Does gender influence how candidates in the United States present their prior political experience to voters? Messaging one’s experience might demonstrate a history of power-seeking behavior, a gender role violation for women under traditional norms. As a result, men should be more likely to make experience-based appeals than women candidates. For evidence, we analyze the contents of 1,030 televised advertisements from 2018 state legislative candidates from the Wesleyan Media Project. We find that ads sponsored by experienced men are significantly more likely to highlight experience than ads sponsored by experienced women. However, we find that women’s and men’s ads are roughly equally likely to discuss work experience, suggesting that men’s greater emphasis on experience is limited to prior officeholding. The results contribute to our understanding of gender dynamics in political campaigns, the information available to voters, and how advertising shapes the criteria voters use to assess candidates.

Historically, trans people have been excluded from politics. Despite political under representation, trans interests increasingly appear on the political agenda in the Netherlands and Germany. In 2021, trans women were elected to the Dutch and German parliaments for the first time. However, increased trans visibility is accompanied by backlash and transphobia. The political representation of trans people does not follow a familiar pattern from elected descriptive representatives to increased substantive representation of interests. What mechanisms shape the political representation of trans people? We argue that symbolic representation shapes possibilities for descriptive and substantive representation of trans people. The analysis of symbolic representation of transpeople draws on a combination of 1) qualitative text analysis of Dutch and German parliamentary documents, research reports, and trans activists’ publications and 2) in-depth interviews with trans andcisgender representatives, candidates, and activists. The findings demonstrate how political spaces are not only gendered, but also cisgendered and heteronormative.

This essay considers the rapid uptick in anti-trans legislation that targets transgender girls and women as an occasion to critically interrogate the ways that gender is conceptualized and operationalized in political science (Murib 2022). I argue that the disciplinary tendency to view gender as a single-axis facet of identity that is static and rooted in biology needs to be reconsidered in light of two problems. First, collapsing biological sex and gender naturalizes the gender of non-trans women and men as static, normal, and self-evident; transgender people, in contrast, are locked into perpetual processes of gendering themselves against this biological baseline (Enke 2012). Second, and as a result of this limited view of gender, political scientists face difficulties anticipating, understanding, and addressing recent mobilizations invested in maintaining White, heterosexual, and reproductive families as the cornerstone of what it means to be a proper citizen (Alexander 1994).

Due to the concern about relatively small samples, it has been conventional in previous research to analyze women voters together as a group. However, viewing women as a monolith results in ‘whitewashing,’ obscuring variation at the intersection of race and gender in partisan vote choice. Utilizing the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey (CMPS), we disaggregate women voters by race and ethnicity and analyze the significance of a host of factors that contribute to partisan vote choice, with particular attention to the role of attitudes about race (i.e., “racial resentment”) and gender (i.e., “hostile sexism”) on support for Donald Trump in 2020. Our analyses demonstrate how intersectional positionality of race and gender together conditions how standard explanatory measures as well as attitudes about gender and race vary across women voters who are Black, Asian American, Latina, and white in their support for United States presidential candidates.

This study investigates the nexus between the rise of female leaders and the appointment of women to cabinets and how family ties, crucial for women’s political ascendance, impact these appointments. Using a unique dataset across 160 countries from 1966 to 2021, we find that female leaders generally appoint more women to their cabinets and key cabinet roles. However, this effect is significantly moderated by the “Goldilocks” principle, defined by the nature of a leader’s family ties. Specifically, female leaders with moderate family ties are most likely to appoint women. In contrast, their counterparts from political dynasties and those without familial political ties are less inclined to do so. The exploratory analysis suggests potential mechanisms driving this dynamic: female leaders with a “just-right” degree of political lineage are more likely to have advanced degrees and Western education, potentially aligning them more closely with liberal and feminist values.

Persistent gender inequalities in internal political efficacy have traditionally been attributed to gender differences in resources. This article complements the resource model by focusing on how gendered political socialization occurs during citizenship education and how citizenship education might mitigate, reproduce, or intensify inequalities. Based on multilevel models on a 2016 survey dataset (3898 students across 150 schools) of Belgian senior high school students, we show that citizenship education increases internal political efficacy for both male and female students. However, we also find that citizenship education intensifies inequalities since male students gain more from it than female students, especially in schools with a conservative gender role culture. Our results indicate that the influence of citizenship education depends on the gendered school context in which it is offered. In this respect, citizenship education risks intensifying rather than mitigating gender inequalities.

This article investigates legislators’ willingness to talk about gender and women during policy making discussions, asking whether it is conditional on their sex or partisanship in environments where party discipline does not constrain their speech. The Canadian Senate offers a case of a legislature with low or absent party discipline. A quantitative content analysis of nearly 1,000 Senate committee meetings confirms that sex is a primary indicator of legislators’ inclination to talk about gender and women. Moreover, women senators who sit on committees with a critical mass of women members (30% or greater) are more likely to talk about gender and women, making the case for the importance of women’s descriptive representation. Partisanship and independence had no significant effect on senators’ propensity to discuss women. The findings suggest that partisanship does not constrain legislators’ representation of women in environments with low party discipline.

In the United States, emphasizing their families and talking about parenthood can be a potent strategy for political candidates as voters use information about a candidate’s family life to make assessments of the candidate’s personal attributes and issue competencies. We nonetheless know little about how a candidate’s race affects these assessments. We thus consider how Black women use and benefit from politicizing motherhood, and we argue that the unique intersectional identities of Black women shaped jointly by their race and gender can give Black women a stronger strategic advantage from highlighting motherhood compared to white women. Using both observational and experimental data, we apply this intersectional framework by examining motherhood messages. We identify the extent to which Black women rely on messages about motherhood and how voters respond. Our results show that Black women are just as likely to use motherhood messages relative to white women, and that Black women receive positive evaluations from voters from a message emphasizing motherhood. White and minority voters are equally likely to positively rate Black women who emphasize motherhood.

This study draws together theories of women’s substantive representation and research on politicians’ knowledge of constituent preferences. We ask whether politicians are better at predicting their constituents’ policy preferences when they share the same gender. In doing so, we contribute to knowledge about the mechanisms underlying substantive representation. Using original surveys of 3,750 Canadians and 867 elected politicians, we test whether politicians correctly perceive gender gaps in their constituents’ policy preferences and whether women politicians are better at correctly identifying the policy preferences of women constituents. Contrary to expectations from previous research, we do not find elected women to be better at predicting the preferences of women constituents. Instead, we find that all politicians — regardless of their gender — perform better when predicting women’s policy preferences and worse when predicting men’s preferences. The gender of the constituent matters more than the gender of the politician.

When the analytical lens of intersectionality was first applied to descriptive representation, it documented the increased level of disadvantage for those belonging to more than one underrepresented group. Although ethnic minority women have been slow to benefit from drives to boost ethnic minority or women’s representation, increasingly, political parties seeking to diversify see them as “ticking two boxes,” resulting in a new positive story of relative representational success in many countries and legislatures. However, we argue that the two narratives coexist: intersectional group membership mars the experience of ethnic minority women politicians despite their increased electoral success. Conceptualizing intersectional disadvantage beyond examining differential outcomes, we focus instead on how the mechanisms leading to those outcomes are experienced by ethnic minority women local councillors, from their selection to their working conditions and extra representative burdens. Using 85 interviews with ethnic minority women and men UK local councillors, we demonstrate how gender and racial inequalities leave ethnic minority women fighting two (or more) battles.

Advocates of gender quotas emphasize their transformative potential for women’s political participation. Yet evidence on the symbolic effects of quotas remains inconclusive, with some studies uncovering significant backlash after implementation. Although elite resistance to quotas has been posited as an explanation, the underlying mechanisms generating negative effects remain underexplored. This study proposes the utilization of “moral panic” by elites as a mechanism of resistance. By leveraging their media influence and employing conservative moral rhetoric, elites engineer moral panic, framing women’s political engagement as detrimental to social order and gender hierarchies. Such panic aims to incite public opposition and rationalize elite resistance to progressive changes. Notably, this tactic is more prevalent in countries with reserved-seat quotas, where elites possess limited control over electoral outcomes. Using an original dataset encompassing politician names and genders, I analyze over 150,000 news articles from 2000 to 2021 across 10 sub-Saharan African countries. The findings indicate that quota-induced gains in women’s representation are followed by significant increases in conservative ethical language in news coverage of women politicians, particularly in countries with reserved-seat quotas. These findings bear important implications for gender equality in politics and shed light on the dynamics of backlash after quota implementation.