We apply an intersectional framework to explore how connections to marginalized communities interact with candidate demographics to shape vote choice in U.S. politics. In an original experiment manipulating candidates’ race, gender, sexuality, and endorsements, we show that endorsements by organizations advocating for marginalized communities shape voter evaluations to the same, if not greater, degree as candidate demographics. Moreover, the effects are particularly pronounced for candidates receiving an endorsement from an LGBT advocacy organization. Attitudes toward marginalized communities are mapped onto candidates with ties to those communities, whether the candidate is a member or not; we call this process associational affect. Identity has a complex role in shaping vote choice, and, absent an investigation of power and interlocking social hierarchies, it alone is insufficient to explain vote choice.

Due to the concern about relatively small samples, it has been conventional in previous research to analyze women voters together as a group. However, viewing women as a monolith results in ‘whitewashing,’ obscuring variation at the intersection of race and gender in partisan vote choice. Utilizing the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey (CMPS), we disaggregate women voters by race and ethnicity and analyze the significance of a host of factors that contribute to partisan vote choice, with particular attention to the role of attitudes about race (i.e., “racial resentment”) and gender (i.e., “hostile sexism”) on support for Donald Trump in 2020. Our analyses demonstrate how intersectional positionality of race and gender together conditions how standard explanatory measures as well as attitudes about gender and race vary across women voters who are Black, Asian American, Latina, and white in their support for United States presidential candidates.

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 investigate the gender gap in issue attention among members of parliament (MPs) by applying automated text analytic techniques to a novel data set on Italian parliamentary speeches over a remarkably long period (1948–2020). We detect a gendered specialization across issues that tends to disappear as women’s shares in parliamentary groups increase. We then investigate whether women’s access to previously male-owned issues brings with it a different agenda, operationalized as a different vocabulary. We detect a U-shaped pattern: language gender specificity is high when female MPs are tokens in parliamentary groups with a large preponderance of men; it decreases when their shares start increasing and grows again when they constitute a considerable minority. We argue that this pattern is consistent with the theory of tokenism, and it is produced by the interlinkage of commitment to shared norms and the distribution of “activation thresholds” among female MPs.

In recent years, struggles for justice, peace, and democracy around the world have been articulated through protests. Whether in Iran, Nigeria, Poland, Senegal, Tunisia, or the United States, this form of political participation challenges the status quo. Rising forms of autocratic rule, democratic backsliding, and right-wing populism underscore the urgency of protesters’ demands. Often overlooked in mainstream accounts, however, is the role of feminists in driving forward liberatory demands for new social contracts (Sen and Durano 2014). One recent example of this is the role that the Feminist Coalition played in the Nigerian #EndSARS protests, mobilizing against years of police brutality and impunity (Nwakanma 2022). Confronted with physical harm and even death, these feminists and their fellow protesters have strategized and theorized a vision for a better world (Nazneen and Okech 2021; Tamale 2020).

There are competing global trends in terms of gender equality. International concern with gender inequality is significant. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (2000), and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (2015), among other instruments, pushed countries to increase women’s access to decision-making and basic rights such as education, paid labor, and health care. Yet more recently, there has been a “backlash” against progress in gender equality (Berry, Bouka, and Kamuru 2021; Chenoweth and Marks 2022; Piscopo and Walsh 2020; Roggeband and Krizsán 2018).

Representation scholarship has drawn from intersectionality theory 0to examine how systemic structures of oppression and privilege have created social groups with distinct political needs. Derived from Black feminist theory that recognizes that identities are mutually constitutive and interconnected, intersectionality research is rooted in the lived experiences of marginalized groups who call attention to social (in)justice. Empirical scholarship building on the insights of Black feminist theorists such as Collins and Bilge (2016), Hill Collins (1990), Crenshaw (1989; 1991), and King (1988) has constituted nothing less than a paradigm shift in the study of gender and politics. Nevertheless, there remain an array of opportunities to expand upon the potential for intersectional frameworks and methods, as well as pressing new questions concerning the operationalization of intersectionality itself. This Critical Perspectives section offers a moment to take stock of these developments and debates, as well as to highlight new pathways for scholarship committed to centering the margins and considering the nexus of multiple power structures that frame our political lives.

Feminists protesting gender-based violence and state violence have been instrumental to contesting the status quo and the shifting discourses, modes of organizing, and registers of protest in Senegal. Some 40 years after the emergence of Yewwu Yewwi, a major feminist movement, Senegalese feminists have returned to radical feminist organizing, despite increasing anti-gender backlash. In this essay, I draw on interviews with feminist activists and politicians between 2013 and 2022 to analyze the March 2021 protests in Senegal in light of previous protests. I argue that the intertwined dynamics of class, gender, and generation are critical to understanding the protests. I do this following the example of some feminist academics who have used intersectionality as a method, theory, and research agenda (Collins and Bilge 2016; Mohammed 2022). Innovations in protest strategies have allowed activists to overcome generational and ideological divides between feminist and women’s rights organizations, as well as within feminist movements, and to resist strategic alliances between patriarchal and political powers.

Although democratic countries historically have had stronger outcomes in advancing gender equality than other regime types, many authoritarian regimes in Africa have proved rather adept at adopting women’s rights provisions, making extensive constitutional and legislative reforms, and promoting women as leaders. These outcomes are particularly evident when it comes to women’s political representation, where one finds little difference between authoritarian and democratic regimes in Africa. This essay explores how authoritarian regimes in Africa came to promote women leaders and how the instrumentalization of women leaders served to enhance the longevity of their rule.

If one were to write the history of representation from an intersectional perspective, it would read as a veritable comedy of errors. A story, in short of inclusion and exclusion, privileging and marginalization, and of good, mis-, poor, and non-representation. No facet of politics is untouched by these dynamics – whether civil society or formal political participation, political recruitment and leadership, or policy and legislation (Siow 2023).

Although authoritarian regimes often repress the rights of women, many autocrats have committed to international treaties protecting women’s human rights. Scholars have typically overlooked this engagement, focusing instead on autocrats’ commitment (and violation) of treaties protecting civil, political, and physical integrity rights. Yet existing explanations for autocrats’ ratification of these treaties—such as appeasing domestic opposition groups—do not necessarily apply to women’s rights (von Stein 2013). As authoritarian international law is increasingly viewed as an important area of study (Ginsburg 2020), scholars should explore how authoritarian regimes navigate participation regarding women’s rights issues, including their engagement with the main women’s rights treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). After taking a closer look at how autocracies shape, commit, and challenge women’s rights internationally, we suggest several research directions to build this area of study.

This essay considers the rapid uptick in anti-trans legislation that targets transgender girls and women as an occasion to critically interrogate the ways that gender is conceptualized and operationalized in political science (Murib 2022). I argue that the disciplinary tendency to view gender as a single-axis facet of identity that is static and rooted in biology needs to be reconsidered in light of two problems. First, collapsing biological sex and gender naturalizes the gender of non-trans women and men as static, normal, and self-evident; transgender people, in contrast, are locked into perpetual processes of gendering themselves against this biological baseline (Enke 2012). Second, and as a result of this limited view of gender, political scientists face difficulties anticipating, understanding, and addressing recent mobilizations invested in maintaining White, heterosexual, and reproductive families as the cornerstone of what it means to be a proper citizen (Alexander 1994).

This essay historicizes feminist protests in Kenya over the last decade to examine the changing patterns of protest action and how they illustrate the evolution of both feminist discourses and sites within which these debates are animated. I look beyond the streets and direct action as the epitome of protest action to examine strategic litigation, hashtag activism, and national campaigns as important ways through which feminist protest can be understood in Kenya, focusing on three recent cases.

On August 6, 2016, the week of the South African public holiday Women’s Day, an extraordinary protest held the nation spellbound. Then president Jacob Zuma was announcing the results of local government elections live on national television when four young women walked out of the throng of election officials and politicians. They stood in front of the president, silent but visible on the televised screen. They held up placards: “I am 1 in 3,” “Ten Years Later,” “Khanga,” “Remember Khwezi.” Although the protesters stood for the duration of the broadcast, they were forcibly removed by security agents immediately after Zuma left the stage and the cameras moved offscreen. Hustled to the back of the room, they were lambasted by senior women leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) for their “inappropriate” action. This was a spectacular demonstration: silent and nonviolent, its tactics and timing pierced the performance of presidential authority and made visible a new form of feminism.

There is growing evidence of the international and domestic political benefits for autocrats to advance women’s rights (Bjarnegård 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 Vilán (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.

As the number of ethnic minority politicians increase across countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, so too have instances in which these officeholders act against the communities they descriptively represent. In this contribution, we introduce the concept of paradoxical representation which we argue functions through neoliberal, post-racial scripts of color-blindness and meritocracy. Similar to research on gender representation which calls into question assumptions that substantive representation will follow unproblematically from women’s descriptive representation (Celis and Childs 2012), we argue that ethnic minority representatives can act as “post-racial gatekeepers.” This means paradoxically working against rather than for marginalized ethnic minority groups (Saini, Bankole, and Begum 2023). Through political discourse and policymaking, these representatives construct and “gatekeep” hegemonic ideas around race, racism, gender, and migration.

Women were at the forefront of the popular uprising that overthrew Sudan’s dictator, Omar al-Bashir, in 2019 (Al-Nagar and Tønnessen 2021). In the aftermath of the uprising, different forms of feminist mobilization emerged. Based on interviews conducted in Sudan in early 2022, we argue that this feminist mobilization was sparked by the backlash facing women during and after what is popularly known as the “December revolution.”1

The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in women’s presence in local politics. According to the newly published United Nations (UN) Women in Local Government data set, women constitute 36% of local deliberative bodies worldwide compared to merely 25% in national parliaments.1 Much of this increase is the result of gender quotas: the Gender Quotas Database (International IDEA 2022) shows that as of 2021, 75 countries had some form of gender quota on the local level, 24 of which were authoritarian regimes. Yet, extant work on gender politics in authoritarian regimes tends to focus on the national level, given the highly centralized decision-making processes in such contexts. We contend that the study of women’s engagement and representation in local politics can help scholars better understand not only gender and politics, but also authoritarian politics more generally.

This article analyses the possibility of an intersectional understanding of “disability” in relation to Article 14(2)(c) of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol). Adopted in July 2003 and enforced since November 2005, the Maputo Protocol is considered a ground-breaking international human rights instrument (Johnson 2023, 329). It is the first treaty to comprehensively protect the reproductive rights of African women, including the contentious issue of abortion (Maputo Protocol 2003, Article 14(2)(c); Banda 2006, 82).

Authoritarian regimes around the world have increasingly implemented policies and reforms to strengthen women’s rights, ranging from adopting gender quotas to penalizing gender-based violence. Recent literature highlights that authoritarian leaders are at the forefront of these initiatives, often aiming to strengthen their rule rather than advance women’s rights (e.g., Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2016; Bush and Zetterberg 2021; Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2021). While we cannot ignore the contributions of grassroots activism in advancing gender equality (e.g., Kang and Tripp 2018; Krook 2009), authoritarian regimes, by nature, have less incentive to pay attention to popular demands. Thus, women’s rights reforms in autocracies tend to be top-down: initiated by the leadership, with a lack of citizen involvement in the design process. This essay considers how top-down gender reforms may be viewed by the public, and as a consequence, how the public’s perceptions of them may affect women’s status in the broader society.