With two women leading in the polls, Mexico will elect a woman president for the first time in June 2024. Due to a long history of gender quotas, the country has seen a rise of women in the legislature, reaching gender parity in the 2018 elections. The current presidential contest has nonetheless brought the continued gendered nature of Mexican politics to the forefront, drawing attention to the complicated relationship between gender, representation, and electoral politics.

This virtual special issue collects together articles on women as national leaders published in Politics & Gender. Focusing on a wide range of countries around the world, the articles highlight the challenges women face when running for and working in the executive branch as well as the successes they achieve while in office.

The first group of articles maps the paths women take to being elected to higher office and point to a common type of barrier: institutions. In a comparison of women presidents and prime ministers across the world, Farida Jalalzai finds that women are more likely to ascend to these positions when  executive power is fragmented across several positions. Sarah Elise Wiliarty, Karen Beckwith, and Marcela Rios Tobar highlight the role of political parties, identifying how achieving party leadership is a pivotal step for women achieving executive office in parliamentary and presidential systems respectively. As Anne Maria Holli demonstrates in the Finnish case, changes in political institutions can thus open up opportunities of women to gain executive office. Melinda Adams emphasizes the important of post-conflict institutions in combination with a strong women’s movement.

The second set of articles explore the gendered nature of public opinion and media coverage of women presidents and prime ministers. In their examination of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, Melissa K. Miller, Jeffrey S. Peake, and Brittany Anne Boulton find that Clinton received more negative media coverage than her male counterparts. When elected to office, women also face gendered perceptions of their leadership, as shown by Linda Trimble and Carol Johnson in the case of Julia Gillard.  According to Jennifer M. Piscopo and Louise K. Davidson-Schmich, Farida Jalalzai, and Malliga Och, gender norms can also shape opinions, both positive and negative,  about the effectiveness of women’s leadership during crisis. Mark Setzler, meanwhile, demonstrates how difficult bias against women as leaders is to measure.

The final group of articles asks questions about the impact of women as national leaders. Women presidents can have positive effects for women’s substantive representation, as demonstrated by Farida Jalazai and Pedro G. dos Santos in their article about Dilma Rousseff. However, in parliamentary contexts Diana Z. O’Brien, Matthew Mendez, Jordan Carr Peterson, and Jihyun Shin find that women prime ministers generally do not aid in increasing the descriptive representation of women through cabinet positions. In authoritarian contexts, women’s political leadership is often much more symbolic than substantive, according to Aili Mari Tripp. Young-Im Lee demonstrates, further, dynastic politics can overshadow gendered representation.

- Majka Hahn, Rutgers University, Politics & Gender graduate editorial assistant

Please enjoy free access to all articles below until the end of September 2024. 

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