Women and Politics Research

It is a commonplace to observe that the post-1972 focus on women and politics involved empirical analysis, with men as a comparison (and occasionally primary reference) group. Early studies of women and politics relied on an “add women and stir” model. Survey research and computer technology provided the basis for statistical analyses of women and politics, with a behavioral political approach. The initial focus of this research concerned conventional and electoral behavior. Moreover, early research on women centered on aggregate analysis that obscured the multiplicity of women's experiences. Commonplace though these observations may be, however, this early body of research also established “women” as a politically relevant group whose inclusion in political science research was necessary for drawing generalizations, and whose exclusion from such arenas of study has no scholarly merit. Research that draws conclusions about governance on the basis of male political rulers and attitudinal research that fails to disaggregate by sex is fundamentally flawed. In short, the excluded other half has become the necessary included.

The need for research on women and politics persists. Much of the early empirical scholarship was undertaken with an eye toward feminist theory, toward high-level feminist theorizing, and toward issues of gender, women, and power. Such work served to expand our knowledge and to advance our understanding not just of women and politics but of gendered politics as well. We still lack a wide range of knowledge, especially comparative and longitudinal, about women's political behavior, political beliefs and attitudes, means of organizing, behavior in governmental office, experience in campaigning, response to power inequalities, and exclusion from political power—among other concerns. The subfield of women and politics research still requires this basic, investigatory, cumulative research. The virtue of a women and politics approach is that it focuses on women, however that term may be conceived or operationalized. “Where are the women?” was the original central question, one which we must continue to ask. In this regard, our major concern with women and politics has not been precluded by, or surpassed by, a focus on gender.

Even the earliest women and politics scholarship questioned our understanding of “politics” and the “political.” The recognition that politics was more than governments, institutions, and constitutions expanded our focus (and the behavioral revolution, attacking the traditional focus on states and constitutions, was an ally of this move). Voluntary association activism, neighborhood organizing, civic engagement, and community-level involvement quickly came within the realm of politics and the political. Concomitantly, social movements and collective action drew scholars to attend to reemerging feminist movements and to women's activism in social movements more generally (in the United States, the Black Civil Rights movements in particular). Political protest, innovative organizational forms, solidarity-creating activities, and formation of collective identities were similarly encompassed in an expanded understanding of politics. In all of these arenas and activities, women were found, explicitly and implicitly, making politics and exercising/challenging/resisting political power. One of the most important contributions of the study of women and politics has been to question conventional, institution-focused, state-centric definitions of politics, and to extend the boundaries of what has been considered “political” in the discipline of political science.

A second and equally important contribution has been to disaggregate the meaning of “women.” If “politics” and the “political” have been problematized, so too has women as a politically relevant group. “Women,” in women and politics research, are no longer treated as a monolithic, undifferentiated constituency of identified, shared, implicitly homogeneous preferences. Driven by feminist theory, scholarship on women of color, and canonical studies of racialized politics, women and politics research has moved away from essentializing women and toward a critical analysis of the ways in which non-gender-specific constructions of dominance and subordination inform, reinforce, interact with, and undermine women's political power and practice of politics. The complexities of differences among women have been studied within single geopolitical boundaries but also in comparative perspective. In particular, the scholarship on comparative women and politics has evidenced the complexities and nuances of differences between and among women, nonetheless emerging with findings of similarity in political preferences, forms of mobilization, and relationship with states, among others. If “where are the women?” was the original central question, “which women?” quickly became an expanded focus.

Gender and Politics Research

The foundational work on women and politics has been joined, but not superseded, by a focus on gender and politics. It is not yet clear that we have a common language about gender in the subfield, and disciplinary articulations of gender have changed across time. From Wilma Rule Krauss's earliest discussion of “gender” in the American Political Science Review in 1974 to Iris Marion Young's “Gender as Seriality” (1994) to Joni Lovenduski's “Gendering Research” (1998) and beyond, gender in political science scholarship has been conceptualized along a range of understandings, from simple synonym for sex to culturally specific dynamic interactions. Nonetheless, overall, these various meanings and uses share two understandings.

First, male and female, as categories of “sex,” do not lead inexorably to any particular practices or meanings and, hence, do not directly embody politics or political practice. That is, the existence of bodies imbued with male or female secondary sex characteristics do not lead inexorably to any particular practices or meanings. Whatever meanings sex might have are constructed and not physical imperatives. Because, as Anne Fausto-Sterling argues, “our bodies physically imbibe culture” (2005: 1495), we can employ sex as an analytical marker of convenience, rather than as a secure physical foundation upon which to map difference.¹

Second, male and female as values of a variable sex do not translate perfectly into a universal, transparent, bimodal distinction between masculine and feminine; rather, “masculine” and “feminine” are indicators of the outer boundaries of constellations of meanings that are politically contextualized and constructed. Furthermore, categories of masculine and feminine are not mutually exclusive, but rather are mutually implicated. We might think of this agreement as a third shift in focus: What is the political scientific utility of meanings of “women” and “men”? What exactly do we mean by “women” and by “men”?

Our common language of gender, however, is not yet fully established, even with these two agreements. We have not had the full debate, in empirical political research, on what we mean by sex and whether sex is inexorably biologically embodied. Nonetheless, gendered empirical political research need not wait for such a debate.

I propose two meanings of gender that can serve as at least part of our common language: gender as category and gender as process. By gender as category, I mean the multidimensional mapping of socially constructed, fluid, politically relevant identities, values, conventions, and practices conceived of as masculine and/or feminine, with the recognition that masculinity and femininity correspond only fleetingly and roughly to “male” and “female.” Using gender as a category permits us to delineate specific contexts in which feminine and masculine behaviors, actions, attitudes, and preferences, for example, result in particular outcomes, such as military intervention, social movement success, and electoral choice, among others.

Gender in these cases is different from a simple dichotomy of male and female, men and women. For example, Elizabeth Faue's work on “muscular unionism” (1991) and Julie Guard's analysis of “feisty femininity” (2004) illustrate how gender differences, not perfectly synonymous with sex, constrain or facilitate political actors' (in these cases, union members in the United States and in Canada) success in achieving union objectives. In my own work (2001), I found that male miners in the 1989–90 Pittston Coal Strike (United States) reframed their mining masculinity in response to new conditions of union-corporation conflict as a strategy for winning a strike. In each of these cases, the central category is gender rather than sex, and in each case, gender reveals more specifically how human actors position themselves politically in terms of masculinity and femininity, even in situations where most of the actors are, for example, men, and where sex differences may originally appear unimportant or even irrelevant.²

As the previous examples suggest, employing gender as the analytical category also permits, as it were, meaningful single-sex research. Gender points us to situations where all the actors are male (e.g., the military), or where the primary actors are female (e.g., care work), and permits us to investigate the political construction and ramifications of variations of masculinity and femininity within these contexts. For example, to what extent do U.S. military spokesmen employ a feminized rhetoric in public announcements concerning troop deaths to minimize opposition to the U.S. presence in Iraq? What underlying masculinities might be invoked in Britain and the United States to mobilize male support for military intervention in Iraq? How might conventional understandings of femininities in France have been employed to mobilize some women's and girls' support for wearing headscarves in public schools and to mobilize other women and girls in opposition? Answering such questions will lead us to consider not women and/or men (although they may) as much as they will help us to understand variations in cultural codes that apply to gender and that underlie and inform the political.

Gender also functions as process. Indeed, the fluidity of gender as a category leads fairly quickly to gendered research involving process. By “process,” I mean behaviors, conventions, practices, and dynamics engaged in by individuals, organizations, movements, institutions, and nations. Gender as process has two major manifestations in recent gender and politics research: 1) as the differential effects of structures and policies upon women and men, and 2) as the means by which masculine and feminine actors (often men and women, but not perfectly congruent, and often individuals but also structures) actively work to produce favorable gendered outcomes. Each of these two manifestations of gender as process requires at least some brief elaboration.

First, gender as process is manifested as the differential effects of apparently gender-neutral structures and policies upon women and men, and upon masculine and/or feminine actors. Gender can be seen, for example, in the workings of electoral systems to advance or to hinder female candidates for elective office. Electoral rules, negotiated historically among men representing organized, masculinized interests, can be “played,” as it were, in limited ways by individual and organized women to gain access to office. The extensive literature that identifies proportional representation, party lists, district magnitude, and left parties as factors facilitating women's access to elective office is exemplary of highly developed scholarship employing (sometimes only implicitly) gender as process (Caul 1999; Darcy, Welch, and Clark 1994; Kittilson 2001; Lovenduski and Norris 1993; Matland 1998; Matland and Studlar 1998; Studlar and McAllister 1998, 2002; Welch and Studlar 1996). Gender as process has also been employed in the scholarship on transitions to democracy. Recent research on transitions has focused on how political structures, again established and maintained primarily by men, and masculinized in their practice, have been superseded by new political forms that affect men and women differently (Bose & Acosta-Belén 1995; Kuehnast and Nechmias 2004; Matland and Montgomery 2003; Rai 2003; Waylen 1994). Research employing gender as process centers on the idea that institutions and structures are themselves gendered and have differential implications for women and for men.

How does the political construct gender? Public practice shapes private behavior and possibilities. For example, the state engages in the normalization, authorization, legalization, and otherwise privileging of heterosexual marriage, with division of marital powers according to gendered actors known as “husband” and “wife.” In these cases, distinctions of masculine and feminine, connected if loosely to sex distinctions, construct gendered relations of political dominance and subordination.

Second, gender as process suggests not only that institutions and politics are gendered but also that they can be gendered; that is, that activist feminists, religious fundamentalists, social movements, and political parties can work to instate practices and rules that recast the gendered nature of the political. This type of research involves investigations of “how cultural codes of masculinity are built into public institutions” (Lovenduski 1998: 339), and of strategic behavior by political actors to masculinize and/or to feminize political structures, rules, and norms, for example, literally to regender state power, policymaking, and state legal constructions and their interpretations. In short, gender as process can reveal how the specific behaviors of appropriately feminine and masculine actors influence the political.

Recent research has employed gender as process to demonstrate, for instance, female agency in regendering state processes and institutions (see, for example, Brown, Donaghy, and Mackay 2002; Chappell 2002; Dobrowolsky 2003; Dobrowolsky and Hart 2003; Matland and Montgomery 2003; Tremblay and Trimble 2003). These studies do not depend on women as the exclusive actors but, rather, on the process of actively gendering institutions—which can shape masculinities and femininities that have political ramifications for actually identified women and men. This work explicitly asks questions about how gender constructs the state. How do women's collective action and protest shape state institutions? How do the understandings of masculinity and physical embodiment shape public policies that are gendered in their impacts? Who has the capacity, time, talent, resources, confidence to be a candidate? Whose employment history, or family history, links him or her to powerful others who have influence with the state? Whose organized votes provide crucial leverage in electoral contests? Asking these questions can provide answers not about (or not only about) women and men but about the more complicated means by which political power is constructed and functions in gendered terms.