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Since the 1990s, gender quotas have been celebrated for improving women's equality. Yet their cross-national and longitudinal impact on attitudes toward female politicians and the mechanism through which this process occurs are not well understood. Using multilevel modeling on 87 nations, we examine how different types of quotas, with varied features and levels of strength, shape beliefs about women in politics. We give particular attention to the mechanism of visibility created by quotas in impacting attitudes. Results suggest that unlike quotas with features facilitating low visibility (i.e., weak quotas), those producing high visibility (i.e., robust quotas) significantly impact public approval of women in politics. However, the direction of this effect varies by quota type. Social context also matters. Robust quota effects—both positive and negative—are especially pronounced in democracies but are insignificant in nondemocracies. Limited differences by gender (men versus women) emerge. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive field of research identifies girls' secondary education as central to improving human and economic development. Despite improvements in girls' secondary education enrollment, there are still over 34 million female adolescents out of school—the majority in developing nations. While gender equity in education has improved, girls still lag behind boys in secondary education enrollments. Building on existing research, we argue that the failures of education spending in creating equitable access to secondary education are due to a lack of governance. We contend that strong governance has the potential to increase the effectiveness of education expenditures at improving female secondary education relative to males. Using two-way fixed effects models for a sample of 105 low and middle-income nations from 1997 to 2012, we examine how the interaction between four measures of governance and education expenditures impact gender equity in secondary education. Our findings suggest that governance increases the effectiveness of education expenditures in improving girls' secondary education enrollment compared to males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing levels of democratic freedoms should, in theory, improve women’s access to political positions. Yet studies demonstrate that democracy does little to improve women’s legislative representation. To resolve this paradox, we investigate how variations in the democratization process—including pre-transition legacies, historical experiences with elections, the global context of transition, and post-transition democratic freedoms and quotas—affect women’s representation in developing nations. We find that democratization’s effect is curvilinear. Women in non-democratic regimes often have high levels of legislative representation but little real political power. When democratization occurs, women’s representation initially drops, but with increasing democratic freedoms and additional elections, it increases again. The historical context of transition further moderates these effects. Prior to 1995, women’s representation increased most rapidly in countries transitioning from civil strife—but only when accompanied by gender quotas. After 1995 and the Beijing Conference on Women, the effectiveness of quotas becomes more universal, with the exception of post-communist countries. In these nations, quotas continue to do little to improve women’s representation. Our results, based on pooled time series analysis from 1975 to 2009, demonstrate that it is not democracy—as measured by a nation’s level of democratic freedoms at a particular moment in time—but rather the democratization process that matters for women’s legislative representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]