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This article seeks to understand the circumstances under which minoritized women are descriptively represented. Drawing from a unique dataset of 7,978 legislators in 37 countries, we conduct the first cross-national examination of minoritized women's representation at the level of individual legislators. We find that gender quotas, ethnic parties, and ethnic seats are effective at enhancing minoritized women's political representation across different electoral systems, especially when clustered together. And, although ethnic parties and ethnic seats promote the representation of both minoritized women and men, ethnic seats provide a more level playing field between minoritized women and men than ethnic parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of women’s formal political representation ranks among the most significant trends in international politics of the last 100 years. Though women made steady political progress, substantial country-level variation exists in patterns of growth and change. In this paper, we develop longitudinal theories to examine how political factors affect women’s political representation over time. We use latent growth curve models to assess the growth of women in politics in 110 countries from 1975 to 2000. We investigate how electoral systems, national-level gender quotas, and growth of democracy impact country-level trajectories of women’s legislative representation. We find: (1) national quotas do affect women’s political presence, but at a lower level than legislated by law; (2) the impact of a proportional representation system on women’s political representation is steady over time; and (3) democracy, especially civil liberties, does not affect the level of women’s political representation in the earliest period, but does impact the growth of women’s political representation over time. These findings both reinforce and challenge prior cross-sectional models of women’s political representation.

Women's underrepresentation in middle and upper management is a well-documented feature of the public sector that threatens performance and legitimacy. Yet, we know far less about the factors most likely to reduce these gender inequalities. In this article, we focus on two well-understood drivers of career advancement in public administration: leadership training and intersectoral mobility. In theory, training in leadership and experience across government levels and policy areas should help both women and men to climb management ranks. We use logistic regression to test this proposition using a representative sample of 1,819 Danish public managers. We find that leadership training disproportionately benefits women, and this helps to level the playing field. However, our analyses show that differences in intersectoral mobility do not explain the gender gap in public sector management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can weak judicial institutions facilitate the advancement of women to the high courts? We explore the relationship between weak institutions and gender diversification by analyzing the consequences of judicial reshuffles in Latin America. Our theory predicts that institutional disruptions will facilitate the appointment of women justices, but only when left parties control the nomination process. We test this argument using difference‐in‐differences and dynamic panel models for 18 Latin American countries between 1961 and 2014. The analysis offers support for our hypothesis, but gains in gender diversification are modest in size and hard to sustain over time. Political reshuffles may produce short‐term advances for women in the judiciary, but they do not represent a path to substantive progress in gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the ways activists cooperate with and challenge other global actors. Here, we argue that activist organizations' aims and timing of founding influence their connections to the interstate arena. Drawing from a new dataset, we examine patterns of transnational organizing around women's rights and environmentalism in 2013. We classify activist groups into three categories based on their inter-organizational connections: (1) multilateralists are linked to a wide array of international agencies; (2) pragmatists are more selective in their ties; and (3) rejectionists operate outside the formal inter-state arena. We find that more recently established women's groups are more likely to be rejectionists, operating outside inter-state organizations, whereas many younger environmental groups maintained ties to treaties and monitoring bodies. We interpret these changes in this population in light of the shifting geopolitical, institutional, and social movement context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the global political arena, including shifts in geopolitical arrangements, increases in popular mobilization and contestation over the direction of globalization, and efforts by elites to channel or curb popular opposition. We explore how these factors affect changes in global politics. Organizational populations are shaped by ongoing interactions among civil-society, corporate and governmental actors operating at multiple levels. During the 1990s and 2000s, corporate and government actors promoted the 'neoliberalization of civil society' and the appropriation of movement concepts and practices to support elite interests. Not all movement actors have been passive witnesses to this process: they have engaged in intense internal debates, and they have adapted their organizational strategies to advance social transformation. This article draws from quantitative research on the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) and on qualitative research on contemporary transnational activism to describe changes in transnational organizing at a time of growing contention in world politics. We show how interactions among global actors have shaped new, hybrid organizational forms and spaces that include actors other than states in influential roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]