Less than a year ago, Politics & Gender made its debut at the American Political Science Association meetings in Washington, DC, at a reception graciously held by our publishers at Cambridge University Press. Past, present, and future presidents of the APSA, members of the Women and Politics Research Section, and scores of colleagues joined us to celebrate the publication of Volume I, Issue 1. We were buoyed by the enthusiastic reception but more than a little anxious about the work that lay ahead. Now, with four issues completed, we'd like to review what we've accomplished and reflect on the scholarly shape the journal has begun to take.

January 2006.

Women's groups emphasize the view that women are viable candidates in American politics with the popular slogan “when women run, women win.” What do party leaders believe about women's electoral chances? Do parties know that “women win”? In an analysis of state legislative election results, I find few gender differences in candidates' vote share and success rates—two widely used measures of the status of women candidates. Yet I find that many party leaders report that one gender has an electoral advantage. These party leader perceptions are related to the objective measures of women's electoral success to some extent. However, most analyses reveal a gap between elite perceptions and objective measures of women's status as candidates. This disjuncture suggests that scholars may have overestimated the extent of party leader and voter support for women.I thank Timothy Frye, Claudine Gay, Kathryn Pearson, Beth Reingold, Lisa Sanbonmatsu, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. I also thank Nanaho Hanada, Heidi Bruns, Lyndsey Young, Huma Khan, and Tina Pierce for research assistance.

Since its foundation, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promoted gender equality, at least at the level of official rhetoric. Despite some progress in their social and economic lives, women have not been able to make headway in Chinese politics. Many scholars have studied this topic, but due to the CCP's political sensitivity, systematic data are not available. Drawing on a unique data set about provincial-level elites, I quantify gender inequality in Chinese politics and test several commonly held hypotheses. Although most empirical studies of Chinese women in politics focus on the National People's Congress (NPC), this paper focuses on officials in the Party-State, on the grounds that they wield more power than members of the NPC. Female leaders of the Party-State are more likely to be drawn from nonparty members and to occupy less prestigious positions than male leaders. There is no evidence, however, indicating that women and ethnic minority status are associated, or that women face more difficulties entering more powerful branches of the Party-State. Cross-regional analysis finds that political institutions, socioeconomic conditions, and culture have all played some role in promoting or hindering women's political careers.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago. I thank Louise Davidson-Schmich, Ying Huang, Marc Moskowitz, Dali Yang, two editors, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and excellent suggestions. Anesa Uda-Diaz has offered excellent research support.

The name “Radical Cheerleaders” refers to loosely organized groups of women and men who use creative cheers and costumes to engage in political protest. This article explores the ways in which the Radical Cheerleaders challenge gendered assumptions about women's political activity. Through their aggressive presence on the streets, their rejection of norms of civility, and their use of humor, the Radical Cheerleaders (ab)use the traditionally gendered practice of cheering to stage transgressive political spectacles that cannot easily be subsumed into or appropriated by mainstream political discourse. The Radical Cheerleaders' tactics, in other words, resist governmentality. In so doing, they trouble our ideas about political deliberation and citizenship and expand the boundaries of the contemporary public sphere.

This study aims to advance our understanding of why women are underrepresented in legislatures around the world, and what accounts for the wide variation over time and across countries. Scholars generally agree on many of the favorable conditions for women to enter parliament, including, inter alia, proportional representation, leftism in government, and female employment. However, the mechanisms that link women's seat shares to the supposed explanatory factors are still poorly understood. In this study, we argue that the key link resides in welfare state policies that 1) free women to enter the paid workforce, 2) provide public sector jobs that disproportionately employ women, and 3) change the political interests of working women enough to create an ideological gender gap. The emergence of this gender gap, in turn, creates incentives for parties to compete for the female vote, and one way that they do so is to include more and more women in their parliamentary delegations.We are grateful to Natsu Matsuda for capable research assistance, to Torben Iversen for sharing data, and to Ethan Scheiner and Bing Powell for helpful comments as discussant for this paper at a panel at the 2004 American Political Science Association meetings in Chicago. Thies also acknowledges the support of a grant from the UCLA Academic Senate's Committee on Research.

Although the idea of intersectionality has been widely accepted by social, political, and feminist theorists, little work on intersection has made its way into empirical studies within the social sciences. Because of the diversity of the California electorate, the 2003 California recall election provides a unique opportunity to explore differences in vote choice among women and men from different racial groups. In addition, the context of the recall, including the existence of allegations of sexual misconduct against one of the front-runners in the race for a replacement candidate, makes it an excellent case for testing the existence of intersection. We find that despite the unique nature of this election, partisanship was a significant predictor of vote choice. Additionally, we find that voting on the recall was racially polarized, and that gender affected vote choice more among whites than among other racial groups. These findings have important implications for theoretical models within the subfields of gender and politics and race and politics. At a minimum, our findings suggest that models testing for the effects of race, class, and gender in American society need to treat these factors as mutually constitutive categories of marginalization and privilege, rather than as simple, discrete categories.

In recent years, more than a hundred countries have adopted quotas for the selection of female candidates to political office. Examining individual cases of quota reform, scholars offer four basic causal stories to explain quota adoption: Women mobilize for quotas to increase women's representation, political elites recognize strategic advantages for supporting quotas, quotas are consistent with existing or emerging notions of equality and representation, and quotas are supported by international norms and spread through transnational sharing. Although most research focuses on the first three accounts, I argue that the fourth offers the greatest potential for understanding the rapid diffusion of gender quota policies, as it explicitly addresses the potential connections among quota campaigns. In a theory-building exercise, I combine empirical work on gender quotas with insights from the international norms literature to identify four distinct international and transnational influences on national quota debates: international imposition, transnational emulation, international tipping, and international blockage. These patterns reveal that domestic debates often have international and transnational dimensions, at the same time that they intersect in distinct ways with international and transnational trends. As work on gender quotas continues to grow, therefore, I call on scholars to move away from simple accounts of diffusion to a recognition of the multiple processes shaping the spread of candidate gender quotas worldwide.I would like to thank Judith Squires, Sarah Childs, Ewan Harrison, and participants in the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy Graduate Fellows Workshop at Columbia University, as well as the editors and three anonymous reviewers at Politics & Gender, for their helpful comments. Earlier versions of this article were presented as a paper at the International Studies Association Annual International Convention, Montreal, Canada, March 17–20, 2004, and at the British International Studies Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, December 20–22, 2004.

Having and raising children bring about tremendous change in the lives of parents, and it seems likely that these changes may have a political dimension to them. In this article, we use National Election Studies data from 1984 to 2000 to explore the impact of children on social welfare policy attitudes, with special focus on how children influence the sexes differently. Our findings show that having children does have a significant effect and affects the views of men and women differently. Women with children were significantly more liberal on social welfare issues than those without, whereas children had either no effect or possibly a conservative impact on the views of men. Moreover, the impact of parenthood grows stronger across the 1990s. We argue that two factors lie behind the increased and gendered impact of parenthood: the changing nature of the American family, particularly the role of mothers, and the politicization of the American family.

This article explores U.S. teenage girls' rejections of “politics,” arguing that for some girls, the refusal to identify with politics is a discursive strategy informed by their consciousness of inequality and their commitments to social justice. Drawing upon interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, I show how two different groups of girls reflect on their varied experiences of political marginalization as aged, gendered, racialized, and classed subjects in order to develop a critique of the practices and policies of the U.S. government. Building on research on the various and complex meanings of political disaffection, I argue that defining politics very narrowly and then distancing oneself from it can be part of an oppositional political project, and I address myself to the implications and mechanisms of girls' use of this strategy.The author would like to thank France Winddance Twine, Verta Taylor, Avery Gordon, Richard Flacks, Leila Rupp, and the editors and reviewers from Politics & Gender for their insightful comments and assistance in the development of this article. This material is based upon work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Candidate dropouts are a crucial and understudied population; they represent a significant source for increasing women's candidacies and addressing the gender imbalance in office. Survey evidence demonstrates that women are discouraged from running in districts in which their party is strong, while men are discouraged from running in districts in which their party is weak. Are women more likely to drop out of an election race than are men? If so, why? Using election records and an original survey, this article examines the experiences of all declared candidates for the state legislature in Florida in 2000 and 2002. The sample includes candidates who won office, who lost their races, or who dropped out along the way. Evidence here shows that women are no more likely to drop out of a state legislative race than are men. Among dropouts, however, women are disproportionately likely to drop out from districts in which their party is strong. The results offer support for the contention that political elites continue to value men's political leadership more than women's, and that increasing the number of female officeholders may require efforts to support declared women candidates in the earliest stages of their candidacies.A previous version of this research was presented as a paper at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. My thanks to Kira Sanbonmatsu for helpful comments on this study.

This study explores how the state genders citizens' attitudes toward women by examining differences between East and West Germany in gender role attitudes since unification. Compared to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was a stronger supporter of women's employment, although the two countries did not differ greatly in their policies on women's roles within the family. Using four waves of the German Social Survey, I examine whether East–West differences in gender role attitudes are explained by: 1) institutional learning (socialization under a particular regime) or 2) compositional effects (variation in the distribution of causal factors, specifically women's employment or religious affiliation). Analyses suggest that both types of factors influenced East–West differences in gender role attitudes. Even when other characteristics are included in the model, East and West Germans continue to differ in their gender role attitudes. Women's employment and religiosity—both heavily influenced by GDR policies—continue to play a large role in determining gender role attitudes even 15 years after unification. The results suggest that gendered state policies are reflected in citizens' gender role attitudes both directly and through changes in the social characteristics of the population.The early stages of this research were supported in part by the Alexander von Humboldt Bundeskanzler Fellowship Program. I would like to thank Sarah Poggione, Maria Inclan, and Jonah Victor for their assistance in data management and analysis, and Marie Pierson for help in preparation of the final manuscript. I am also grateful to Eric Plutzer, Robert Rohrschneider, and the reviewers and editors of Politics & Gender for their suggestions and comments.

Support for gender equality in the United States has gradually increased from the 1970s onward. Nonetheless, significant and varying gender gaps in this support become evident when we analyze public opinion over time and across generations. I utilize longitudinal survey data from national samples of three generations that came of age in the pre–women's movement era, during the era, and in the postmovement era, respectively. Three main indicators of attitudes about gender equality are employed and two types of gaps are formulated. Contemporaneous gender gaps—the differences between men and women at a given time—tended to increase over time and across succeeding generations. Longitudinal gaps, the differences in support between men and women across generations at different points in time, took the form of women becoming more liberal than men. Signs of growing resentment or ambivalence about gender equality among men appeared in the postmovement generation. A combination of generation and period effects accounts for these dynamics, the key factor being the interaction of gender with generational location and secular tides.The most recent support for the research reported here comes from the National Science Foundation and the Academic Senate of the University of California, Santa Barbara. I thank Lia Roberts and Kuang-hui Chen for their technical assistance. The data used here are available through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the Dilemmas of Democracy Conference, Loyola Marymount University, 2003.

Street harassment is a form of sexual terrorism that reminds women of their vulnerability to violent assault in public and semipublic spaces. Black women's experiences of street harassment are complicated by their race, and by the race of their harasser(s). Black feminists' political vocabulary of intersectional analysis offers a useful framework for portraying the indivisibility of race and gender in black women's lives, but the extension of intersectional criticism to capture black lesbians' political vulnerability within black politics and civic life has been neither automatic nor consistent in black feminist theory. This article invokes the 2003 street harassment and subsequent murder of a black lesbian teenager by a black male assailant in Newark, NJ, both to demonstrate black heterosexual women's interest convergence with black lesbians in black civic life, and to urge black feminists to be less equivocal in holding black men and women responsible for their participation in black patriarchy. This requires the retrieval and redefinition of the political language of culture and behavior from black conservatives who rightly flag the associational aspects of black politics, but who fail to question the gender and sexuality dynamics within these associations and fail to perceive the interplay between civic behavior and intersecting structural inequalities, such as racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and spatial poverty.I wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Politics & Gender for their helpful critical feedback. Thanks also to the participants in the Philadelphia Political Theory Workshop, held at the University of Pennsylvania (September 2005), and to Temple University's Conference on Black Civil Society in American Life (September 2005) where I presented an earlier version of this article, as well as to Reuel Rogers and my research assistant Greg Graham.

The 2004 U.S. presidential election was a highly gendered contest involving major masculinized, gendered campaigns by Senator John Kerry and incumbent President George W. Bush. If Senator Kerry was “reporting for duty,” and “W [Stood] for Women,” what have been the gendered implications for women as citizens, as voters, as candidates, and as potential officeholders? As we approach the 2006 U.S. midterm elections, five scholars, expert in gender and electoral analysis, share their observations about the short- and long-term implications of the 2004 elections for women's political participation and influence. These essays complicate and enrich our understanding of women and elections, and they come to different and even competing conclusions, leading us to suspect that there is a sea change under way in the analysis of women and elections, one that may recast our understandings of gender, generation, race, and sex.

Women's representation by elected women is a major research arena for scholars of women and politics. Comparativists and U.S. politics scholars, as well as feminist theorists, have given extensive attention to the question of whether or not women's political presence in legislatures is necessary for advancing policies favorable to women. Recent research and theorizing have sought to identify the conditions under which women-friendly policy might be advanced and the explanatory links between women's parliamentary presence and public policy outcomes. A key potential explanatory model has been partially constructed on the concept of “critical mass”: a threshold number (or percentage) of women in a legislature necessary for transforming the legislative context from one in which women-friendly policy is unlikely to one in which the opportunities for women's policy success are increased. If, as Mansbridge asserts, women's descriptive representation improves women's substantive representation, do increasing numbers of women in legislatures result in more and better public policy for women? Is there a critical mass of elected women that, once achieved, accelerates their policymaking opportunities? If so, what mechanisms explain such a transformation? Should activist women target a specific critical mass as a political strategy for advancing favorable legislation? The following four critical essays address these questions, taking in their different ways a critical perspective on the concept of critical mass.

The subfield of women and politics research, established two decades ago, has followed a developmental trajectory of empirical research, original feminist theorizing, and new concept formation and evaluation. An early emphasis on women and politics—concern with political behavior, with voting patterns and gender gaps, with political institutional presence and women as political elites—involved crucial foundational work for the subfield. Empirical research focused on finding where women were politically located, what political power they had, and what “politics” meant for women; the availability of survey research data that included a “sex” variable, and the identification of specific female political elites channeled early work into questions that could be answered by—or that permitted the contestation of—these data. The earliest research grappled with comparisons of women and men in politics; subsequent research focused primarily upon women, and upon women across politically relevant differences (in the U.S. case, particularly in regard to race). Feminist theory began to contest, to deconstruct, and to reconstruct gendered concepts of power, of equality and difference, of justice, and of democracy, some of which empirical scholars began to import into their research.

Many feminist theorists have embraced coalition building as the central model for feminist political mobilization. They have done so because they believe that coalitional solidarity resolves a long-standing impasse within feminism between the political claims of diversity among women and the political need for unity. In this essay, I argue that the turn to coalition politics within feminist theory is problematic: While coalitional solidarity honors the claims of diversity among women, it ignores the importance of acknowledging commonality. The tactical ties that it encompasses fail to enact the kind of mutual recognition on which feminism, as a movement for social justice, depends. I show that in order to address both the concern with diversity and the need for unity in a satisfying way, theorists of solidarity must supplement their appeal to coalition building with an account of the ethical and affective preconditions of inclusive political ties. Specifically, I argue that the cultivation of “enlarged sympathy” among feminist political actors is crucial to the establishment of political bonds that accommodate and affirm important differences among women.The author would like to thank the following individuals for helpful comments and discussions: Farid Abdel-Nour, Cheryl Hall, Kimberly Lau, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Politics & Gender. An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper in San Francisco at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting in 2001.

Political scientists concerned with gender relations have long been interested in the numbers of women in national legislatures. Women make up slightly more than 50% of the world's population, yet average only 16% of the world's elected political posts. This has led to calls for action that would increase the number of women in legislatures based both on arguments of justice and on claims that an increase will substantively change decision-making processes and outcomes. Part of the debate about substantive changes in political decision making has centered on whether women in a legislature must reach a “critical mass” in order to bring about change in the political arena. The term critical mass is frequently used by politicians, the media, and academics, but can it offer insights into the influence of gender on political processes and outcomes? In this essay, I argue that critical mass is only useful if we discard the belief that a single proportion holds the key to all representation needs of women and if we discard notions that numbers alone bring about substantive changes in policy processes and outcomes. I use a longitudinal textual analysis of New Zealand parliamentary debates to begin development of a joint-effect model that can better explain the factors that aid (or hinder) the substantive representation of women.

Why develop a comparative politics of gender? As the critical perspectives in this section demonstrate, there are many answers to this question. I would like to focus here on two reasons: first, for gaining a deeper understanding of the operations of political institutions, and second, for explaining the relationship between these institutions and social actors, including those pursuing a gender equality agenda. To be specific, this essay argues not just for a comparative politics of gender but for a comparative politics of gender and institutions. The discussion focuses on the possibility of using neo-institutionalist theory, especially in relation to its normative and dynamic understanding of institutions, to gain a deeper understanding of the way that gender shapes political institutions and also, through interaction with social actors, including feminists, the way gender norms can be disrupted to open new spaces for these actors.

In 2004, 39 individuals were newly elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Eight of these individuals were women. Women went on to win two special elections held in 2005, while a man won the third contest. This increase in the numerical representation of women in the lower house of Congress in 2004–5 was a positive counter to the lack of progress women made in advancing their numbers in other elective offices, such as the U.S. Senate, governorships, and state legislatures in 2004. These gains in representation, however, only amounted to a 15.5% membership for women in the U.S. House of Representatives. Who were these successful women, and what does their election suggest to us about women and political officeholding and about gender as a factor when men and women run for public office in the early years of the twenty-first century? Do their campaigns and election reflect the continued relevance of gender, or are they indications of the demise of gender as a factor in elections?