Research has shown that voters are willing to stereotype candidates on the basis of their gender, which can sometimes pose obstacles and sometimes prove advantageous for female politicians. But the literature is uncertain about how candidate gender interacts with candidate party affiliation to shape voters' perceptions. In this article, I draw on political psychology, the women and politics literature, and recent work on partisan “trait ownership” to suggest that the application of gender stereotypes will be limited by the salience of partisan stereotypes. I use nationally representative survey data and a content analysis of news coverage from the 2006 U.S. Senate elections to test the argument. Focusing on voter evaluations of candidate traits, I find that party stereotypes are more powerful than gender stereotypes, and that assessments of candidate attributes can be affected by news coverage when candidates are portrayed in ways that challenge traditional partisan images. The results suggest that gender stereotyping is limited by the relevance of party stereotypes, and that as the Republican and Democratic parties continue to polarize at the elite level, the importance of partisan stereotyping is likely to increase.

In this study, an examination of the legal treatment of “crimes of passion” points to important gendered aspects of the construction of both reason and passion in the law. In crimes of passion, criminal responsibility is mitigated because the perpetrator was in the grip of a strong emotion – in other words, not in his or her right mind. The legal concept of passion is, therefore, society's formal recognition of the limits of reason as a basis for social behavior.

Feminist scholarship has long argued that reason in law is not neutral but reflects dominant social interests. Less attention has been given to passion as reason's recognized opposite. It might be expected that the law's partial toleration of passion would privilege different interests. But this is not the case; in effect, although passion is reason's opposite, its construction in law reflects the same dominant values. Recent efforts to eradicate gender disparities in criminal law have led to some reconsideration of the construction of reason and the recognition of passion in some systems.

The point of departure for this study is the recent work of Burden (2008) on the “gender gap” in partisanship in the United States. He shows that the preponderance of Democratic identification among women is partly a function of the measurement of party identification. When respondents were asked “Do you feel that you are” rather than, more traditionally, “Do you think of yourself as” a Democrat or Republican, the sex gap narrowed to statistical nonsignificance. Burden's explanation for this result lies in the psychology of partisanship. The traditional “think of yourself as” (or cognitive) question primes women to consider their partisanship as a social identity, which in turn activates the stereotypical association between women and the Democratic Party. The “feel that you are” (or affective) question encourages a deeper, more personalized response, rendering social identity less relevant and thereby nullifying the effect of that stereotype.

Under certain conditions, women are more likely than men to vote for women candidates, a phenomenon referred to as a “gender affinity effect.” Causal mechanisms connecting women voters to women candidates are gender consciousness, desire for descriptive representation, support for liberal social policy, the use of gender as a shortcut to vote choice among low-information voters, and a “party-sex overlap.” Existing work is focused on American elections, which tend to be candidate centered, so little is known about gender affinity effects between voters and candidates in other contexts. This article focuses on Westminster-style parliamentary systems, using the Canadian federal elections of 2000 and 2004 as test cases. Women in these systems have the same motivations to gravitate toward women candidates, for they are gender conscious and desire descriptive representation. But they do not have the same incentives to cast ballots for women because political institutions and practices tend to discourage candidate-based voting. The article pays particular attention to a segment of the electorate we call “flexible” voters, which is comprised of independents, leaners, and defectors. In Westminster systems, it is this group of voters who should be most sensitive to candidate-based considerations.

This essay explores gender scholarship about how state architectures affect women's politics. A rapidly growing literature addresses the effects of vertical and horizontal power divisions in federations. While just one in five states is a federation, federations govern 40% of the world's population (Watts 2008). Globalization and neoliberal ideology foster regionalization, devolution, and increased influence by international agencies, and so more people experience multilevel governance (MLG) in unitary states, too. Hence, feminist scholars now increasingly consider the impact of state architectures. The field's core idea is that while socioeconomic and ideological forces shape gender/power relations, governments and movements respond from within specific state architectures. Related debates involve how institutional designs shape opportunity structures, and how feminists respond to federal diversity.

Federalism seems to play a widely varying role in maintaining or undermining gender hierarchies around the world. In 1869, for example, federalism allowed Wyoming—a new state in the United States—to enfranchise women before this happened at the national level. But in Switzerland, federalism let a recalcitrant canton disenfranchise women until the 1990s—20 years after women achieved the vote on the national level (Banaszak 1996). More generally, federal institutions are associated with widely varying policies on women's rights. Table 1 groups countries according to Lijphart's (1999, Chapter 10) three measures of federalism: a numerical summary measure (column 2), whether the country is centralized or decentralized (column 3), and a dichotomous measure of federal or unitary based on the country's constitution (column 4). No matter which measure is used, gender equality policies vary greatly within each type of system. The wide variation within each category suggests that standard approaches to federalism give us little purchase on gender politics.

Latin American countries display wide variation in gender equality and organized women's capacity to mobilize and influence policy outcomes. Yet there are also many similarities in the region's political systems and sociocultural contexts that affect women's politics and its impact. These include presidential systems that, in theory, divide power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, but often concentrate power in the executive; deep social and regional inequalities; and the influence of organized religion. How these factors affect women's lives, however, is also shaped by vertical divisions of powers. Although only four Latin American states are federations (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela), most other countries undertook decentralization in the last two decades, transferring service delivery and program implementation (but not taxing authority) to regional or local levels. Because in some cases decentralization occurred under authoritarian regimes, or in newly democratizing states in the midst of fiscal crises, it has not ultimately deepened Latin American democracy.

The starting point of this essay is that the emerging literature on gender politics and state architecture needs to take seriously the insights from devolving multilevel states, as well as from formal federations and classic unitary states. The formal components of state architecture, and the dynamics of scale, are important—but hitherto neglected—features to consider in any gendered analysis of politics. We argue, however, that it is impossible to read off in any straightforward manner whether a particular form of state architecture provides a “gendered advantage.” Instead, we argue that the practice and interplay of state architecture and political actors is as important as formal features.

New and reconfigured structures of policymaking and governance present fresh challenges to gender equality seekers, especially in federal systems. In a world in which policy functions are increasingly being “uploaded” to international or supranational levels, “downloaded” to meso-level units, or “offloaded” to civil society and private enterprises (Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003), the links among institutional design, policy activism, and policy outcomes provide fruitful opportunities for empirical research and theory building. This essay asks what impact state architectures have on women's political mobilization around child care. How might we theorize the effects of different types of federation and multilevel governance on child-care activists' political opportunities and achievement of policy outcomes? How adequate are existing frameworks for explaining links among policy actors, state institutions, civil society, and international business? We sketch some preliminary answers and show how recognizing the significance of the multiple scales and layers involved in contemporary governance can expand feminist research agendas and promote gender-sensitive policymaking. Child care is increasingly understood as an essential component of contemporary welfare states (Michel and Mahon 2002). Well-designed child-care programs help time-pressed earner parents reconcile work and family life and make it possible for lone parents to improve their economic situation through paid work. Universal early childhood education and care (ECEC) also lays the foundations for lifelong learning, indispensable for success in knowledge-based, postindustrial economies. Adequate public support for ECEC systems generates good postindustrial jobs for early childhood educators who work in publicly financed, regulated settings instead of in low-paid, informal, caregiving situations (Esping-Andersen 1999). Developing high-quality, universal ECEC in federal systems with divided jurisdictional responsibility, however, faces particular challenges. Most comparative social policy and welfare regime literature ignores state architectures by assuming that unitary state forms are the norm and focusing purely on nation-state governments and policymaking (Esping-Andersen 1999). Advocacy and policy initiatives on international or meso-level scales typically are ignored or underexplored.

Even as this issue of Politics & Gender appears in print, a committee of scholars (Kimberly Morgan, Vanita Seth, and Wendy Gunther-Canada in 2011) is serving the discipline by undertaking the fascinating and painful task of choosing a book (or books) upon which to bestow the American Political Science Association's Victoria Schuck Award for Best Book on Gender Politics. Twenty three committees have given the award to 32 books since the first awards were made in 1988. The Schuck Award is one of only four association-wide book awards (the others, of course, are the Ralph Bunche Award for ethnic and cultural pluralism; the Gladys Kammerer Award for best book in U.S. national policy; and the Woodrow Wilson Award for Best Book as chosen by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation on government, politics, or international relations). How did the young field of gender politics reach such heights of scholarly recognition so soon?