Do female legislators exhibit more party discipline in autocratic regimes? How does party discipline affect the representation of women's interests? Work has provided mixed evidence on women's substantive representation in autocracies. On the one hand, work has shown that female legislators are more likely to act on behalf of their female constituents and push for policies that serve their interests. On the other hand, others have highlighted the limited role played by female legislators and viewed them as merely "token" women. We present one of the first systematic studies of women's substantive representation in autocracies. Focusing on the case of Morocco, we analyze the oral and written queries initiated by female legislators for almost a decade. Our results suggest that female politicians in autocracies advance women's rights. Furthermore, we find that women demonstrate high levels of party discipline; however, this does not negatively affect the representation of women's interests.
This article examines how feminist actors achieve institutional change within political parties, analyzing Uruguay's left-wing Frente Amplio, which adopted a series of internal gender-equality reforms between 2016 and 2025. Drawing on feminist institutionalism and a relational conception of agency, it proposes an analytical framework built around three interacting factors - sustained feminist agency exercised by critical actors, reflexive strategic action encompassing institutional and discursive strategies, and the presence of critical allies - mediated by favorable political opportunity structures. Based on qualitative analysis of party documents and in-depth interviews, it shows that feminist institutional change is neither linear nor consensus-driven, but cumulative and iterative.
This article analyzes networks of critical actors advancing women's representation in Brazil, positing that when executives or legislatures weaken inclusionary policies, courts can help safeguard them. In a context of persistent underrepresentation, coordinated efforts across parliament, parties, civil society, and the judiciary have created alternative pathways to expand women's political opportunities. Focusing on access to campaign finance, we examine recent court decisions that reshaped the electoral landscape. Drawing on feminist institutionalism and collective action literatures, as well as evidence from Brazil, we show how strategic leadership, cross-sectoral coordination, and judicial allies enable actors to leverage opportunities and incrementally advance descriptive representation.
Why do women lead some political parties and not others? This article examines the organizational and institutional factors shaping women's access to party leadership in Latin America. Drawing on an original dataset of 54 parties across 16 countries (1990-2025), V-Party/V-Dem data, and mixed-effects regression analysis, we find that gender organizational structures exhibit contingent effects conditioned by party ideology: contrary to expectations, formal gender models do not per se increase women's presence in party leadership, but autonomous structures produce a significant positive effect among centrist parties, offsetting their otherwise negative general effect. Party institutionalization consistently predicts women's leadership, as formal rules and standardized procedures create more inclusive conditions. Previous experiences of female leadership also generate path-dependent effects that increase the probability of repetition. The findings reveal how formal and informal dynamics interact to shape women's opportunities and identify the organizational features most conducive to breaking the "glass ceiling" in party leadership.
Women's movement actors' (WMAs) domestic and international activism has been one of the critical factors behind the worldwide diffusion of electoral (and party) quotas for women. Yet there is a set of countries in which this institutional innovation has underperformed for decades. How do WMAs gauge and react to this situation of underachievement? More importantly, do they mobilize a critical state actor - their country's gender equality machinery (GEM), if one exists - to address the deficiencies of the quota policy? Using primarily qualitative evidence (interviews, participatory observation, and document analysis) from a puzzling case, Brazil, the analysis uncovers underexplored aspects of quota underperformance. In keeping with the social movement literature, as WMAs perceive the introduction of this institutional change as a policy success, they turn their attention to other demands. However, since the policy outcomes of implementing electoral quotas for women might take several election cycles to materialize, there is a delay in understanding the innovation's shortcomings and formulating responses to address its increasingly evident weaknesses. As a result, even in countries with a robust women's movement, as in the case at hand, the decline in issue prioritization can obfuscate the pursuit of implementable, effective alternatives in subsequent rounds of quota policy reform.
Candidate recruitment is vital to democratic gatekeeping, yet Japan's party endorsement (k & omacr;nin) remains opaque and discretionary. This article argues that opaque and discretionary endorsement processes can create conditions under which gendered political harassment is exercised, normalized, and rendered difficult to challenge, thereby producing "invisible barriers" that constrain women's political agency. Because k & omacr;nin serves as a critical resource bundle - providing funds, networks, and visibility - delayed or denied status systematically undermines candidate viability. Despite public "open calls," undisclosed selection criteria enable arbitrary exclusion. Through interviews with 14 female aspirants, this study maps these non-institutionalized recruitment stages and their material and psychological costs. By conceptualizing "weaponized opacity" as a mechanism of gendered gatekeeping that may take harassing forms, the article holds parties accountable before voters ever reach the ballot.
Women's political representation remains a problem in Zambia. Applying Verba, Lehman Schlozman, and Brady 's Civic Voluntarism Model and a historical analysis of Zambia, this study finds that women's engagement in political processes is constrained by multiple, interrelated factors, notably resource limitations, psychological disengagement, and exclusionary recruitment networks. Women do not have the financial resources to finance campaigns and experience psychological disengagement from political activity because of the prevalence of demands for monetary bribes and exploitative behaviors. In recruitment networks, opaque party systems do not guarantee candidate adoption. These barriers intersect and serve as a critical deterrent to women's involvement in politics. To increase women's political participation in Zambia, a more equitable political landscape - guaranteed through political party constitutions and adherence to their provisions - could create pathways for enhanced participation.
While prior research links discrimination experiences to higher levels of political engagement among women, it remains unclear whether such engagement extends beyond in-group advocacy and how the nature of discriminatory experiences relates to this association. Drawing on survey data from Germany (N approximate to 1,800), this study examines how gender-based discrimination is associated with political engagement across four issue areas: women's rights, anti-racism, labor rights, and environmentalism. The analysis identifies consistent positive relations between reported discrimination experiences and engagement across all domains, indicating that perceptions of gender injustice may be connected to broader forms of feminist consciousness and egalitarian orientations. Additional analyses show that this pattern holds primarily among women identifying on the political center or left, but not among those on the right. The results also point to issue-specific differences between overt and subtle forms of discrimination and underscore the particular salience of societal or everyday sexism for understanding patterns of political engagement.
Drawing on a unique global dataset that monitored violence against women (VAW) measures during the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, this article explores the political and institutional factors that supported government responsiveness to VAW at that particular crisis moment. Our quantitative data highlights feminist mobilization as a central driver of government action. Yet feminist mobilization did not always translate into policy action. In some countries, governments adopted a significant response without visible feminist mobilization. Based on qualitative case studies, we identify four distinct pathways - cumulative, truncated, critical juncture, and opportunistic - through which VAW made it onto the COVID-19 response agendas of four countries with very different political and institutional contexts - Argentina, Brazil, Fiji, and Uzbekistan. The findings offer important lessons for both researchers and activists interested in exploring or promoting government action regarding VAW during emergencies.
This article examines women's pathways to leadership positions across EU institutions, asking: (1) What characterizes their career trajectories? and (2) Which factors facilitate their advancement? It develops a conceptual framework and analyzes a dataset of all women appointed to EU leadership roles between 1979 and 2021. It also presents qualitative case studies of Ursula von der Leyen, Catherine Day, and Christine Lagarde. The findings show that women's access to EU leadership depends on favorable structural conditions, exceptional circumstances, and, above all, outstanding personal and professional capacities, while persistent gender inequalities continue to shape their careers.
We test how the presence of women candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary increased levels of emotional engagement among feminists. We use an original three-wave panel data collection. We find that respondents expressed high levels of positive emotions when they learned about a man running in the presidential primary rather than a woman regardless of their feminist identities. We find that after the Democratic primary process concluded, respondents reported lower levels of negative emotions when they read about a former woman candidate relative to a man who had run in the Democratic primary. We also find that strong feminists had higher levels of positive emotions when the candidate had explicitly identified as a feminist for both women and men candidates. These results suggest that women candidates pursuing the Democratic Party presidential nomination in future elections may not increase the emotional engagement of feminists and this can have implications for turnout.
Feminist economic and feminist political economy approaches have long critiqued the gendered division of labor that relies, in part, on women's underpaid or unpaid care work in public and in private. The COVID-19 pandemic breathed new life into these ideas, creating a potential critical juncture for transforming economic models. This article uses feminists' COVID-19 recovery plans to develop a template for analyzing whether and to what extent governments' policy responses mirrored feminists' ideas about a care-led recovery. We apply this template to three cases: Germany, Canada, and Finland. We find that only Canada took initial steps toward a caring economy.
This article draws from a wider feminist institutionalist analysis of Welsh local government and women local councilors' experiences, exploring specifically violence against women politicians and the subsequent local "costs of doing politics" for women. Drawing on data from 18 semi-structured interviews with women councilors during the 2017-2022 electoral period, first-hand accounts are explored. Incidences including acts of violence, abuse, and harassment committed by the public in public and offline, and by peers in the council chamber were discussed by participants, alongside feelings of being "at-risk." Violence acts as a form of resistance to women's electoral presence and is found to have a significant impact on women's political representation. It affects descriptive representation, through discouraging prospective councilors and causing interviewees to question continuing in politics, and substantive representation by permeating political cultures, and silencing women's voices by forcing them to change the way they "do politics."
This study examines the drivers and dynamics of women's rights advocacy within Mexico's subnational legislatures. Drawing on an original dataset of nearly 47,000 legislative proposals and biographical information for over 2,200 legislators across 32 state congresses (2014-2022), the research investigates which actors champion women's rights, the institutional and personal characteristics that shape their behavior, and the extent to which their efforts result in substantive legal change. The analysis focuses on three dimensions: the volume of womens rights bills (WRB) sponsored, the legal complexity of these proposals, and their likelihood of enactment. Results reveal that sex, institutional leadership roles, and partisan affiliation significantly influence legislative engagement. Female legislators are consistently more active in sponsoring WRB, particularly those with committee or party leadership roles. However, most approved proposals target secondary legislation, limiting structural transformation. The study contributes to the literature on substantive representation by highlighting how institutional access, legislative experience, and party dynamics intersect with sex to shape policy outcomes. It also raises critical questions about the limitations of symbolic inclusion and the barriers to enacting far-reaching reforms at the local level.
Over the last two decades significant efforts have been made to increase the participation of women in politics and decision-making. As a result, the formal presence of women in politics has been increasing, with important experiences for society, democracy and institutions; but also for those women who have decided to pursue a political career in positions of responsibility. Based on data obtained from 136 surveys with Spanish female politicians, this article reveals the personal, professional and social experiences of women in politics. The results show that, in general, there are no significant differences in the experience of women in politics depending on their ideological position. This finding shows that the struggle for equality between men and women is not a matter of a particular political color, but is relevant for all women in politics.
We develop a party-asymmetric theory of gendered opportunity to explain how congressional primaries disadvantage women in different types of districts in distinct ways depending on partisan affiliation. Democratic women are disadvantaged in competitive districts, likely due to strategic discrimination, where party elites, donors, and primary voters prioritize "electability" and view men as safer choices, reducing women's success despite organizational efforts to support their emergence. In contrast, Republican women are disadvantaged in safe districts, likely due to conservative primary voters and policy demanders applying ideological purity tests and assuming female candidates are less conservative than their male counterparts, meaning many qualified Republican women opt not to run. We call this asymmetric opportunity theory, and test it on an original dataset of recent congressional primaries (2006-2020) using two-stage Heckman selection models. Democratic women were less likely to win primaries in competitive districts, and Republican women are less likely to run in the districts where they are most likely to win general elections. We offer a new framework to understand women's descriptive representation in primary elections, highlighting the need for party-specific solutions to women's underrepresentation.
This study investigates the relationship between traditional gender norms and liberal democratic values in East Asian democracies, focusing on Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Drawing on data from the World Values Survey (WVS), I explore how Confucian gender ideologies influence public perceptions of gender equality as a democratic principle. Results reveal that support for Confucian patriarchal norms, especially those emphasizing male authority and prioritizing male education, correlates with diminished support for gender equality in democratic governance. However, endorsement of women's domestic roles is positively associated with support for gender equality as a democratic ideal, suggesting a culturally embedded perception of equality. This pattern is more pronounced in East Asia than Europe, where gender equality constitutes a significant element of democracy in the minds of citizens. The study also identifies notable national and gender-based differences, with South Korea exhibiting a persistent gender gap and declining support over time, in contrast to more egalitarian trends in Japan and Taiwan. By examining these patterns in both regional and global contexts, the research provides a nuanced understanding about tradition and modernity and the role of gender equality therein.
