While the same formal candidate selection rules are generally in place throughout a state, there is often intracountry variation in male descriptive overrepresentation. To explain this variation, scholars cannot focus exclusively on women (e.g., how do women respond to formal institutional opportunities?) or femininity (e.g., how do norms governing appropriate female behavior affect women's odds of being selected as a candidate?). Rather, scholars must attend to the ways that informal norms regarding masculinity operate across space and time within a country. Drawing on the insights of feminist institutionalism, this essay examines two intracountry sources of variation in candidate selection: the spatial urban-rural divide and temporal differences between first-time recruitment and renomination. While the formal candidate selection rules are uniform, informal institutions vary depending on where and when we look, leading to different levels of male overrepresentation.

Are female politicians less likely to be promoted to specific ministerial posts, and is it important for them to toe the party line? This article focuses on whether the selection of ministers has a gender-specific dimension. Building on role congruity theory and research showing that female and male politicians are evaluated in a different manner in leadership positions, we present some original hypotheses. For example, we hypothesize that female politicians are less likely to be appointed to cabinet when they have held gender-incongruent committee positions in parliament. We also hypothesize that women are less likely to be appointed to cabinet posts when they have previously deviated from the party line. In an empirical analysis of Swedish ministerial appointments in six cabinets, we find that female politicians were less likely to be appointed to cabinet posts when they have held positions in 'masculine' parliamentary committees and when they deviated from the party line in their parliamentary speeches. These results suggest that women are more harshly judged when holding positions that are not in line with traditional gender stereotypes and have important implications for our understanding of gender and political leadership.

Election violence is an important issue from a number of perspectives. Understanding the causes and consequences of violations of personal integrity is always relevant, but election violence adds a different dimension to this already serious issue: it also violates electoral integrity and decreases democratic quality (Norris 2013). Therefore, election violence should be studied as a simultaneous violation of personal and electoral integrity. In this contribution, I define election violence as occurring when (1) the goal of the act is to affect an electoral outcome or prevent someone from running in an election, and (2) the means by which it is carried out violates the personal integrity of individuals involved in the electoral process.

There is growing evidence of the international and domestic political benefits for autocrats to advance women's rights (Bjarnegard and Zetterberg 2016; Bush and Zetterberg 2021; Donno and Kreft 2019; Tripp 2019). Research on the adoption of gender reforms in autocracies-including contributions in this Critical Perspectives section by Audrey L. Comstock and Andrea Vilan (2022) and Aili Mari Tripp (2022)-emphasizes the dual role of international pressure (Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2021; Edgell 2017; Okundaye and Breuning 2021) and women's movements (Giersdorf and Croissant 2011; Htun and Weldon 2012; Tripp 2015). Reforms can be "top-down " if the autocrat advances rights even while suppressing the women's movement, or "bottom-up " if the regime allies with-and seeks to co-opt-civil society groups.

A nascent body of literature has highlighted the violence (broadly defined) that women sometimes face as they enter politics. Some interpretations depict this violence as primarily gender motivated: women politicians are targeted because they are women. Another interpretation is that violence in some contexts is an everyday political practice targeting men and women alike. However, because we lack large-scale, systematic comparisons of men's and women's exposure to election violence, we know little about the extent to which—and how—candidate sex shapes this form of violence. We address this research gap by using original survey data on 197 men and women political candidates in the 2018 Sri Lankan local elections. Sri Lanka is a suitable case for analysis because it is a postconflict country in which political violence has been endemic and the number of women candidates has increased rapidly due to gender quota adoption. Overall, we find large similarities in men's and women's exposure to violence, suggesting that violence sometimes is part of a larger political practice. However, we find that women are exposed to forms of intimidation of a sexual nature more often than men. This finding demonstrates the need for gender-sensitive analyses of election violence.

Candidate selection and recruitment has been notably described as the “secret garden” of politics—an obscure process, often hidden from view, that is regulated largely by internal party rules, informal practices, and power relationships (cf. Gallagher and Marsh 1988). In this contribution, we contend that informal party practices and their gendered consequences are critically important for understanding the continuity of male political dominance and female underrepresentation. Rather than make a strict separation between formal and informal rules in the recruitment process, we argue that gender politics scholars must instead identify and empirically investigate the specific combinations of such rules that impact upon women's and men's political participation in parties. The proposed approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of the bounded nature and variable outcomes of institutional innovation and party change.

Research on gender and politics has made use of Pitkin's (1967) distinction between descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation to conceptualize and understand the different facets of women's underrepresentation and misrepresentation. The corresponding overrepresentation of men has seldom been explicitly recognized in this literature. We explore what the critical study of men and masculinities could contribute to the study of different forms of representation. Researching the descriptive overrepresentation of men implies recognizing male dominance and turning our attention from the factors that constrain women from entering politics to the factors that enable and reproduce men's presence. Researching the substantive representation of men also implies investigating how men represent men and identifying whether hegemonic masculinities privilege the representation of some men while neglecting others. Finally, a study of the symbolic representation of men implies identifying and describing the masculine signals and symbols that permeate political life but remain largely invisible because they constitute the political norm. Naming them as “masculine” will facilitate a gendered analysis of political institutions, practices, and discourses that are seldom questioned. We also consider the symbolic representation of men who do not conform to hegemonic masculine ideals and are not represented descriptively.

Despite the popularity of electoral gender quotas, the substantive impact of quotas on the plenary behavior of members of parliament (MPs) has yet to be thoroughly empirically explored, and in particular, there is a dearth of evidence from non-Western cases. Here we create a unique content analysis dataset from 14 years (1998–2011) of plenary debates, including the contents of more than 150,000 unique MP speeches recorded in some 40,000 pages of the Ugandan parliamentary Hansard to test how MP characteristics affect patterns of gender-related legislative speech. We find that female MPs speak about issues related to women's interests significantly more than male MPs. Further, we find no evidence of significant differences between female MPs elected with and without quotas, suggesting that, in the Ugandan case, gender is a more salient predictor of the tendency to “speak for women” than electoral pathway. To our knowledge, this is the first study that examines the effectiveness of quotas in promoting women's substantive representation in parliamentary debates across all policy domains over a significant time period. We discuss the implications of these findings in the Ugandan context, as well as how our evidence speaks to substantive representation through reserved seat quotas in semi-authoritarian regimes more broadly.

Women’s access to political leadership positions has increased greatly in recent decades, which calls for research concerning the conditions of women’s political leadership in more gender-balanced contexts. This article responds to this need by exploring the leadership ideals, evaluations, and treatment of men and women leaders in the numerically gender-equal Swedish parliament (the Riksdag). Drawing on interviews with almost all the current top political leaders in the Swedish parliament, along with an original survey of Swedish members of parliament, we reveal a mainly feminine-coded parliamentary leadership ideal that should be more appropriate for women leaders. Masculine practices remain, however, and women leaders continue to be disadvantaged. To explain this anomaly between ideals and practices, we argue that a feminist institutionalist perspective, which emphasizes how gender shapes a given context in multiple ways, contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the conditions for women’s political leadership than that provided by the widely employed role congruity theory.

In this paper, we study the ways in which affirmative action for one political minority, gender quotas, impact on intersectional representation. In a quantitative analysis of detailed panel data from 285 Swedish municipal assemblies, the numerical impact of a zipper placement mandate in Sweden's largest political party, the Social Democratic Party, is analyzed. No evidence that this quota helped, or hindered, the intersectional representation of men or women is found in the short run, but it is found that a weak numerical impact may exist in the long run. A qualitative analysis of party records and interviews with key actors sheds further light on these results. Differences in the norms of representation for women and polyethnic minorities, coupled with weak organizational and practical constraints for formulating policies for the latter, appear to be likely explanations.

This article analyzes the implementation of gender mainstreaming at the local level in Sweden by investigating implementation gaps in the operations of two municipalities, Eskilstuna and Jönköping. The study draws on the literature on policy implementation, particularly the dimensions of comprehension, capacity, and will, as well as the feminist institutional literature on resistance. The data are based on a micro-study of the implementation of gender mainstreaming in two model municipalities, comprising interviews with key actors and a document study. The study shows that the key obstacles to the implementation of gender mainstreaming are complacency—that is, the perception that work on gender mainstreaming is satisfactory and that no extra attention to the matter is needed—and the congestion of perspectives—the fact that the gender equality perspective must compete with other relevant perspectives, a process in which gender equality is often the loser. Another obstacle is lack of political will. However, lack of political will, even in model municipalities, may be compensated for by solid systems of governance. The study contributes to research on implementation theory and feminist institutionalism by demonstrating the gendered barriers and obstacles to affecting change, even in best-case scenarios.

The gender and politics literature offers diverse views on the causes of gendered practices and the best methodologies for studying them. This article advances efforts to take stock of and systematize this diversity by grounding the feminist institutionalist perspective in critical realism. The article posits that gendered institutions are real entities with independent powers, while also emphasizing the crucial role that human ideas play in upholding and contesting gendered practices. To faithfully capture gendered institutions and their relationship with human agency, the article promotes the use of the abductive-retroductive research design. This approach allows feminist institutionalist scholars to construct and test multiple competing theories about gendered institutions, drawing from various empirical manifestations of institutional power. These expressions range from observable actions to codified rules, socially shared norms, and other subtle discourses. By shedding light on the principles at the heart of realist-oriented feminist research, this work paves the way for a more standardized and transparent approach to feminist inquiries.

We know that women politicians are harassed by constituents to a greater extent than men, but we know less about why this difference exists. This study tests potential drivers of hostility against women politicans using an original survey experiment with 7,500 respondents in the United States and Sweden. First, I test whether constituents hold more lenient attitudes toward hostility directed at women than men, which would make hostility in messages targeting women representatives more likely. Second, I test whether constituents prefer to direct their complaints to women, which would increase the risk of hostility by generating a higher number of angry contacts. Results from both countries show a preference for directing complaints to women representatives over men, but no evidence of more leniency toward hostility directed at women.

This essay proposes an integrated discursive institutionalism as a framework for feminist political analysis. Both historical institutionalism and discourse analysis have merits and limitations, and both perspectives complement each other and offer solutions to their respective deficiencies. Traditionally there has been a strong demarcation between the two perspectives. A common way to divide both approaches is between investigating “causal regularities” and “understanding meaning.” I argue that a feminist institutionalism needs to deconstruct the dichotomy of causal explanation versus meaning and description and to reformulate the concept of causality. There is no adequate explanation without “meaning,” and the stretching of institutionalism toward “ideas” exemplifies this inadequacy

The Colombian peace process was internationally celebrated for its unprecedented focus on women’s experiences of war, but the everyday violence women that may face in their homes was not acknowledged. This article explores the links between exposure to local armed conflict violence and individual women’s experiences of intimate partner violence. I combine pooled nationally representative data on individual women’s experiences of intimate partner violence with information about the intensity of conflict during 2004–16. Results of fixed-effects linear probability models show that conflict was generally linked to a slightly elevated risk of women experiencing emotional, physical, and sexual violence perpetrated by their partner. Among women who had experienced intimate partner violence, conflict was related to an increased probability of being partnered at interview, which could reflect women staying in abusive relationships because conflict normalizes violence or increases women’s reluctance to leave those relationships.

This article presents a qualitative analysis of profeminist Islamic women public figures' discourses in the abortion debate in Turkey in 2012. The aim is to reveal the possibilities and limitations of achieving an intersectional and egalitarian profeminist collaboration on the Islamic-secular axis in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on recent feminist scholarship on coalition politics, the article exposes the fluctuations of meaning and the shifting frames of reference in these women's narratives and relates this hybrid, dynamic narrative quality to profeminist Islamic women's unique social location. It also elaborates on the blockage points in these narratives that hinder coalitional ways of thinking. Within this frame, this article suggests that in a social and political context that has witnessed a striking upsurge of antifeminist gender politics in the last decade, the building of coalitional profeminist politics beyond the Islamic-secular divide can be facilitated by shifting the focus from the apparently irreconcilable character of ideological positionings and lived experiences toward coalitional rhetorical strategies and intermediary narrative lines in profeminist subjects' accounts.

Scholars of gender quotas have paid increasing attention to the ways in which formal and informal institutions shape the outcome of this electoral reform (Hassim 2009; Jones 2009; Zetterberg 2009). Quotas, however, are not only affected by the institutional context in which they are adopted; their transformative nature also implies that they (should) contribute to changing political institutions. This dynamic relationship has consequences for the analysis of key institutions within representative democracy: Electoral quotas may, in some cases, challenge well-defined analytical frameworks and established ways to study political life. This essay aims to demonstrate theoretically how quota adoption exerts an impact on established political structures and thus challenges existing understandings within subfields of comparative politics. More specifically, I bring up two institutions within representative democracy that are likely to be affected by quotas: the political recruitment process and intraparty politics within legislative institutions.