Cabinet committees are important sites of executive politics in Canada. This article examines the extent to which two representational attributes—gender and region—determine influence, as a function of cabinet committee structure. Employing a dataset of ministers under the three most recent prime ministers, I find that female ministers are less likely than male ministers to be influential in terms of connections to other ministers, to belong to the core of most influential ministers and to be represented on the most powerful committees or chairing committees. However, there is evidence of improvement over time. While regional representation is an imperative in cabinet making for Canadian prime ministers, its role in determining ministerial influence within committees is not evident: ministers from less-represented regions are no more likely to be influential than other ministers. This analysis highlights a neglected but central arena for social representation in Canadian government.

We present the results of a randomized survey experiment demonstrating that the public evaluates women politicians more highly than men across multiple characteristic assessments. This finding is consistent with a recent wave of research indicating greater preferences for women politicians. Which respondents rate women politicians more highly, and why? We find that women and younger voters do not account for the greater marks given to women politicians. Instead, respondent partisanship and the presumed partisanship of the politician account for a great deal of our findings, with gender playing a complicating role. Democratic and Republican respondents are apt to project their own partisanship onto politicians, and across both parties, we find higher assessments for co-partisan politicians and for women politicians. On the whole, women politicians are evaluated on par with or significantly higher than men politicians across six characteristics, scoring especially well relative to men when politicians are presumed to be members of the opposing party and when traditionally feminine characteristics are assessed.

This article seeks to understand why Ghana, unlike several other African countries, has seen relatively few women appointed as ministers to the cabinet since the transition to democracy. We draw on Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet's 2019 book Cabinets, Ministers and Gender, which provides an in-depth analysis of the cabinet appointment process in seven democracies (but no African cases) and demonstrates that the cabinet appointment process is gendered—that is, men and women have different (and unequal) opportunities to be appointed as cabinet ministers. This article covers Ghana's Fourth Republic, during which women's presence in cabinets has increased slowly but steadily. We rely on media reports from five recent presidential administrations and semistructured, in-depth interviews with selected informants, as well as other primary and secondary sources. We find that while Ghana has a fairly empowered president who could appoint a gender parity cabinet, the formal and informal rules governing the selection of cabinet ministers—for example, those related to regional balance and “minister MPs”—work against more women in the cabinet.

Recent decades have seen a surge in women occupying positions of political power. This has been welcomed in part as a means of achieving better policy outcomes for women. We interrogate this proposition, developing a “gendered accountability” framework to explain when and how female representation promotes the implementation of policies that women prioritize. Our empirical analysis applies this framework to sub-Saharan Africa, home to the largest recent expansion in women’s political representation. We find that increased female representation in the legislature is robustly associated with reduced infant and child mortality as well as greater spending on health. Effects are magnified when women are more active in civil society and appear primarily in countries that have gender quotas and proportional electoral systems. Thus, while female representation can lead to improved policy outcomes for women, the process is not automatic and is unlikely to occur absent key institutional and societal conditions.

Citizens hold gender-specific stereotypes about women in political office, yet scholars disagree on whether these stereotypes lead to a “double bind” in which female legislators are held to higher standards than male legislators. Two survey experiments reveal how citizen evaluations of elite responsiveness to constituent mail are conditioned by gender and sexist attitudes. The findings suggest that a double bind does exist in legislator–constituent communication, even among people who have positive views of women. For instance, although the least sexist respondents favor communication from female legislators regardless of the quality of communication, they also punish women, but not men, for taking longer to respond to constituent mail. Male legislators are also more likely to be rewarded for being friendly as respondents’ sexism increases, but female legislators do not enjoy the same advantage, likely due to gender stereotypes and expectations regarding women's behavior.

Where female representatives are located within legislatures and what they do matters for the substantive representation of women. Previous scholarship has found that female parliamentary committee members participate differently than their male counterparts in relation to both policy area and status of positions held. Here, we draw on an original time-series data set (n = 9,767) to analyze the U.K. select committee system. We test for the impact of four variables previously found to be important in explaining changes in gendered divisions of labor: the system of appointment/election, the proportion of female representatives in the legislature, sharp increases in the number of female representatives, and changes in government from right-wing parties to left-wing parties. We find that horizontal and vertical divisions of labor persist over time and that membership patterns in the United Kingdom mainly correspond to those found elsewhere. Moreover, there is little evidence that any of the four variables have systematically affected membership patterns.

Like many other countries, Brazil has adopted gender quotas in elections for legislatures at all levels of the federation. However, Brazilian gender quotas have been ineffective at increasing women's participation in politics. Authors usually point to reasons related to the electoral system and party structure. This article analyzes a variable that is rarely considered: the role of the Electoral Court. We argue that the quality and intensity of the control exercised by an electoral court, when called upon to decide on the enforcement of the gender quota law, can influence the efficacy of this policy. We show that, in general, the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court tends to foster the participation of women in politics. However, based on two divides—between easy and difficult cases and between cases with low and high impact—we argue that in the realm of gender quotas, this court takes a rather restrained stance in those cases considered both difficult and with high impact.

Increasing numbers of female candidates are running for Congress in American national elections. Despite the rise in female candidates running for office, women are not significantly increasing their presence in the House and Senate. A much hypothesized influence over the electoral fates of female candidates is the role of gender stereotypes. However, political science scholars have struggled to pinpoint the effect of stereotypes on vote choice, if there is any effect. This essay compares the way social psychology and political science scholars theoretically, conceptually and empirically test for gender stereotype influence over evaluations of female candidates and politicians. Differences emerge in the theoretical assumptions made in the two disciplines, the types of measures used in research, and the empirical tests conducted to demonstrate the presence or absence of stereotypes in evaluations of women. The discussion explores how scholars studying female candidates and politicians can integrate insights from social psychology to clarify the role of stereotypes in candidate evaluation and choice.