Gender Ideologies and Polish Political Parties

This article explores the gender dimension of ideology and representation by analysing the political parties that ran in the 2019 Polish parliamentary elections, using a novel analytical framework based on gender claims and gender-related policy pledges. This article demonstrates that a left and liberal ideology largely determines feminist and pro-LGBTQ+ promissory representation. However, the gender ideologies of right-wing political parties vary in their traditional types and can include a populist element. This article contributes to comparative gender and politics scholarship by examining gender ideologies in the Central and Eastern European context, where on the one hand, populism and anti-gender campaigns have taken hold, and, on the other, feminist and progressive movements have challenged traditionalism and illiberalism. This article also differentiates a scholarly meaning of gender ideology from its populist meaning.

Decomposing the source of the gender gap in legislative committee service: evidence from US states

Extensive research on gender and politics indicates that women legislators are more likely to serve on committees and sponsor bills related to so-called “women's issues.” However, it remains unclear whether this empirical regularity is driven by district preferences, differences in legislator backgrounds, or because gendered political processes shape and constrain the choices available to women once they are elected. We introduce expansive new data on over 25,000 US state legislators and an empirical strategy to causally isolate the different channels that might explain these gendered differences in legislator behavior. After accounting for district preferences with a difference-in-differences design and for candidate backgrounds via campaign fundraising data, we find that women are still more likely to serve on women's issues committees, although the gender gap in bill sponsorship decreases. These results shed new light on the mechanisms that lead men and women to focus on different policy areas as legislators.

The Tragedy of Sex Trafficking: A Study of Vietnamese Women Trafficked into Malaysia for Sex Purposes

Sex trafficking is an abhorrent crime in our contemporary times. Malaysia is currently both a transit and destination country, where women from different countries are trafficked in and out of Malaysia for sex purposes. This article focuses specifically on the trafficking of Vietnamese women into Malaysia. We, the researchers of this paper, interviewed a group of 10 Vietnamese women who were caught in a single police raid at an illegal ‘gambling center’ and placed in a women’s shelter in Kuala Lumpur. While this article explores the tragedy of sex trafficking and the plight of trafficked victims, it also focuses on the politics of the body of the trafficked woman, discussing how the female body has been abused and condemned through manipulation and oppression. This article also reveals how systems of oppression, namely patriarchal cultural practices and gendered discrimination, have helped form a prejudice and suppression of Vietnamese women. Ketu Katrak and Elleke Boehmer’s discussions on the politics of the female body construct the basis of this article’s theoretical framework. At the same time, the literary approach of ‘lived narratives’ offers a unique blend of multiple disciplines of study, including literature, sociology, gender, and politics, to discuss sex trafficking in Malaysia. Overall, this article provides a glimpse into the complex dynamics of sex trafficking in Malaysia.

Gender and Politics: Gender Balance as a Panacea to a Credible and Successful Election

This paper focuses on Gender Balance as a Panacea to a Credible and Successful Election, having as its raison d’être: to review the concept of gender balance and appropriate its implications towards achieving a credible and successful election required for the existence of human centered development process in sub-Saharan Africa, with Nigeria as a case study. Thus, the paper achieves its goal by adopting a qualitative descriptive method of analysis as it examines qualitatively: the urgency for the crusade on gender balance; the inter-linkages between gender balance and a credible-successful election. A few theoretical orientations were employed to mediate for a proper epistemic extrapolations and reconstructions to explaining gender balance as a panacea to a credible and successful election: these include, the notion of Social Contract, the notion of Democratic Culture, and the notion of Participatory Electoral Process. The paper made some findings, a few of these include: 1) there is the tendency in the sub-Saharan African socio-political cultural practice, Nigeria in particular, to socially exclude women in politics because the female gender has been judged first of all from sexuality point of view as a second class gender rather than seeing women, first of all, as humans, hence entitled to human rights for which right to political participation is inclusive. 2) There is a correlation between gender balance and a credible-successful election, and the absence of the former reproduces a negative outcome in the latter. The paper therefore concludes that strict observance of gender balance is a sine qua non for a credible-successful election conducive for human centered development process. It thus recommends for the total commitment of government to democratic culture by mainstreaming women in politics, inter alia. Received: 27 July 2021 / Accepted: 15 October 2021 / Published: 5 November 2021

The Essays

Woolf’s essays fall into many genres, including book reviews, literary criticism, biography, memoir, and occasional pieces. As a student of the essay and its history, she studied the form from Montaigne, Hazlitt, Pater, and Beerbohm and through their work she learned to make the essay her own, reinventing the genre to argue for a uniquely female and feminist perspective. Woolf’s deep understanding of the essay’s form, her drive to construct a female literary history and female narrative form, culminate in A Room of One’s Own (1929), where she employs a feminist rhetoric of affect and emotion. Woolf’s particular contribution to the essay includes a new kind of literary history that focuses on women, gender, and politics. Hers is a uniquely feminine and feminist voice created through a visceral and sensual rhetoric that addresses the body’s response to experience and exploits emotions in order to persuade her readers.

Are You My Candidate? Gender, Undervoting, and Vote Choice in Same-Party Matchups

Partisanship is the dominant force that dictates American electoral behavior. Yet Americans often participate in elections in which either the partisanship of candidates is unknown or candidates from the same party compete, rendering the partisan cue meaningless. In this research, we examine how candidate demographics—specifically gender—relate to voter behavior and candidate selection in these contexts. Leveraging survey data from same-party matchups in congressional elections (resulting from “top-two primaries”), we examine the relationship between candidate gender and undervoting and vote choice. We find that in same-party matchups, women candidates are associated with lower levels of undervoting among women voters. Furthermore, we find that in mixed-gender contests, women voters from both parties and Democratic men are more likely to favor female candidates. The findings presented here have important implications for the literatures on gender and politics, electoral politics, partisanship, and the design of electoral institutions.

MULHERES NA ASSEMBLEIA LEGISLATIVA DA BAHIA NO PÓS-1988

RESUMOO presente trabalho se propõe a analisar, sob a perspectiva da garantia constitucional da igualdade de gênero, a participação das mulheres na Assembleia Legislativa do Estado da Bahia - ALBA. Através de uma abordagem empírica fundada no levantamento quantitativo dos mandatos parlamentares exercidos por mulheres em cada legislatura da ALBA após 1988, pretende-se demonstrar como a participação feminina naquela instituição representativa ainda é incipiente e enfrenta uma série de obstáculos. Tal constatação confirma algumas das hipóteses da literatura feminista sobre gênero e política e também da teoria democrática contemporânea sobre a baixa representatividade feminina nos órgãos legislativos. Ao final, apresentam-se indicativos a serem avaliados como alternativas inclusivas enquanto as estruturas partidárias não conseguem promover maior equilíbrio de gênero na representação política. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Igualdade de gênero; Democracia; Representatividade Política Feminina. ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the female political representation in the Legislative Assembly in the State of Bahia - ALBA, under a perspective of the constitutional guarantee of gender equality. Through an empirical approach stablished in a quantitative research on parliamentary mandates from women in each legislature since 1988 it is intended to show how female participation in that institution is still incipient and faces several obstacles. The evidence confirms some of the hypotheses of feminist literature on gender and politics and also from contemporary democratic theory on low female representation in legislative bodies. In the end, there are suggestions to be evaluated as inclusive alternatives as long as party structures cannot promote greater gender balance in political representation. KEY WORDS: Gender equality; Democracy; Female Political Representation.