As a core principle of democratic theory, political scientists stress the importance of more inclusive and diverse elected bodies (Mansbridge 1999; Phillips 1995; Pitkin 1967; Williams 1998; Young 2000). A large portion of that literature discusses the positive symbolic effects of elected bodies when they come closer to mirroring the population from which they are drawn. For underrepresented groups, increases in their descriptive representation symbolize a more open political arena. This improves the group's political participation as well as beliefs about the group's role in politics.

Pressure to make policy issues gender neutral, as in the cases of policy debates concerning child care and anti-violence against women, had initially been put onto public policy agendas by feminist advocates. The broader influence of neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism (also known as the social-investment perspective) in Canada has amplified this trend. Global trends toward neoliberalism encouraged less state involvement and reduced public spending on the welfare state from the 1980s into the 1990s, with detrimental effects on women's policy. Moreover, feminist women's groups and women's issues were increasingly labeled “special interests”; advocacy claims toward the state were routinely delegitimized by successive provincial and federal governments, although this trend was less pronounced under left-wing regimes than right-wing ones (Collier 2006; 2009). As Canada entered the new millennium, many social-policy researchers identified a renewed state interest in reinvestment in social programs to position the state better in a competitive global marketplace. This newer shift toward the “social-investment perspective” is alleged to have consciously erased gender from social policy debates, particularly in the child-care arena (see Jenson 2009).

As anti-choice adherents have transitioned from a scattered movement in the early twentieth century to an organized political interest group in recent decades (Mohr 1978), American abortion politics has moved to medical rather than political ground. Accordingly, advocates of safe, legal abortion have become mired in interpretative debates over abortion's medical necessity rather than its political value. To be sure, this turn was not the product of a strategic plan hatched by pro-choice feminists, but was foisted upon them by judicial and legislative developments that created political contexts to which they were forced to react. Nonetheless, these medical necessity debates have obscured—and sometimes eclipsed—more forceful political arguments, replacing self-authorizing political claims—such as political and human rights, choice, reproductive freedom, and bodily autonomy—with arguments for abortion's medical necessity.

Scholars have debated the impact of open-list systems on women's representation. While some argue that open lists provide a unique opportunity for voters to overcome parties' bias against women, others argue that they create additional barriers. I examine several mechanisms that impact women's representation within Poland's open-list system. Results suggest that 1) voters shift women's original list placements positively across all parties over three elections; 2) these shifts are more pronounced when women's overall presence on the list and list placement are lower, regardless of party; and 3) positive shifts often result in the election of substantially more women than would have been expected. These findings add to our understanding of open-list systems by documenting variability in the effects of preferential voting across time and party in a postcommunist context. In addition, the unexpected positive effects of preferential voting in Poland add to a growing body of evidence that voters and parties on the center and right support female candidates at rates approaching or similar to parties on the left.

As global society has observed the rise of women's rights and their development in a context of globalization, much research has focused on the conditions under which women's rights are acquired (e.g., Fallon 2003; Ferree 2006; Viterna and Fallon 2008). These include domestic conditions, such as democratization, economic development, and women's representation in national politics, as well as transnational conditions, such as neoliberal restructuring and transnational women's movements. Most studies, however, focus merely on one dimension of women's rights or explore one case in depth. Few studies compare cases of women's rights cross-nationally or longitudinally. This limitation can create much confusion in determining the factors that are influential or negligible for women's rights. By replicating and extending a recently published article focusing on women's social rights (Yoo 2011), I seek to distinguish the factors that are more and less influential in explaining women's political, economic, and social rights globally.

Conjuring up images of nineteenth-century London à la Charles Dickens, the Wall Street Journal recently featured an article entitled “Welcome to Debtors' Prison, 2011 Edition.” The Journal was not using the term debtors' prison as a figure of speech but, rather, was documenting a recent spike in the use of arrest warrants by debt collectors to prosecute borrowers who cannot or will not repay small amounts of money. Indeed, over the past several years, and particularly following the most recent economic crisis from which the United States and the global economy have still not fully recovered, debt-buying firms have increasingly relied upon the state's legal system as a means of compelling individuals behind on their credit card payments, auto loans, and other bills to meet their obligations. In the past year alone, judges have signed off on more than 5,000 arrest warrants, incarcerating Americans for debts as small as $250.

The literature on the descriptive representation of women in parliaments is voluminous, and most studies focus on different levels of women's representation across legislatures (e.g., Krook 2010; Matland 1998; Paxton 1997; Reynolds 1999; Siaroff 2000). The number of women in parliaments is counted across the globe, and explanations as to what facilitates and hinders the election of female politicians are sought. At a macro level, PR systems, high district magnitudes, and, of course, gender quotas are some of the institutional mechanisms that have been identified as advantageous for women's ambitions to conquer seats in legislatures. These aspects of the electoral system have also drawn widespread attention among electoral engineers, since they can be manipulated, far more so than can socioeconomic factors (such as women's educational level or participation in the labor market) or cultural factors (such as dominant religion or the cultural perception of women's societal role), both of which have also been identified as important to women's descriptive representation at the parliamentary level (see, e.g., Christmas-Best and Kjaer 2007).

While significant attention has been dedicated to explaining women's election to office, fewer studies have assessed female politicians' access to positions of power within legislatures. This latter topic became particularly salient in the British House of Commons following the 2010 general election, when recently adopted reforms introduced intracameral elections for select committee members and chairs. This article outlines three hypotheses concerning the influence of candidate sex on election outcomes: a gender bias against female candidates, a gender advantage favoring female candidates, and gender-neutral outcomes. Drawing on two original data sets, the results not only fail to support the gender-bias hypothesis but also demonstrate that women were advantaged in the interparty elections for committee chairs. These findings offer new insights into both the position of female legislators in the UK Parliament and gender and the allocation of power within national assemblies more generally.

Countries with Muslim-majority populations often are viewed as places where women are particularly oppressed. To a degree, this perception reflects reality. Fish (2002) demonstrates that, relative to Catholic countries, Muslim countries are associated with larger male–female literacy gaps, higher male–female population sex ratios (which can reflect poorer treatment of females), and lower scores on the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP's) Gender Empowerment Measure, which focuses on political participation, economic influence, and income. Looking at the developing world, Cherif (2010) finds that Muslim countries are associated with inheritance and nationality laws that are discriminatory toward women. Some suggest that Islam itself is responsible for limitations on women's economic, political, and social freedoms. Whether referring to the substance of Islamic (shari'a) law, which treats men and women differently, or to the ways in which politicians defer to conservative interpretations of shari'a law in order to build and/or consolidate their legitimacy, or to contemporary regimes' need to appease (or at least not inflame) important Islamist constituencies who favor a subordinate role for women, many accounts of gender inequality in Muslim countries assert that “prevailing interpretations of Islamic law . . . and the attitudes it informs” are a key culprit (Cherif 2010, 1145).

Women are underrepresented in most of the world's legislatures. While the scarcity of female representation is problematic for multiple reasons, one of the central concerns of advocates and scholars rests on the assumption that women have different legislative preferences than their male counterparts. If this is the case, then it implies that where women do not occupy an equitable proportion of the legislature, their interests are not well represented.

The aim of this article is to provide new insights into theorizing on “critical mass” and “critical acts,” a widely studied topic within feminist political science. From a more comprehensive viewpoint, these concepts are linked to the descriptive and substantive representation of women (hereafter referred to, in short, as DRW and SRW). The aim is to apply and test a key element—the recruitment hypothesis—with empirical data from Finnish parliamentary standing-committee hearings. The project simultaneously serves to pinpoint theoretical and methodological problems in the way we conceive and study DRW and its potential effects regarding SRW. The overall implications of the study represent a profound challenge to theorists and empiricists alike: Perhaps we should reconsider some of our beliefs concerning the accumulation of knowledge in this field from the perspective of “strong objectivity” and start reviewing fundamental assumptions that underpin our concepts of “critical” mass and acts.

Intersectionality has long been a cornerstone of feminist discussion and scholarship around the world (McClintock 1995; Rao 2012). But the concept itself—intersectionality—continues to demand additional explication, interrogation, and development. In 2005, Politics & Gender published a Critical Perspectives on intersectionality that generated a great deal of interest and debate. A recent mini symposium in Political Research Quarterly coedited by Evelyn Simien and Ange-Marie Hancock (2011) further extended this discussion, providing contributions from across subfields in political science to enrich the theoretical arguments and empirical explorations of topics that intersect and combine issues of sexual orientation, race, gender, class, and national origin across the world. This Critical Perspectives seeks to build on these foundations by contributing additional empirical and theoretical attention to the ways in which intersectional analysis can render certain experiences of oppression invisible or seemingly out of the bounds of politics.

Four decades after publication, Hanna Pitkin's The Concept of Representation (1967), continues to resonate with scholars of representation and democratic performance. Many contemporary empirical and theoretical studies of politics begin and/or end with Pitkin's seminal taxonomy of representation (formal, symbolic, descriptive, and substantive representation); her definitions of these different forms of representation; or her conceptualizations of the relationships between the representative and the represented. This classic work still seems to provide some of the crucial tools and concepts for analyses and critiques that focus on the way in which and the extent to which policy decisions and deliberative processes relate to society.

One question at the heart of the analysis of gender and politics is whether women and men act and speak in different ways to significant political effect. In terms of political representation, this issue is particularly important. Arguments for increasing the number of women representatives in parliament, for example, are not about an abstract numerical parity, but rest on a claim about the distinctive voice and experience that women bring to political debate and decisions. For some, the difference turns on the view that women bring a more empathetic and less adversarial style to politics. A number of feminist scholars have suggested that the quality of deliberation is correlated with the presence of women in a group—for Mansbridge (1996, 123), for example, the process of persuasion is related to a consultative and participatory style that seems to characterize women more than men. For others, arguments for increasing the number of women representatives in parliament turn on a difference of values. Such views were particularly widespread in the 1980s, when psychological and social theories of gender differences claimed to have found evidence of parallel but different moral reasoning in women and men (Gilligan 1982; Ruddick 1989; Tronto 1993). Gilligan (1982, 57), among others, advanced in her seminal work, In a Different Voice, that female politicians are more likely to espouse an “ethic of care” concerned with responsibility and interpersonal relationships, while men are, by contrast, prone to embrace an “ethic of justice.”

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, freedom was the dominant term used to describe the United States in national political discourse. It was articulated as sovereign power, unencumbered agency, and military triumph. “Freedom” eventually animated global violence, becoming a justification for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as for substantial increases in state surveillance. A significant body of feminist scholarship has interrogated the discourse of post-9/11 freedom, examining how the call to “free the women of Afghanistan and Iraq” legitimated the push for war (Bhattacharrya 2008; Marso 2007; Mohanty 2008). For these scholars, “freedom” transformed feminist concerns into tools of militarism and imperialism, while worsening living conditions of women across the globe. In this essay, I also examine the discourse of post-9/11 freedom from a feminist perspective, but I ask a different question: How can feminist political theory critique the discourse of American freedom and challenge its trajectory of sovereign and violent state power? In other words, I examine the discourse of Americans upholding their own freedom, rather than their quest to free others, and insist that feminist theoretical arguments are directly relevant to post-9/11 problematics.

In 1995, the fourth and most influential world conference on women delivered the Beijing Declaration, calling for “women's empowerment and their full participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society, including participation in the decision-making process and access to power.” The idea that women needed not just the equal right to vote and participate in politics, but “full participation on the basis of equality,” had been gathering force for a number of years. Activists around the world had long challenged the underrepresentation of women in legislatures and decision-making assemblies. Political parties in the Scandinavian countries had been experimenting with voluntary gender quotas from the early 1980s. In the course of the 1990s, a number of countries, particularly in Latin America, made it a legal or constitutional requirement that something had to be done. Votes for women were the key demand at the end of the nineteenth century; parity of representation was the new demand by the end of the twentieth.

My contention in this brief essay is that disability is a feminist issue with particular significance for freedom. There are two “models” for understanding disability. The “medical model of disability” has been the dominant view since the Enlightenment, when advances in science and medicine created the realization that humans can intervene in the body to overcome disease (Stiker 1999). In this model, disability is seen as an individual condition arising from a flawed body, which presents a “problem” that must be “fixed” or “cured.” The problem is intrinsic to the body, which must adapt to the preexisting environment. Disability is viewed as a loss, even a tragedy, that the person wants to escape, the appropriate response to which is pity; the less appropriate but more common response is repulsion.

“What does queer theory teach us about x?” ask Berlant and Warner (1995). “As difficult as it would be to spell out programmatic content for an answer, this simple question still has the power to wrench frames” (p. 348). This challenge comes from an early essay published to circumvent queer theory's appropriation. Its power “to wrench frames” is what I am posing to intersectional research, not only to reflect on what intersectionality has allowed feminists to accomplish but also to identify some existing shortcomings in the scope and domain of its employment. Because there is little disputing intersectionality's theoretical contribution to feminist research in the past decades—one scholar calls it “the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies . . . has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771)—it is important for us to take stock of the sorts of political problems that intersectional scholarship has addressed and the ones to which it has often been inattentive.

In the countries of the former Eastern bloc (and the USSR), abortion politics followed a different historical path than in Western Europe. In Czechoslovakia, abortion was made legal relatively early on, almost as soon as the social and political turmoil that followed World War II and the communist coup in 1948 had settled. Unlike in Western Europe, however, it was not legalized in response to pressure from civil society or the feminist movement. It was a bureaucratic decision made in relation to specific macrosocial and political circumstances. The Czechoslovak Act on Artificial Termination of Pregnancy in 1957 made abortion legal on certain conditions. Special commissions were established and endowed with the authority to decide whether to grant women permission for abortion on demand. The decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy was thus not placed directly in the hands of women.