Scholars of marginalized groups are experts on attitudes, behaviors, practices, and institutions that resist inclusion and reproduce bias. Many scholars who study marginalization also work from first-hand experience of it. Although academic experiences of marginalization usually occur in sites of middle-class privilege, the effects can be profound. Women in the U.S. political science profession continue to be underrepresented, and women of color severely so. This sends the message to all students that women lack the capacity to be scientists. Women in academe often internalize that message and too rarely seek leadership positions. When they do, their achievements are characterized as tokenism and devalued, revealing a hostile gender climate that enables bias to flourish. That bias is reflected in salary discrepancies, resource distribution, and service responsibilities (e.g., APSA 2011; Monroe et al. 2008).

Most would concur that the American state, from its very founding and still today, builds upon liberal principles asserting the fundamental equality of all individuals. What is more, social movements have been successful in demanding that the state treat all individuals the same “in spite of” their group differences, thereby promoting the inclusion of people initially discriminated against on the basis of their group difference. This is no small task, as history tells us. For example, we have recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Movement, which exemplify the demand for equal treatment of individuals “in spite of” their race. John Lewis, an African-American civil rights activist, testifies, for example, as to how difficult this was, based on his experience fifty years ago. When he traveled during those times, he ran into racial segregation everywhere, including housing, hotels, restaurants, and public restrooms. His goal was desegregation—that is, to integrate public facilities so that all individuals would have access on equal bases with everyone else (Stolberg 2013).

The aim of the article is to develop our understanding of the role bodies play in processes of institutional change. It does so through developing an approach to the politics of institutional newness that highlights the way in which raced and gendered bodies can become entangled with claims to, or judgements of, “being new.” These questions are explored through South Africa's Constitutional Court, newly established as part of South Africa's transition to democracy in the 1990s and at the center of the broader claims being made about the creation of a new democratic, nonracial, and non-sexist South Africa. Focusing on judicial appointments to the Constitutional Court since 1994, the article draws attention to the ways in which historically excluded bodies, women and black men, have been included into this new space within the judiciary. It is argued that exploring the ways in which institutions lay claim to “being new” through the bodies of historically excluded groups is important for our understanding of the dynamics of institutional change being constituted.

Women's representation in national legislatures varies widely around the world. In 2012, only Rwanda and Andorra had achieved parity in women's representation in the national parliament, with 56% of the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies being female and exactly half the Andorran General Council represented by each sex. In many other countries, women still have little representation in the national legislature, despite being almost 50% of the population. A large body of research has emerged to try to explain the wide variation across countries, with most of it focusing on cultural, socioeconomic, and electoral explanations (e.g., McDonagh 2002; Norris 1985; Reynolds 1999; Rule 1987; Tripp and Kang 2008). Recent scholarship, however, has suggested that the legislature itself is a gendered institution that marginalizes women and argues for greater attention to understanding exactly how legislative institutions affect women's representation (Beckwith 2005; Chappell 2006; 2010; Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1995; Hawkesworth 2003; 2005; Krook and Mackay 2011; Schwindt-Bayer 2010).

The European Union (EU) consists of 27 nation states, and its motto “united in diversity” refers to the right of EU citizens to cross borders and work and live legally in another EU country as well as to the accommodation of national minorities. In spite of this common fate, “diversity” issues have increasingly been associated with conflicts between citizens and noncitizens about integration of new migrant groups. At a time of rising populism in Europe, it is important to assess how major political actors of the European Public Sphere (EPS) articulate issues regarding the intersection of gender and ethnic diversity. To do so, this article draws on the findings from the Eurosphere project, which compares sixteen European countries to investigate the inclusion or exclusion of women and minority groups in the EPS (Siim & Mokre 2013). The Eurosphere project provides timely insight into how key actors representing selected political parties and social movements/NGOs across Europe perceive intersections of gender and ethnic diversity.

The question of whether or not we still need a women's movement is legitimate and important, but it usually presumes a conflation of women with feminist. Certainly, significant gains in women's rights and status are due to decades of feminist activism, but feminists have not been the only ones advocating on behalf of women. Indeed, as long as there have been feminist women's movements, there have been conservative women contesting them. The increase in the number of conservative women running for office and the growth of a conservative women's movement prompts further questions about identity and representation, women's interests, and the future of feminism itself.

J. R. R. Tolkien once suggested that “short cuts make long delays.” While Tolkien was not talking about improving the situation of women in political science, this essay argues that those of us interested in making political science less alienating for women would do well to heed his advice.

Rape crisis centers, which provide supportive services to survivors of sexual assault, are commonly lauded as one of the most successful and lasting transformations achieved by second-wave feminism (Bevacqua 2000; Martin 2005; Schmitt and Martin 2007). But the advocates who work in these centers overwhelmingly reject the use of the word “feminist” to describe themselves or the work of their agencies (Campbell, Baker, and Mazurak 1998; Corrigan 2013; Maier 2008). Here, I describe this puzzling disconnect between feminist consciousness and feminist practice and offer a theory of why the incorporation of feminist analysis could enrich the provision of services on the ground.

The history of the origins of the concept of intersectionality is deeply embedded in the U.S. context. The intertwined histories of the American women's movements and American race relations as well as the conjunction of several theoretical strands, such as the philosophical critique of the modern subject, poststructuralism, the critique from feminists of color, and critical legal studies, have marked the genesis and the operationalization of the concept of intersectionality in American feminist studies (Ackerly and McDermott 2011, Dhamoon 2011). This legacy has given the concept of intersectionality particular analytical contents, preferred objects of inquiry, and methodologies as well as specific political aims (McCall 2005). Kimberlé Crenshaw's initial formulation of intersectionality exemplifies this U.S. genealogy since it represents a joint analytical and political effort, embedded in critical legal studies and black feminist theory, to identify and promote the political identity of African-American women or, as she writes, to “demarginalize” their political interests and to critique single axis approaches to inequality and discrimination (Crenshaw 1991). By doing so, the concept of intersectionality not only makes visible the categories and groups that were marginalized in theory and political practice, but also articulates a new set of political interests and, to a certain extent, contributes to construct and to represent intersectional identities.

Advocates have been striving for decades to improve the representation of women and people of color in the academy. The results in political science have been fairly limited. From 1980 to 2010, the proportion of women among white political science faculty grew from 9.6% to 24.8% (APSA 2011, 44). Even with this sizable increase, women constituted fewer than a quarter of white political scientists. Within their respective ethnoracial groups, women of color made up a greater proportion of political science faculty but remain woefully underrepresented in the profession, with only 79 Latino, 161 African American, and 117 Asian American female political science faculty nationally in 2010 (APSA 2011, 44–46). Overall, the proportion of scholars of color within political science during this period, male and female, has remained largely flat; in 2010, 88.9% of political science faculty were white. In this essay, I argue that an intersectional approach to thinking about this issue—one that acknowledges the marginalization and privilege that cut across faculty within departments and universities—raises the possibility of changing the conversation about inclusion, potentially opening up new possibilities for making substantive change within political science departments and universities.

This essay draws on insights from research into human rights activism to propose a feminist human rights account of leadership that could be applied to political science. I advance the view that the practice of leadership is one of building networks and strengthening the capacity of others to advocate for themselves and their communities. In this view, leadership leverages the political and strategic capacities made possible by relative positions of privilege and so transforms the networks, capacities, and privileges of others. Mentoring is an integral part of this activist approach to leadership. In this view, leadership and mentoring are about developing the networks that make transformation possible; they are collective and political. For illustration, I begin with insights about the importance of networks learned through a personal experience in Bangladesh and juxtapose that experience with the experience of Bangladeshi labor rights organizers before providing a more general account of two key aspects of this leadership: building networks and strengthening capacity in others.

We can and should use a wide range of measures and methods to study institutions; we need a combination of approaches to chart such complex phenomena meaningfully. This is true for all kinds of institutions, both formal and informal. In this essay I argue that statistical methods, including large-scale cross-national analyses, can be fruitfully employed by feminists and others seeking new insights into institutional change. Moreover, large-scale cross-national studies offer the opportunity to examine our ideas about institutions in ways that are not possible in smaller, localized studies. Statistical methods and large-scale cross-national studies offer the tools to parse out the degree to which varying elements of the contexts and characteristics of institutions shape their operation and outcomes. They strengthen the power of arguments about the general application of the findings in specific cases and provide tools for assessing the impact of chance. Thus, although qualitative and quantitative techniques are best used together, or at least are best used when they inform each other, statistical techniques in general and large-scale cross-national analyses in particular offer insights not available with other approaches. Here I mainly discuss these arguments as they apply to informal institutions, where methodological challenges are the greatest, but the points I make here should apply to research on all kinds of institutions.

It is important to take the time and look both backward and forward at the women's movement: how it has influenced the past and how it is likely to be important in the future. But why do we ask this question in the first place?

In this article, we argue that in order to understand and counter the asymmetrical effects of the current economic crisis, intersectional analyses and coalition building are required. Our research aims to address a tendency in some intersectionality research to underplay or sideline social class and capitalist relations (Anthias 2012, 6, 15; Skeggs 2008). Our goal is to expand intersectionality to questions of political economy that are not typically viewed through this lens (Strolovitch 2013, 168). Sophisticated theorizations of social locations, divisions, processes of differentiation, and systems of domination (Dhamoon 2011) within intersectionality literature can thus become tools to name and challenge the effects of the economic crises that are deepening social and economic inequalities in Europe.

Anthropologists and new institutionalist scholars studying politics share an interest in rules, norms, and power. The former tend to agree more closely with those researchers who rely on inductive empiricism rather than deductive research methods, take an historical perspective, and treat ambiguities as part of the study rather than an inconvenience. As Olivier de Sardan argues, those institutionalist approaches that tend to rely on abstract, predetermined structures contrast with the way anthropologists see social norms as emerging out of interaction between people in specific contexts (2014, 288).

There are many good reasons why we still need a women's movement in this country. Here I shall focus on just one: I argue that we need a women's movement to recruit and support women as candidates for public office.

Debates about whether states can act intersectionally have resulted in mostly negative responses (Kantola and Nousiainen 2009; Koldinská 2009; Lombardo and Verloo 2009; Skjeie and Langvasbråten 2009; Squires 2008). Notably, most of the theorizing on this concern is situated within a European context in which scholars are grappling simultaneously with the questions of whether states can act intersectionally, and what intersectionality itself means within local contexts outside of its U.S. genesis. That is, scholars are asking both whether states can be committed to acting intersectionally and whether and how the theory travels in the first place. Similar concerns are relevant to the Latin American case, where, as is true for Europe, there is some promotion of intersectional action at the level of academic theorizing, state, and civil society, alongside some ambivalence about whether and how the concept is meaningful at the local level. States like Uruguay are open to fostering a more inclusive environment because of the commitment of its own state actors, what might be termed diffuse support at the international level, and the work of local actors who see the need—and some of whom have pushed for—greater insertion. But this openness is accompanied by a lack of clarity around, and ambivalence about, intersectionality even within the context of the state, much less among the organized community. I focus here on said ambivalence and the incomplete elaboration of intersectionality within the National Women's Institute (Inmujeres), which is exemplified by distinct approaches to intersectionality within the Institution, distinct approaches to the question of difference, and a lack of civil society insertion.