change. Around the world, we see women being brave. They do so at great personal risk, and often when the potential benefits of being brave are infinitesimally small.

The Supreme Court of the United States’ (SCOTUS) decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed the federal right to an abortion, thereby entrusting the states to decide the fate of women’s reproductive health care policies. The outcome activated pro-choice and pro-life groups in efforts to secure favorable policies in states. One tool that groups have utilized to gain support for their position involves selective framing of women’s reproductive policies, including careful selection of wording employed in popular referenda. Using a survey experiment, this study investigates how word/phrase choice influences support for women’s reproductive policies. Two general findings stand out. First, word/phrase choices significantly impact aggregate levels of support for policies. Second, predictor variables exhibit non-static relationships with support across statements. For example, some gender gaps were evident in support for general statements and pro-choice-leaning statements but absent for specific statements and pro-life-framed statements. These findings hold implications for elections on reproductive health policies.

Women political leaders, research shows, have been able to use stereotypically feminine traits to their advantage in their response to the pandemic, thus overcoming usual double binds of performing femininity and political leadership. But what, more precisely, accounts for women politicians’ successful performance of pandemic leadership? In this paper, we argue that public perceptions of women leaders’ credibility are negotiated through news media and further mediated by specific events and broader cultural contexts. Using a mixed methodology of media readings and focus group interviews, we show how prime ministers Erna Solberg of Norway and Mette Frederiksen of Denmark both performed a persona of the “mother of the nation,” but only Solberg succeeded in doing so authentically, leading to the public’s celebration of her credibility while Frederiksen was chided for being inauthentic and strategic.

This study explores the role of influencers in shaping public opinion about feminism in Spain, a country where gender equality and feminist discourse have gained relevant public prominence. Although the figure of the influencer may appear novel, the process of opinion formation mirrors that which has historically prevailed for celebrities in traditional media. However, the inherent characteristics of social media endow influencers with even greater tools of persuasion. We test this argument by collecting a representative survey of the Spanish population and analyzing posts and videos from influencers’ profiles, employing manual content analysis. Our findings reveal that audiences of incidental feminist influencers exhibit stronger pro-feminist attitudes, while those of incidental anti-feminist influencers lean toward anti-feminist views. Additional analysis using propensity score matching offers further evidence of the persuasive power of influencers, even after adjusting for potential selection biases in their audiences.

Over the past quarter-century, the literature on gender, peace, and security has evolved into a substantial interdisciplinary field. In this line of work, researchers have investigated the interplay between state security and women’s security, or how gender equality at the state level affects the occurrence of international and intranational conflict. The conclusion is that more gender-equal countries are less prone to engage in warfare, pointing toward a link between women’s security and national security. Various indicators have been used to capture gender equality in this literature, such as the representation of women in parliamentary roles, the proportion of women participating in the labor force, and school enrollment among girls relative to boys.

Transgender rights are receiving increasingly greater attention in policymaking arenas around the globe. However, few studies empirically investigate the factors that shape the protection of these types of legal rights from a global perspective. Therefore, this article aims to contribute to the literature by examining how one potential correlate – religion – influences countries’ recognition of transgender rights. More specifically, this article distinguishes between the presence of religion in state institutions versus the society, allowing for a more nuanced investigation of the different avenues through which religion may influence a country’s trans-specific laws. Analyzing data from 173 countries between 2000 and 2021, this study finds that while religious influence over society more consistently explains variation in transgender rights, religion in government also plays a significant role. Overall, the findings shed light on an often-understudied population and offer valuable insights into the areas where transgender individuals may be most vulnerable.

Social role theorists argue that the roles that people inhabit and their experiences within can alter their attitudes. We use Swedish panel data to demonstrate how involvement in the parental role changes attitudes toward government policies differently for fathers and mothers. For fathers who take parental leave, the caregiving activities accompanying this leave conflict with stereotypical masculine experiences and such counter-stereotypical engagement should be transformative. We find that fathers who take more parental leave favor care provided by the state. For mothers, we hypothesize and find that the caregiving role during parental leave confirms a female-typical role, resulting in small effects that are not significant. We conclude with a discussion of how state policies can alter the effects of gender by providing specific experiences within a role, such as parental leave, and the significance of finding results in a country with high baseline levels of gender equality.

Past work on media coverage of candidates for political office has explored gender differences in quantity, substance, and tone with mixed results depending on the office, race, and context. We draw on the stereotype content model (SCM) to examine gendered patterns of media coverage of candidates on the trait dimensions of warmth and competence in the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential primary. Combining Natural Language Processing and manual analysis of news, we find that female candidates receive more negative than positive warmth coverage, while male candidates receive more tonally balanced warmth coverage, which suggests that female leaders are penalized on the dimension of warmth. Additionally, white women received more warmth coverage than women of color and women of color receive more competence coverage than white women. The findings suggest news media may portray white women and women of color candidates as lacking gender congruent traits like warmth but may portray white women as possessing role congruent traits like competence.

Conventional wisdom holds that women’s political underrepresentation partly stems from gendered stereotypes, with women candidates perceived as lower in ability and assertiveness, and as less competent to handle key issues like the economy and national security. However, recent research uncovers how societal leadership stereotypes have become less advantageous for men. Two conjoint experiments show that Americans’ stereotypes about political candidates follow similar trends: although women candidates (following conventional expectations) are perceived as friendlier and more moral than men, they are also seen as higher in ability and as equally assertive. Similarly, men and women candidates are perceived as equally competent to handle the economy, crime, and national security. Further analyses reveal that liberals and individuals low in hostile sexism hold stereotypes most favorable to women. These findings suggest that gendered candidate stereotypes likely constitute less of a hindrance to women seeking political nominations than in the past.

The objective of feminist institutionalist (FI) political science is to expose institutions that perpetuate gender inequalities. The nature of these entities and the best strategies for studying them remain hotly debated topics. Some scholars identify ethnography as a valuable methodology for FI research. However, novices to this methodology might need help navigating it. In this theory-generating article, we aim to bridge the gap between different approaches to FI and ethnographic methodologies. We propose ethnographic approaches suitable for scholars who see gendered institutions as real entities that constrain and enable human practices, as well as those who perceive them as sedimented clusters of meanings. We illustrate our arguments using a partially fictional empirical example, inspired by findings from our own ethnographic research. We hope that this article will promote increased engagement, both theoretical and empirical, with ethnography among FI scholars.

We take a deep dive into the sponsorship and cosponsorship activity of Republicans in the US House of Representatives from 1993–2014 to examine how ideology and gender influence the policy priorities of Republican legislators on issues associated with women, as well as on the party-owned issue of tax policy. We expect that Republican women are cross-pressured since assumptions about their policy expertise as women conflict with the policy reputation of the Republican Party. As a result, Republican women’s policy choices are impacted by their ideology in a way that is different from their male counterparts. Moreover, our analysis of which members’ bills move through the legislative process demonstrates that beyond their own policy preferences, women are strategic party actors. Thus, women are only more likely to see action on their women-focused and anti-abortion proposals, the two areas that define the partisan divide over women’s place in society.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed new challenges for leaders, requiring behavior change and public self-compliance. Stereotypically feminine qualities, such as compassion and a good approach to people, may have helped achieve these goals, rendering the pandemic a “feminine crisis.” The special nature of this crisis, along with media attention on female-led countries successfully managing the pandemic, raises the question of whether female leaders would be perceived as more competent in handling such a crisis. In an experimental study conducted on a representative sample in Poland, we assessed whether female prime minister candidates or candidates with feminine traits had an advantage when their competence in managing a large-scale pandemic was evaluated. Surprisingly, we found that, contrary to national security and economic crises (where male or masculine candidates tend to be advantaged), women or feminine candidates were not perceived as having an advantage in managing a COVID-19 type crisis. Furthermore, conservative participants seemed to perceive male candidates as more competent, even in the pandemic context. Although the differences were small in magnitude, they suggest that even in a potentially “feminine crisis,” women do not fare better than men, while men still fare better in stereotypically male crises.

Mass public opinion on globalization shows a persistent gender gap, but explanations for this gap differ. In the context of Africa, understanding this gender gap is particularly important because of women’s growing representation in legislatures and the rapid expansion of global economic flows on the continent. Why are women on average more skeptical of foreign economic actors? We consider this question across Sub-Saharan African countries, using Chinese economic engagement as a salient, visible form of economic globalization. Numerous studies have explored the impact of China’s presence on Africans’ attitudes toward China, but we know little about a documented gender gap in these attitudes. We explore the roots of this gap from an angle of economic vulnerability, positing that women at higher risk of a negative economic impact of Chinese engagement are more likely to view China negatively than their male counterparts. Using multilevel analyses of up to 84,000 respondents from up to 37 countries, we find a consistent pattern of economic vulnerability explaining the gender gap in attitudes, and factors associated with economic security mitigating it. Our findings suggest that economic vulnerability shapes attitudes differently across genders, and that increasing representation of women in African legislatures may have implications for policies toward Chinese engagement.

Women have long been underrepresented in American politics. This is evidenced by women being less likely to run for and hold elected office. Existing scholarship largely focuses on explaining why women are less politically ambitious than their male counterparts but pays less attention to why some women do run for office. To this end, I focus on the potential role of labor union membership. I argue that labor unions can foster political ambition and increase ordinary people’s likelihood of running for office. I test this among women in the American mass public, primarily with survey data from the 2010–22 Cooperative Election Study (CES). Overall, I find that labor union membership is significantly associated with women’s likelihood of running for office. I also find that this robust relationship is unlikely to be driven by self-selection or omitted variable biases. Overall, these findings help us to better understand the sources of political ambition, illustrate a viable potential pathway to boost women’s likelihood of seeking elected office, and underscore the political consequences of organized labor.