Women

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.

Do increases in women’s legislative representation causally reduce a state’s foreign military actions, and does that effect depend on whether legislatures must approve deployments?

This article asks whether apparent attribute effects in candidate choice reflect unobserved masking (inference about missing information) or genuine lexicographic preferences (respondents treating one attribute as dominant). The authors propose an empirical test that uses conjoint experiments to distinguish between the two explanations and illustrate the approach with data on gender, race, and party; they also report a preregistered replication.

This paper asks whether local government policy priorities shape women’s decisions to run for office and offers evidence on how municipal spending patterns relate to women’s emergence as candidates. Using Brazilian municipal-level variation, the authors link policy outputs and communal spending to the number and composition of entrants, arguing that women’s interest in running varies across place and time rather than being uniform.

This article asks whether politician gender changes how voters judge political scandal, testing whether people discount or disbelieve scandals that contradict gender stereotypes. Using a survey experiment in Mexico that varied scandal type and the politician’s gender, the authors report that respondents were more favorable toward female politicians accused of stereotype-incongruent behaviors, and that people high in benevolent sexism were especially likely to discount stereotype-incongruent scandals. The piece aims to clarify the role of gender stereotypes in judgments about politicians’ fitness for office.

Donald Trump's presidency sparked intense debate over whether congressional Republicans were allies or adversaries. This article examines Trump's legislative backing from two angles. First, it forecasts his Republican support using historical data (1969–2016), finding levels consistent with expectations despite media skepticism.

This study asks whether commonly observed gaps—women scoring lower on political knowledge, expressing less interest, and being less likely to give valid answers—are driven by how surveys define "politics." The author shifts the focus from questions about political institutions to a broader set of issues that can be considered political, and uses an experimental design to test whether measurement choices systematically disadvantage women. The contribution is a qualified challenge to the conventional interpretation of political knowledge and interest: the gender gaps appear to depend on the traditional, institution-centered content of survey items rather than on an overall deficit in women’s political information or engagement.

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.

This paper asks how bilateral investment treaties (BITs) affect women's rights in host states, arguing that BITs produce divergent effects across types of rights. The authors propose that an initial “locking in” to attract investors and later legal pressures on states reduce enforcement against foreign investors, which they link to declines in women’s economic rights. They further argue that host states may respond to unrest or backlash by improving women’s political rights as a compensatory measure. The paper reports that the authors’ expectations are "broadly and consistently confirmed."