Previous research has found that individuals harboring hostile sexist attitudes are more likely to support the use of political violence. In this study, we examine this relationship further. We theorize that the impact of hostile sexism on support for political violence is mediated through two mutually reinforcing factors: social dominance orientation and political illiberalism. We test this argument using an original survey we administered to over 1,400 subjects in the United States. We employ two operationalizations of individuals’ support for political violence: support in the abstract and support for specific acts of political violence. We find that individuals who exhibit hostile sexism are substantially more likely to support political violence, both abstract and specific. Moreover, we find that both social dominance orientation and political illiberalism together mediate 64.9% of the effect of hostile sexism on support for political violence in the abstract and 80.5% of the effect on support for specific acts of political violence. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings.

Women’s political representation is a key indicator of peace and stability in postconflict states, but we do not yet fully understand the factors that lead to sustained increases in women’s representation after conflict. This article proposes and tests a new variable affecting changes in women’s legislative representation in postconflict states: types of women’s participation in the peace process. Using multivariate regressions, this study finds that local women’s participation in high-influence roles and in both Track I and II processes significantly increases women’s representation after conflict, while international women in peace processes do not. Women’s movements only increase women’s representation after conflict in combination with local women in peace processes. These findings illustrate one important outcome of local women’s inclusion in peace processes and highlight the importance of inclusive peace processes for postconflict democratic outcomes.

We draw on a comprehensive dataset of metadata about journal articles substantively related to gender and politics published in 37 political science journals through the end of 2023, including Politics & Gender, to characterize and compare trends over time and the most prominent topics addressed by these journals. We show that the volume of work published by Politics & Gender has increased over time, has become increasingly quantitative in nature, and tends to focus on questions related to women running for political office and the nature of women’s political representation. These patterns closely reflect broader tendencies in the gender and politics research published by general-interest political science journals. Other journals dedicated to research on gender and politics tend to publish more qualitative research on topics including care work, the diffusion of equality norms, and conflict.

Does the situation in Afghanistan amount to persecution due to the accumulation of repressive measures enacted against women and is it sufficient that women are affected by such measures merely on the basis of their gender? While these two questions remain in front of the Court of Justice of the EU, several EU member states have moved to grant asylum to women and girls from Afghanistan on general risks of gender-based persecution. This dynamism in asylum regulations across the EU has occurred alongside renewed discussions around gender-based persecution and gender apartheid in international criminal law in light of the ongoing process for a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty. In this article, I put these developments into conversation through case study method and legal-institutional analysis, and argue that the historical link between international refugee law and international criminal law provides a space to envision an integrated system of protection around gender-related claims. To this end, I offer three outlooks for establishing general risks of gender-based persecution in international refugee law and the relationship between gender apartheid and asylum.

The popularization of intersectionality within political science, feminist scholarship, and activism has constituted nothing less than a paradigm shift (Hancock 2007a). Politics & Gender has been a critical actor in enabling change within our discipline. However, this development has been hard won and there remains much to be done to operationalize intersectionality in line with Black feminist theory, and to center women of color and other intersectionally marginalized groups within scholarship. This article both traces the evolution of intersectional approaches within Politics & Gender over two decades and articulates pathways for future gender and politics research which aims to employ intersectionality. We employ quantitative and qualitative analysis of articles’ foci on different inequality structures and categories, their methodological approaches, and how they employ the concept of intersectionality. Subsequently, we argue in favor of approaches which center rather than include diverse intersectionally marginalized groups, emphasize the normative commitments of Black feminist theory to transformative justice rather than liberal inclusion, analyze intersectional structures and institutions as well as individual experience and identity, treat the constitution of categories and groups as contextual and contingent, dare to address the dangers of “women” as a theoretical starting point, and challenge fundamental raced-gendered assumptions of liberal democracy.

How do women ex-combatants navigate rebel-to-party transformations? While many rebel groups transition into political parties after conflicts, the gendered dynamics of these processes remain underexplored. This article theorizes how militarized social reproductive (MSR) labor—care, emotional, and community work embedded in the armed struggle—can shape women’s postwar political trajectories. MSR can constrain agency through socialization that can reinforce gender norms that marginalize women from politics, yet MSR can also enable collective post-war mobilization through organizational memory. We identify two factors that condition these effects: (1) whether women’s units performed gender normative or transgressive activities and (2) the degree of unit cohesion. Drawing on interviews with members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Women Auxiliary Brigade (BIWAB)—the all-female unit of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines—we show how gender-normative roles led to exclusion, but internal cohesion enabled BIWAB members to repurpose their shared labor into informal political advocacy.

The Dutch parliamentary far right has been considered a relatively liberal outlier to the gender politics of the European far right, yet recent years have shown the increasing anti-gender mobilization of the party Forum voor Democratie(FvD). Based on a theoretical framework of anti-gender mobilization, the far right, and politics of knowledge, this article explores anti-gender politics as a form of alternative knowledge production through a qualitative content analysis of the FvD’s online presence. Through applying Verloo’s concept of the episteme, this article’s findings show that the FvD mobilizes against epistemic institutions by claiming they disseminate dangerous knowledge about gender, which they argue presents a fundamental threat to society, captured in conspiratorial terms like “transgender ideology” and “woke.” Simultaneously, the party promotes illiberal gender politics through the establishment of alternative epistemic institutions. This article shows how far-right actors may promote anti-gender politics by presenting themselves as “alternative intellectuals” who seek to carve out an epistemic niche alongside the mainstream.

This essay highlights the impact of Politics & Gender on the discipline’s understanding of how gender shapes the preferences, behavior, and motivations of voters. It provides descriptive information about the prevalence of research on gender and voting in the journal, along with the proportion of articles dedicated to women voters across different regions globally. The bulk of the essay focuses on the substance of this research — drawing out major themes and identifying significant contributions within each theme — and it concludes by offering a future research agenda on gender and voting.

Women have long been underrepresented in American politics. This is evidenced by women being less likely to run for and hold elected office. Existing scholarship largely focuses on explaining why women are less politically ambitious than their male counterparts but pays less attention to why some women do run for office. To this end, I focus on the potential role of labor union membership. I argue that labor unions can foster political ambition and increase ordinary people’s likelihood of running for office. I test this among women in the American mass public, primarily with survey data from the 2010–22 Cooperative Election Study (CES). Overall, I find that labor union membership is significantly associated with women’s likelihood of running for office. I also find that this robust relationship is unlikely to be driven by self-selection or omitted variable biases. Overall, these findings help us to better understand the sources of political ambition, illustrate a viable potential pathway to boost women’s likelihood of seeking elected office, and underscore the political consequences of organized labor.

How do the gendered patterns of foreign aid operate in the rare occurrence when refugee men are the focus of aid programs? This article uses critical narrative analysis to understand refugee men’s navigation of gendered hierarchies in the aid program Darfur United, a refugee men’s soccer team formed in eastern Chad’s refugee camps. Through juxtaposing the objectives and aims of Darfur United as a program for men with those of aid programs for refugee women and children, I argue that men must demonstrate innocuous and essentialized practices of masculinity to receive care, while ultimately serving as conduits for increased humanitarian support for refugee women and children. This analysis extends existing literature on the absence of humanitarian programs for refugee men and disrupts dominant understandings of gender and refugee men. By centering men’s own understandings of aid’s gendered patterns, it expands contemporary discussions on gender, displacement, and humanitarianism.

Do improved family policies meet women diplomats’ concerns about balancing work and family? Using a feminist institutionalist approach, the article analyzes the interaction of formal and informal institutional rules, the role of informality, and interactions between actors and rules to address whether and how family policies improve women diplomats’ experiences balancing work and family. Narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with Japanese women diplomats — most at the top ranks of diplomacy — surfaces the informal institutional rules at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). The article finds that informal institutional rules along with the lack of transparency in promotion limit the effectiveness of family policies.

Mass public opinion on globalization shows a persistent gender gap, but explanations for this gap differ. In the context of Africa, understanding this gender gap is particularly important because of women’s growing representation in legislatures and the rapid expansion of global economic flows on the continent. Why are women on average more skeptical of foreign economic actors? We consider this question across Sub-Saharan African countries, using Chinese economic engagement as a salient, visible form of economic globalization. Numerous studies have explored the impact of China’s presence on Africans’ attitudes toward China, but we know little about a documented gender gap in these attitudes. We explore the roots of this gap from an angle of economic vulnerability, positing that women at higher risk of a negative economic impact of Chinese engagement are more likely to view China negatively than their male counterparts. Using multilevel analyses of up to 84,000 respondents from up to 37 countries, we find a consistent pattern of economic vulnerability explaining the gender gap in attitudes, and factors associated with economic security mitigating it. Our findings suggest that economic vulnerability shapes attitudes differently across genders, and that increasing representation of women in African legislatures may have implications for policies toward Chinese engagement.

In its first twenty years, Politics & Gender has played a key role in the development of a robust and thriving literature on electoral gender quotas. This article reviews the 76 articles published on this topic in the journal between 2005 and 2024. It first takes a chronological view, analyzing publication patterns over time to show how the field has expanded through research articles, Critical Perspectives essays, book reviews, and Notes from the Field. As part of this survey, it identifies publications that have been particularly influential in shaping knowledge on quotas and their various impacts. The article then takes a thematic view, showing how work published in Politics & Gender has advanced knowledge in the fields of comparative politics and international relations. It focuses on five main literatures: candidate selection, electoral reform, political careers, policy-making processes, and stereotypes and public opinion. The final part of the article reflects on the broader integration of quota research into political science. Quota scholars are increasingly publishing their work in top disciplinary journals, at the same time that quotas have attracted growing interest among authors who would not consider gender to be a central axis of their research program. The article concludes by advocating a dual strategy of engaging debates at multiple levels and across intellectual arenas.

We are delighted to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Politics & Gender. This achievement signals an inflection point in the maturity of the subfield of women, gender, and politics research, and provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the role that the journal has played in the discipline of political science.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed new challenges for leaders, requiring behavior change and public self-compliance. Stereotypically feminine qualities, such as compassion and a good approach to people, may have helped achieve these goals, rendering the pandemic a “feminine crisis.” The special nature of this crisis, along with media attention on female-led countries successfully managing the pandemic, raises the question of whether female leaders would be perceived as more competent in handling such a crisis. In an experimental study conducted on a representative sample in Poland, we assessed whether female prime minister candidates or candidates with feminine traits had an advantage when their competence in managing a large-scale pandemic was evaluated. Surprisingly, we found that, contrary to national security and economic crises (where male or masculine candidates tend to be advantaged), women or feminine candidates were not perceived as having an advantage in managing a COVID-19 type crisis. Furthermore, conservative participants seemed to perceive male candidates as more competent, even in the pandemic context. Although the differences were small in magnitude, they suggest that even in a potentially “feminine crisis,” women do not fare better than men, while men still fare better in stereotypically male crises.

While scholarship on feminist foreign policy continues to proliferate, the impact of anti-feminist objectives on foreign policy requires attention. In this article, I critically examine the intersection of abortion politics and U.S. foreign policy, arguing that American foreign policy has long been shaped by an anti-feminist practice. The U.S. has systematically restricted access to abortion abroad for over 50 years through legislation and executive actions. Applying quantitative and qualitative research methods, I trace the history of abortion-related foreign policy from 1973 to 2022, analyze all congressional foreign policy bills referencing abortion, and draw on interviews with legislative staff and issue advocates from the 115th Congress (2017-18) to highlight how anti-abortion advocacy shapes U.S. foreign policy decisions. These findings suggest that while feminist mobilization has constrained anti-abortion efforts domestically in the US, foreign policy remained a key battleground where anti-feminist actors have historically been more successful. This case underscores the importance of analyzing domestic policy dynamics to understand the broader implications of feminist and anti-feminist agendas in international relations.

Much has changed since 2007–2010 when I co-edited the journal Politics & Gender (P&G) with Kathleen Dolan. In this essay, I reflect on the changes in the journal and the subfield of a comparative politics of gender. Dolan and I were the second team to edit the journal, following in the footsteps of the inaugural editors Karen Beckwith and Lisa Baldez. The journal was finding its footing at the time, and increasing submissions was a key concern. This year, on its 20th anniversary, we can celebrate that the journal, like the subfield of gender and politics, has flourished and matured. The number of articles published by the journal has multiplied exponentially and the quality of articles has improved significantly. Moreover, the journal has demonstrably helped shape the subfield of a comparative politics of gender in ways that I outline below.