This research explores how gender stereotypes shaped voter behavior among white Americans during the contentious 2016 Presidential Election. Using survey data, we analyze the relationship between racial resentment and beliefs about women holding positions of power, revealing unexpected patterns.
* Research Question:* How and why does party activism in populist radical right (PRR) parties differ between women and men? The existing literature predicts lower activity by women because of lower motivations, weaker party ties, and greater sensitivity to stigma.
The gap in women’s representation between the Democratic and Republican parties has widened over the past thirty years. Existing explanations focus on voter responses to candidate sex but understate how voter preferences for gendered presentation shape who advances. The argument: Republican voters—especially the most conservative—favor masculine-presenting candidates in intraparty and entry-level contests, and because sex and gender are correlated this preference reduces the number of Republican women who progress through the political pipeline.
This study asks how gender and status shape conversational dynamics in parliament and highlights interactional asymmetries as a mechanism of marginalization. Using parliamentary question-and-answer exchanges from Croatia, the authors analyze how MPs adjust the frequency, length and depth of engagement depending on the gender and executive status of interlocutors. The contribution frames withholding speech and abbreviated engagement as a form of non-cooperation that can reproduce parliaments as masculine institutions while shaping oversight quality.
Across Europe, the Istanbul Convention — a treaty aimed at combating violence against women — has become a central battleground over gender and sexual equality. Right-wing forces mobilize nationally and transnationally to defend traditional values and oppose so-called “gender ideology,” while progressive actors push back to protect women’s rights. The result is uneven ratification: many states have ratified the Convention, while several have not.
When autocrats avoid spelling out concrete rules for behavior, how do citizens show political compliance? Prior work predicts that uncertainty pushes risk-averse actors toward self-censorship. This study shows that compliance under such uncertainty is gendered rather than uniform.
A prevailing view stresses the destructive effects of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) on communities. An alternative perspective emphasizes survivor agency: survivors may try to counteract stigma by contributing to communal life. The analysis tests whether experiences of CRSV increase civic engagement and whether that mobilization alters gender gaps or harms intergroup relations.
Are nonverbal reactions during parliamentary debate gendered? Do male and female members of parliament experience applause or jeering differently depending on the gendered nature of the speech?
Political science publishing remains male-dominated: a random political science journal article is roughly twice as likely to be written by a man. Many questions about where women are present or absent in the discipline remain unanswered—across journal prestige, coauthorship patterns, and subfields.
Descriptive representation can strengthen democracy by making party organizations more inclusive. The central theory is that parties retain and promote incumbents according to gendered criteria, which creates disproportionate incentives for women to recruit party members. At the same time, gendered resource inequalities reduce women’s access to the patronage networks and resources typically used for recruitment. Faced with these constraints, women respond by recruiting more women—because it lowers recruitment costs, fits role expectations, and makes credit claiming easier.
Extensive literature links cultural conflict to stagnant social mobility but largely centers on men. Upwardly mobile women are often cast as progressive winners in knowledge-based societies, yet their perceptions and politics are understudied. This paper asks how women view their individual and collective trajectories and how those views relate to expectations about future opportunities and political attitudes.
This study tests whether candidate qualifications can win over out-group voters in Afghanistan. An original conjoint experiment was embedded in a face-to-face survey conducted in three Afghan provinces between 2016 and 2017 with over 2,400 respondents.
Conventional wisdom in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) predicts a male advantage at the polls driven by sexism. A large-scale conjoint experiment overturns that expectation: voters in six Arab countries are more likely to support female candidates and rate them as more capable, even in stereotypically male domains.
Given the global pattern that women leaders are often pressured to display masculinity to be seen as effective, this study asks whether those expectations—and the leadership styles they promote—can change over time.
This study analyzes 1,140 resolutions and amendments explicitly targeting Russia in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) from 2007 to 2021. It investigates how cultural politics—especially debates over LGBT rights and traditional family values promoted by Putin—shape divisions over support for Russia across and within European parties.
This study asks whether local state action—specifically women’s police stations (WPS)—shapes citizens’ attitudes toward gender-based violence. Using evidence from Brazil, the authors examine whether the existence and duration of WPS in a municipality are associated with men’s rejection of violence and support for bystander intervention, and assess alternative explanations for those associations.
Increased diversity among members of state legislatures has occurred, but minority and women representation in leadership positions remains limited.