The name “Radical Cheerleaders” refers to loosely organized groups of women and men who use creative cheers and costumes to engage in political protest. This article explores the ways in which the Radical Cheerleaders challenge gendered assumptions about women's political activity. Through their aggressive presence on the streets, their rejection of norms of civility, and their use of humor, the Radical Cheerleaders (ab)use the traditionally gendered practice of cheering to stage transgressive political spectacles that cannot easily be subsumed into or appropriated by mainstream political discourse. The Radical Cheerleaders' tactics, in other words, resist governmentality. In so doing, they trouble our ideas about political deliberation and citizenship and expand the boundaries of the contemporary public sphere.

In recent years, more than a hundred countries have adopted quotas for the selection of female candidates to political office. Examining individual cases of quota reform, scholars offer four basic causal stories to explain quota adoption: Women mobilize for quotas to increase women's representation, political elites recognize strategic advantages for supporting quotas, quotas are consistent with existing or emerging notions of equality and representation, and quotas are supported by international norms and spread through transnational sharing. Although most research focuses on the first three accounts, I argue that the fourth offers the greatest potential for understanding the rapid diffusion of gender quota policies, as it explicitly addresses the potential connections among quota campaigns. In a theory-building exercise, I combine empirical work on gender quotas with insights from the international norms literature to identify four distinct international and transnational influences on national quota debates: international imposition, transnational emulation, international tipping, and international blockage. These patterns reveal that domestic debates often have international and transnational dimensions, at the same time that they intersect in distinct ways with international and transnational trends. As work on gender quotas continues to grow, therefore, I call on scholars to move away from simple accounts of diffusion to a recognition of the multiple processes shaping the spread of candidate gender quotas worldwide.I would like to thank Judith Squires, Sarah Childs, Ewan Harrison, and participants in the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy Graduate Fellows Workshop at Columbia University, as well as the editors and three anonymous reviewers at Politics & Gender, for their helpful comments. Earlier versions of this article were presented as a paper at the International Studies Association Annual International Convention, Montreal, Canada, March 17–20, 2004, and at the British International Studies Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, December 20–22, 2004.

This article explores U.S. teenage girls' rejections of “politics,” arguing that for some girls, the refusal to identify with politics is a discursive strategy informed by their consciousness of inequality and their commitments to social justice. Drawing upon interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, I show how two different groups of girls reflect on their varied experiences of political marginalization as aged, gendered, racialized, and classed subjects in order to develop a critique of the practices and policies of the U.S. government. Building on research on the various and complex meanings of political disaffection, I argue that defining politics very narrowly and then distancing oneself from it can be part of an oppositional political project, and I address myself to the implications and mechanisms of girls' use of this strategy.The author would like to thank France Winddance Twine, Verta Taylor, Avery Gordon, Richard Flacks, Leila Rupp, and the editors and reviewers from Politics & Gender for their insightful comments and assistance in the development of this article. This material is based upon work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

The 2004 U.S. presidential election was a highly gendered contest involving major masculinized, gendered campaigns by Senator John Kerry and incumbent President George W. Bush. If Senator Kerry was “reporting for duty,” and “W [Stood] for Women,” what have been the gendered implications for women as citizens, as voters, as candidates, and as potential officeholders? As we approach the 2006 U.S. midterm elections, five scholars, expert in gender and electoral analysis, share their observations about the short- and long-term implications of the 2004 elections for women's political participation and influence. These essays complicate and enrich our understanding of women and elections, and they come to different and even competing conclusions, leading us to suspect that there is a sea change under way in the analysis of women and elections, one that may recast our understandings of gender, generation, race, and sex.

In 2004, 39 individuals were newly elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Eight of these individuals were women. Women went on to win two special elections held in 2005, while a man won the third contest. This increase in the numerical representation of women in the lower house of Congress in 2004–5 was a positive counter to the lack of progress women made in advancing their numbers in other elective offices, such as the U.S. Senate, governorships, and state legislatures in 2004. These gains in representation, however, only amounted to a 15.5% membership for women in the U.S. House of Representatives. Who were these successful women, and what does their election suggest to us about women and political officeholding and about gender as a factor when men and women run for public office in the early years of the twenty-first century? Do their campaigns and election reflect the continued relevance of gender, or are they indications of the demise of gender as a factor in elections?

In 2004, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the voter turnout rate for women was 60.1% compared with 56.3% for men, and across the United States 8.8 million more women than men voted. Women have voted at higher rates than men in all presidential elections since 1980, with the gap between women and men growing slightly larger in each subsequent election year. Moreover, in 2004, women outvoted men (in terms of both turnout rates and actual numbers) in every racial and ethnic group—African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, and whites (Center for American Women and Politics 2005a).

Words and phrases commonly used to describe the women's vote in 2004 ranged from “much-coveted,” “vital,” “swing,” “heavily sought after,” and “diverse” to “the largest and most pivotal voting group” and “a challenge for each candidate to reach.” Political strategists, analysts, and scholars were cognizant that women had decided every presidential election since 1980.

The “social eligibility pool” stands as one of the most common, and most powerful, explanations for women's underrepresentation in elective office. By this view, women are underrepresented in elite politics because sex discrimination and socialization have produced a gender imbalance in the occupations that typically precede a political career (Darcy, Welch, and Clark 1994). The scarcity of women in law and business has implications for politics: “The absence of women from these stepping-stones to political office does explain a good portion of women's under-representation in public office. A decrease in this under-representation helps explain gains in women holding office” (1994, 179).

Prior to the recent reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I was involved in numerous conversations regarding strategies for its renewal. These conversations prompted me to reflect not only on the impact of the Voting Rights Act for African-American citizenship but in particular on the ways in which it did for African-American women what the Constitution and its amendments had previously failed to do. After all, it is not until the passage of this legislation that African-American women are first extended a modicum of citizenship in the United States.

Men, Militarism & UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis. By Sandra Whitworth. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner. 2004. 225 pp. $49.95.

Armed conflict, torture, murder, sexual assault, sexual enslavement, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS—United Nations peacekeepers are sent into conflict-torn countries to help prevent the further spread of these horrors. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan often highlights these brutalities when he publicly calls upon member states to send troops and resources to protect and assist vulnerable populations in conflict zones. In her most recent book, Men, Militarism & UN Peacekeeping, Sandra Whitworth provides a critical feminist analysis of a UN peacekeeping system that not only is failing to protect civilian populations but is also implicated in the spread of HIV/AIDS and in the torture, murder, sexual assault and enslavement, and human trafficking of the very populations the mission was purportedly sent to assist. Throughout, Whitworth uses sharp critical feminist analyses to help us understand why UN peacekeeping missions have too often become sites of violence and abuse.

It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office. By Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. 203 pp. $65.00 cloth, $22.99 paper.

Why do so few women occupy elected offices in the United States? One reason, perhaps the most important one, is that fewer women than men are politically ambitious. That is the major conclusion to emerge from the innovative research conducted by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox. This finding alone is bound to make It Takes a Candidate a must-read, must-cite book for all scholars studying gender and politics.

Gender and Social Capital. Edited by Brenda O'Neill and Elisabeth O'Neill Gidengil. New York and London: Routledge. 2006. 425 pp. $90.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The essays in this volume constitute a feminist response to Robert Putnam's influential book Bowling Alone, and they shed light on two interrelated questions: First, how is our understanding of the nature and impact of social capital enriched by the introduction of a concern with the consequences of gender differences? Second, how is our understanding of the relationship of gender to politics deepened by an ongoing concern with social capital? As Virginia Sapiro put it (p. 152) in her exceptionally clear theoretical essay: “Wherever discussions of social capital and politics lead, our understanding of the phenomenon will be severely limited if scholars neglect the roles of gender in the creation and distribution of social capital and in the links between social capital and politics. Important aspects of the historically different cultural constructions of male and female in society and politics suggest that disregarding gender in understanding social capital is unwise. Given how different are the structures of women's and men's day-to-day lives and the different types and amounts of financial and social resources to which they have access, a ‘gender-neutral’ story of social capital and politics is likely to be a faulty story.”

Sharing Power: Women, Parliament and Democracy. Edited by Yvonne Galligan and Manon Tremblay. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. 271 pp. $50.00.

This insightful volume contributes to our understanding of women's numerical and substantive representation in national legislatures around the world. Specifically, it focuses on a full array of dimensions of women's political presence: obstacles to women's entrance into parliament, policy mechanisms to improve women's underrepresentation, and the policy impact of growing numbers of women in national politics. Chapter authors draw evidence from a variety of sources—aggregate data on percentages of women in parliament, cabinets and political parties, surveys of political elites and public opinion, and in-depth interviews with party officials.

List of contributors.