Books in the Cambridge Studies in Gender and Politics series

Do gender quota laws - policies that mandate women's inclusion on parties' candidate slates - affect policy outcomes? Making Gender Salient tackles this crucial question by offering a new theory to understand when and how gender quota laws impact policy. Drawing on cross-national data from high-income democracies and a mixed-methods research design, the book argues that quotas lead to policy change for issues characterized by a gender gap in preferences, especially if these issues deviate from the usual left/right party policy divide. The book focuses on one such issue, work-family policies, and finds that quotas shift work-family policies in the direction of gender equality. Substantive chapters show that quotas make gender more salient by giving women louder voices within parties, providing access to powerful ministerial roles, and encouraging male party leaders to compete on previously marginalized issues. The book concludes that quotas are one important way of facilitating congruence between women's policy preferences and actual policy outcomes.

Explains how weak, male-dominant parties interact to marginalize women and Afro-descendants in Brazilian politics. This book demonstrates that party organizational strength (institutionalization) and the inclusion of women in party leadership can improve the electoral prospects of female legislative candidates and enhance democratic accountability and representativeness.

This book analyzes women's rights in seventy countries from 1975 to 2005, explaining the politics behind a wide array of government actions on women's rights issues such as violence against women, abortion and contraception, employment law, parental leave policy, child care and family law.

This book explores how women voted in presidential elections after suffrage. It will be used in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on women's history, twentieth-century American history, and campaigns and elections. With the upcoming centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, we can expect an increased focus on women's suffrage in syllabi or in dedicated courses.

This book analyzes why and how fifteen Latin American countries modified their political institutions to promote the inclusion of women, Afrodescendants, and indigenous peoples. It shows how the configuration of political institutions set the terms and processes of inclusion, arguing that the new mechanisms have delivered inclusion but not representation.

This book explains why women's rights and rates of political leadership are improving more rapidly in post-conflict countries in Africa than elsewhere on the continent. It provides original theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of women, peace and security as well as to the political science literature on post-conflict transitions and peacebuilding.