As Perspectives on Politics enters its eighth year of operation, this issue marks some important changes in the journal. The most obvious change is the journal's cover design which, in bringing Perspectives in line with its two APSA sister publications, is intended to make the journal more inviting (and while you can't judge a journal by its cover, it's surely a good thing for a journal cover to look good and invite readers to discover what is inside). A second set of changes affect the journal's editorial philosophy and policy. When I assumed the journal's editorship last June I promised that I would soon share a general statement of my editorial vision. This statement immediately follows the Introduction you are now reading (it is also posted online on our website). As you will see when you read it, my editorial team and I intend to build upon the previous achievements of Perspectives at the same time that we attempt some exciting changes.

Perspectives on Politics seeks to provide a space for broad and synthetic discussion within the political science profession and between the profession and the broader scholarly and reading publics. Such discussion necessarily draws on and contributes to the scholarship published in the more specialized journals that dominate our discipline. At the same time, Perspectives seeks to promote a complementary form of broad public discussion and synergistic understanding within the profession that is essential to advancing scholarship and promoting academic community.

This lecture inquires into two existential positions that concern Robert Frost in an excerpt from his poem “Mending Wall.”

The Million Mom March (favoring gun control) and Code Pink: Women for Peace (focusing on foreign policy, especially the war in Iraq) are organizations that have mobilized women as women in an era when other women's groups struggled to maintain critical mass and turned away from non-gender-specific public issues. This article addresses how these organizations fostered collective consciousness among women, a large and diverse group, while confronting the echoes of backlash against previous mobilization efforts by women. We argue that the March and Code Pink achieved mobilization success by creating hybrid organizations that blended elements of three major collective action frames: maternalism, egalitarianism, and feminine expression. These innovative organizations invented hybrid forms that cut across movements, constituencies, and political institutions. Using surveys, interviews, and content analysis of organizational documents, this article explains how the March and Code Pink met the contemporary challenges facing women's collective action in similar yet distinct ways. It highlights the role of feminine expression and concerns about the intersectional marginalization of women in resolving the historic tensions between maternalism and egalitarianism. It demonstrates hybridity as a useful analytical lens to understand gendered organizing and other forms of grassroots collective action.

After growing for decades, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts both experienced a dramatic drop in membership during the 1970s. Since then their membership patterns have diverged as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) continues to decline and the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) has reached near record numbers. These patterns raise two questions: Why the decline? And why the divergence? On the cause of decline, I argue that a younger civil rights generation, informed by a new set of post-materialist values, did not join traditional organizations like the BSA and GSUSA because their values were deemed to be outdated. The challenge for traditional organizations therefore was how to respond. Using path dependency theory, I argue that BSA and GSUSA—shaped by their own unique origins and identities—responded very differently to the critical juncture of the civil rights generation, which in turn explains the subsequent divergence in membership patterns from the 1980s onward. While the BSA rejects such changes in order to defend traditional values, the GSUSA, which established a commitment to challenging gender norms from its birth, embraces the new values and adapts virtually every aspect of its organizational identity to this new generation. As young people see themselves reflected back in the values endorsed by the GSUSA, its membership resurges, while the BSA continues to decline. I conclude by drawing out larger theoretical lessons on the meaning of change in American civil society in light of an increasingly diverse population.

American women attain more professional success in medicine, business, and higher education than do most of their counterparts around the world. An enduring puzzle is, therefore, why the US lags so far behind other countries when it comes to women's political representation. In 2008, women held only 16.8 percent of seats in the House of Representatives, a proportion that ranks America lower than 83 other countries. This article addresses this conundrum. It establishes that equal rights alone are insufficient to ensure equal access to political office. Also necessary are public policies representing maternal traits that voters associate with women. Such policies have feedback effects that teach voters that the maternal traits attributed to women represent strengths not only in the private sphere of the home but also in the public sphere of the state. Most other democracies now have such policies in place, but the United States lacks such policies, which accounts for its laggard status with regard to the political representation of women.

While studies typically find that women know less about politics than do men, feminist scholars have argued that these findings reflect gender-biased measures that underestimate women's political knowledge. This article evaluates the feminist critique by taking a more expansive view of what constitutes political knowledge. Using data from a large Canadian urban sample, we show that gender gaps close or even reverse when people are queried about more practical aspects of political knowledge, such as government benefits and services. Our results also demonstrate that this type of knowledge is more equally distributed than its conventional counterpart, though the women who are the most likely to need government services and benefits are often the least likely to know about them. Finally, we show that knowledge of government services and benefits has a significant effect on women's intended vote choice. This article thus shows that more practical types of political knowledge might serve as meaningful additions to existing definitions and measures of political knowledge.

In 2006, President Bush publicly stated that, in relation to the same-sex marriage issue, “activist judges” were thwarting the preferred policy of the elected representatives and the expression of popular will embodied in popular initiatives and constitutional amendments. Notwithstanding the philosophical discussion of the constitutionally assigned role of courts in the political system and the idea of judicial independence, President Bush's statement raises an interesting empirical question: In the case of same-sex marriage, have state and federal courts really acted in direct opposition to the expressed policy preferences of current or recent legislative majorities or overturned popular initiatives and constitutional amendments? Using evidence from state and federal legislative and judicial action around same-sex marriage primarily from the fifteen years preceding President Bush's 2006 statement, I argue that, with some rare exceptions, judges can not easily be identified as “activist” on the issue of same-sex marriage even if we assess their actions according to President Bush's criteria.

Military stalemate in Iraq and Vietnam presents a puzzle: why do presidents persist in a strategic course that has failed to secure the goals they defined when they chose to embark upon war? In the face of a quagmire, presidents might choose among three broad strategic options—disengagement, escalation, or continuity. I argue that the first alternative, to withdraw, is made impossible by the inflated rhetoric presidents invoke to sell a skeptical public on the necessity for a limited war and by their own conviction (reinforced by core supporters) that the price of defeat is too great. At the opposite pole lies the possibility of full-scale mobilization. But because presidents during the Vietnam and Iraq wars believed they could also pursue expensive domestic agendas, they did not reserve the resources needed for large-scale escalation. In the both cases, too, civilian leaders were deeply skeptical about their military counterparts and discounted their caution that a greater military commitment would be needed. Finally, as wars drag on, public disenchantment prevents presidents from mustering the political support escalation would require. Their early decisions thus leave them with no alternative to their current strategic commitment.

Political scientists and political theorists debate the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Blogs provide an important testing ground for their claims. We examine deliberation, polarization, and political participation among blog readers. We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US senators. Blog readers also participate more in politics than non-blog readers. Readers of blogs of different ideological dispositions do not participate less than those who read only blogs of one ideological disposition. Instead, readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively leftwing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs. This may reflect social movement-building efforts by left-wing bloggers.

This symposium is the culmination of work that began in October 2007, when fourteen scholars from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States convened at Case Western Reserve University to participate in the research conference Toward a Comparative Politics of Gender: Advancing the Discipline along Interdisciplinary Boundaries. The conference was funded by a Presidential Initiative Grant from the University and further supported by an ACES grant. Dr. Gregory Eastwood made available the Library of the Inamori Center for Ethnics and Excellence for our conference meetings. Many thanks to Linda Gilmore, Tonae Bolton-Dove, Gail Papay, Shelley White, and Sharon Skowronski for their expert administrative support. Professors Dorothy Miller (Women's Studies), Rosalind Simson (Philosophy, Law and Women's Studies), and Kelly McMann (Political Science and International Studies) served as discussants of the conference papers. To Theda Skocpol, who presented remarks at the opening dinner of the conference, and to the scholars who participated in the CPG conference and whose contributions are included in this symposium, I offer my deepest appreciation and gratitude.

What do we mean by a comparative politics of gender? How would a comparative politics of gender advance our understanding of politics generally? What would it take to develop a gendered comparative political analysis? In the essays that follow, Teri Caraway, Louise Chappell, Leslie Schwindt-Bayer, and Aili Mari Tripp elaborate their understandings of a comparative politics of gender. Five additional essays focus specifically on issues of democratization (Lisa Baldez, Georgina Waylen), political institutions and representation (Mili Caul Kittilson, Mona Lena Krook), and comparative sex equality policies (Mala Htun and Laurel Weldon). In this introductory essay, I discuss what I mean by “gender” in the context of comparative politics. Briefly enumerating the advantages of comparative politics as a subfield for a gendered analysis of political phenomena, I discuss how a comparative politics of gender can serve to advance our understanding of politics generally, and I provide an example of subfield research—the study of political violence—where gender as a metaconcept may be particularly useful. I conclude by considering what it would mean to our study of gender and of comparative politics to place gender as a central concept in comparative political research and to move to a comparative politics of gender.

This essay offers a conceptualization of a comparative politics of gender (CPG) and some explanations for why CPG work is marginalized in the comparative politics subfield. I delineate CPG as a field of study in which gendered dependent or independent variables are the defining feature and present illustrative examples of four different types of CPG research. I contend that institutional and historical factors account for much of the marginalization of CPG research, and I propose some courses of actions through which CPG scholars can lessen this marginalization. The failure of comparative politics scholars to engage with gendered work is also a serious problem. The essay concludes by offering some suggestions for better integrating CPG scholarship into the subfield.

Moving from a “gender and comparative politics” to a “comparative politics of gender” is a challenging proposition. In this essay, I offer two mechanisms for doing this—emphasizing the comparative nature of gender politics research and encouraging greater integration of gender research into the subfield of comparative politics. I illustrate how current research generally uses a “gender and comparative politics” approach that is insufficient for advancing the field and then describe how scholars can work to emphasize greater comparison and integration in the literature. This will help to move the gender and politics literature toward a comparative politics of gender.

A comparative politics of gender offers an opportunity to consider in detail the operation of gender within political institutions. As such, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the roles and experiences of men and women within political institutions, of the policies, laws and norms that are the outcomes of these institutions, and of the relationship between these institutions and social actors. This essay proposes a multi-directional strategy for undertaking comparative gender and institutional research that includes taking account of similarities and differences within and across states, between states and international institutions, across space as well as across time. It argues that through this research strategy it is possible to gain a more nuanced understanding of gender processes and outcomes, which is valuable to those working both inside and outside political institutions to advance a women's equality agenda.

I ask whether comparative politics of gender (CPG) can maintain its normative roots in concerns related to social justice as it moves increasingly away from its interdisciplinary moorings in gender/women's studies and gravitates toward disciplinary concerns. I call for a broad framework for CPG, examining 1) the range and relevance of the questions we ask, the utility of interdisciplinarity, and the range of methods employed; 2) the research collaborations we develop, especially outside of the US–Europe nexus; 3) the way our work is disseminated; and 4) how it engages the policy and practitioner community.

What accounts for the glaring inattention to work on gender within mainstream political science? Part of the problem lies in the substance of scholarship itself. The concepts, central questions, and key variables that predominate in the mainstream literature on comparative democratization and in the literature on gender and democratization have contributed to the gulf between them. But a more fundamental explanation lies in the starting assumptions of scholars in the two camps. Mainstream scholars rarely question whether gender is relevant to politics, and gender scholars rarely question whether gender isn't relevant to politics. I illustrate some ways in which gender could be incorporated into mainstream work, and discuss how gender research could be made more broadly comparative.

This essay proposes a framework to analyze cross-national variation in women's legal rights. To explore the distinct logics of policy change, we disaggregate sex equality policies on two dimensions: 1) whether they improve the status of women as a group or alleviate gender-based class inequalities, and 2) whether or not they challenge the doctrine of organized religion and the codified tradition of major cultural groups. We show that policies promoting gender equality seek fundamental social change and therefore challenge historical patterns of state-society interaction concerning relations between the state and the market; the respective authority of the state, religion, and cultural groups; and the contours of citizenship. Different issues, however, challenge different aspects of these relations. What's more, the priorities, strategies, and effectiveness of advocates and opponents of change (including women's movements, left parties, international NGOs, and organized religion) are shaped by state capacity, policy legacies, international vulnerability, and the degree of democracy.

Integrating the behavioral and institutional approaches to comparative politics will provide a more comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding why differences in political engagement among men and women vary cross-nationally and cross-temporally. This essay advances the argument that gender-related policies and institutions are not only outcomes in the political process, but also exert powerful influence over citizens' interests, values, and perceptions of politics. This policy feedback loop has implications for a wide array of political attitudes and activities—from political interest to running for elected office. Specifically, the adoption and expansion of national policies on issues such as equal wages, childcare provision, paid maternity leave, and violence against women carry important messages to the electorate: Issues that disproportionately affect women, long considered private, have become important national policy choices.

I explore some of the limits and possibilities for a comparative politics of gender (CPG). It argues that a CPG should analyze how major political processes and institutions are gendered thereby increasing our understanding of the major themes of comparative politics and enhancing the subfield. But a CPG should also go beyond this. It should be problem driven and should seek to answer some “big questions” that are important for any efforts to achieve gender equality such as how political change that lessens gender inequality occurs; and how positive gender outcomes come about in a range of contexts. A CPG therefore has an integral connection to a feminist project. I explore some of these themes using the recent literature on gender and transitions to democracy to answer the question under what circumstances can the gender outcomes of transitions be positive.

How does a comparative politics of gender improve our understanding of political representation? I map the existing feminist literature on this topic, which asks questions like why there are so few women elected to political office, whether women in politics represent women as a group, and how the presence or absence of women in politics affects voter perceptions and opinions. I then consider how scholars—both feminist and non-feminist—might generate new insights on political representation by expanding what is thought of as a “case” and what is meant by the term “gender.” I recommend increasing the scope of comparison by (1) opening up the definition of a case to include a broader range of units and events and (2) connecting the study of a single unit to patterns generated by the study of other similar units. I suggest moving away from equating women with gender by exploring (1) relations between women and men and (2) the impact of masculinities and femininities on the conduct of political life. While developed in relation to research on representation, this approach offers broader advice for capturing the diverse and gendered nature of political dynamics observed around the world.