Still Marginalized? Gender and LGBTQIA+ Scholarship in Top Political Science Journals

Is political science research exploring gender and LGBTQIA+ politics still underrepresented in the discipline’s top journals? I examine publication trends in gender research and LGBTQIA+ research in five top political science journals, between 2017-2023 (inclusive). I find that gender research and LGBTQIA+ research together account for 5-7% of published research in the selected top journals, but the bulk of this research is on gender politics rather than LGBTQIA+ politics. Overall, gender research and LGBTQIA+ research largely appears in top journals when it conforms to disciplinary norms about methods and author gender. The vast majority of published gender and LGBTQIA+ research is quantitative. Men author gender research at rates nearly 3x their membership in the APSA’s Women, Gender, and Politics research section and are also overrepresented as authors of LGBTQIA+ research. I suggest that editorial teams’ signaling influences which pieces land at which journals

State capacity, criminal justice, and political rights: rethinking violence against women in politics

Género, violencia, derechos políticos, derechos electorales, mujeres, delincuencia, impunidad, gender, violence, political rights, electoral rights, women, criminality, impunityLas mujeres que se dedican a la política en América Latina padecen de múltiples formas de violencia de género, desde ataques físicos hasta comentarios sexuales degradantes. Las activistas que se enfrentan con este problema lo han etiquetado como violencia política contra las mujeres (VAWIP, por sus siglas en inglés). La VAWIP enfatiza la violación de los derechos político-electorales de las mujeres aprovechando una oportunidad política. En América Latina, los sistemas de justicia están en crisis, la impunidad predomina y el uso de la violencia para mantener el poder político y patriarcal está normalizado. Si bien el Estado no tiene ni la capacidad ni la voluntad para proteger los derechos de los ciudadanos, tanto la integridad física como emocional, los órganos electorales sí han protegido los derechos de las mujeres de elegir y ser electas. De esta forma, clasificar la VAWIP como un crimen electoral es una estrategia eficaz por parte de las activistas —pero una que los investigadores no pueden adoptar sin perder poder explicativo—. Desde la perspectiva académica, la VAWIP ignora cómo la impunidad fomenta la rutinización de la violencia a través del Estado y la sociedad, y plantea soluciones de políticas públicas que sólo castigan a los partidos políticos y protegen a las mujeres que forman parte de las élites. Tales reformas no buscan aliviar problemas fundamentales como lo es la debilidad de un Estado de derecho.Female politicians in Latin America experience myriad forms of gender-based abuse, from physical attacks to degrading sexual commentaries. Activists have framed this problem as violence against women in politics (VAWIP), an emphasis on women’s political and electoral rights that reflects the political opportunity structure. In Latin America, broken criminal justice systems foment impunity, normalizing actors’ use of violence to maintain political and patriarchal power. Citizens’ rights to physical and emotional security are not protected by law enforcement, but women’s rights to elect and be elected have received substantive protections from electoral institutions and electoral courts. Consequently, framing VAWIP as an electoral crime represents an astute activist strategy— but one that researchers cannot adopt without losing explanatory power. From an academic standpoint, VAWIP overlooks how widespread impunity results in the routinization of violence throughout state and society, leading to policy solutions narrowly tailored to punishing political parties and protecting elite women. Such reforms do little to address the underlying absence of the rule of law

Beyond hearth and home : female legislators, feminist policy change, and substantive representation in Mexico

Artículo originalThis paper uses the Mexican case to explore outstanding questions in the connection between women’s descriptive representation (that is, women’s numerical presence in the legislature) and women’s substantive representation (that is, women’s policy interests). Consistent with previous work in Latin America, I find that electing women indeed diversifies the legislative agenda, and that female legislators –rather than male legislators– author proposals with feminist understandings of women’s rights and roles. These trends are robust across Mexico’s ideologically-organized political parties, indicating that feminist advocates should care about electing leftists and women. That is, rightist women are still more progressive than rightist men. Finally, I make a case for unpacking the relationship between women, hearth, and home, and eliminating the conflation of “women’s interests”with childre

New Institutions, New Actors, New Rules:Gender Parity and Feminist Constitution Writing in Chile

The formal and informal rules mediate the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation. Women may be present in office but struggle to influence outcomes in the same way as their male counterparts, especially because parliaments and parties carry masculine blueprints that limit women's individual and collective power. Yet what happens when new institutions incorporate new actors to write new rules, and when women occupy these institutions under gender parity from the start? Using participant-observation and interview data from Chile’s first constitutional convention, we analyse how gender parity and newness combined to give ‘feminist designers’ significant influence over the convention’s procedural rules and, consequently, the final document. Newness and parity helped women secure the adoption of a feminist procedural code, which eliminated many of the masculine blueprints found in traditional parliaments. In turn, women delegates organised explicitly as feminists and led the redaction of a thoroughly feminist document

Neither Penalised nor Prized: Feminist Legislators, Women's Representation, and Career Paths in Argentina

The conventional wisdom holds that party leaders punish women legislators who advocate for gender equality. We test this assumption using the Argentine case, asking two questions. First, who counts as a feminist legislator and how do we know? Second, do feminist legislators have career trajectories that indicate marginalisation or penalisation? We use bill authorship data and expert surveys to identify legislators of both sexes who champion feminist causes and who adopt a gendered, though not necessarily feminist, perspective. Comparing these categories of legislators to those in the general population, we find no meaningful differences in political careers by either legislators’ gender or policy profile. In fact, many feminist champions hold prestigious positions while in congress, but this political capital results neither in punishment nor reward after congress. Women who represent women do not go on to the top posts after congress, but neither do they disappear from public life

How is Political Violence Gendered? Disentangling Motives, Forms, and Impacts

How is political violence gendered? We connect the traditional political violence literature’s emphasis on categorizing attacks to the gender and politics literature’s analysis of the barriers to women’s political participation. Our framework separates gendered political violence into three elements. Gendered motives appear when perpetrators use violence to preserve hegemonic men’s control of politics. Gendered forms emphasize how gender roles and tropes differentially shape men’s and women’s experiences of violence. Gendered impacts capture the subjective meaning-making processes that occur as different audiences react to political violence. This approach offers researchers and policymakers greater analytic precision regarding how political violence is gendered

Exclusion by Design: Locating Power in Mansbridge’s Account of Descriptive Representation

A much-circulated image during the Donald Trump administration showed Vice President Mike Pence and members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus discussing the removal of maternity coverage from the Affordable Care Act—with not a single woman or person of color among them. In another image, white men watched approvingly as Trump signed an executive order reinstating the global gag rule, which bans foreign nongovernmental organizations that receive American aid from supporting abortion access. These images contrast with one from early in Joe Biden’s presidency. In his first address to Congress, Biden was backed by two women occupying the second- and third-most-powerful positions in the country, Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, respectively. After acknowledging “Madame Speaker, Madame Vice President,” Biden said, “No president ever said those words and it is about time.

Lessons from a late adopter: feminist advocacy, democratizing reforms, and gender quotas in Chile

Many Latin American and other Global South countries adopted gender quotas during democratic transitions. What explains late-adopting cases like Chile? We analyze two instances: the 2015-2016 electoral reforms, which finally introduced a 40-percent gender quota, and the 2020-2023 constitutional process, which introduced gender parity. Using a qualitative analysis that draws on 39 elite interviews, we posit that efforts to redesign national political institutions in order to address democratic deficits create transition-like moments. In turn, these moments create windows of opportunity for quota advocates. We show how quota advocates in the parties, congress, and civil society leveraged growing voter discontent to pressure their resistant colleagues and ultimately secure gender quotas (and later gender parity) as part of larger reform efforts. Our analysis of the Chilean case elevates two factors explaining quota adoption: the long arc of democratization and women's role as protagonists in electoral reforms

Reproducing Hierarchies at the APSA Annual Meeting: Patterns of Panel Attendance by Gender, Race, and Ethnicity

Research on the political science profession has shown that homophilous research networks—that is, those organized along the lines of gender and race/ethnicity—reproduce hierarchies. Research networks composed of white men experience the most prestige and lead to the most opportunities. This study documents homophilous networks in a setting where they likely are nurtured: academic conferences. Drawing data from the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, we examine the correspondence between the gender and the racial/ethnic composition of section members, panelists, and audience members for four research sections: Political Methodology; Political Psychology; Race, Ethnicity, and Politics; and Women and Politics. We find that attendees’ and panelists’ gender and racial/ethnic identity largely mirror the dominant gender and racial/ethnic group in their section. These findings indicate that homophily manifests at academic conferences and that efforts to diversify research networks should consider who listens to whom in these settings

A Systematic Review of Nonresponse Bias Studies in Federally Sponsored Surveys

In 2006, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published Standards and Guidelines for Statistical Surveys mandating that all federal surveys with a unit response rate of less than 80% conduct an analysis of nonresponse bias (NRB). Since 2006, federal surveys have increased activities involving NRB analyses; however, it is unclear what methods have been used to assess NRB or whether mitigating strategies reduced bias. This paper provides the first systematic review of NRB studies involving federal surveys since the release of the 2006 OMB Standards and Guidelines for Statistical Surveys. The objective of this systematic review was to collect NRB studies involving federal surveys and summarize the characteristics of the surveys examined, the NRB analysis methods used, and the assessment of NRB for each