While abortion has been a contentious and salient political issue in the United States for decades, the debate around abortion has evolved in terms of the rhetorical frames employed by advocates on both sides. Using vignettes of statements made by hypothetical lawmakers, we evaluate responsiveness to some of these emergent frames. Specifically, we evaluate “pro-woman” framing employed by pro-life advocates, which positions abortion restrictions as being in the interests of women. The experiment also manipulates to whom the frame is attributed in two ways, the gender and the partisanship of the lawmaker. This 2 × 2 × 2 experiment explores the intersection of how abortion restrictions are framed, including the roles gender and partisanship in the persuasiveness of the frames. We find that voters are more receptive to the pro-woman frame compared to the classic fetal rights framing. Importantly, this holds even among supporters of abortion rights, casting substantial light on persuadable groups.

This article examines how Latina Republican Congressional candidates frame themselves as both embodying and representing the “real Latino electorate,” who they claim has been ignored in the U.S. political arena. In this article, I engage in an in-depth analysis of these candidates — including content analyses of their public interviews, speeches, advertisements, websites, newspaper coverage, and social media presences — in four border districts in Texas. I find that the ways in which these candidates strategically reframe Latinidad and the immigrant experience to align with Republican ideology allow these candidates to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform while simultaneously engaging in the Latino threat narrative that dehumanizes the very community they claim to represent. More specifically, these candidates articulate an alternate, intersectional vision of Latinidad which presents Latino immigrant women and children as victims, Latino immigrant men as criminals, and themselves as unique authorities on immigration given their status as border patrol wives. These candidates’ race-gender consciousness also allows these candidates to express political anger, which has generally been denied to women of color in the Republican Party. In so doing, they offer a pointed critique claiming that Latinos are a captured group in American political parties.

Transnational anti-trans actors fall into two camps: traditionally conservative actors who pursue transphobia to extend patriarchy and feminists who pursue transphobia to challenge patriarchy. This article investigates how shared language and practices of anti-trans feminist and traditionalist coalitions enact opposing sex/gender orders. I explain this alliance through grounded theory generated from a critical discourse analysis of my dataset of 1016 anti-trans texts from 175 organizations. I develop my Affective Orientation Threat Structure, which explains the affective governing process of this coalition, and then apply this framework to anti-trans discourses about trans threats to womanhood. I find that anti-trans feminists and traditionalists generate fear via shared threat constructions but frame threat differently in order to mobilize affective energy in service of diverging regulative regimes and sex/gender orders. I argue that the illogics produced by contradictions within this incompatible coalition benefit both camps by maximizing affective disorientation and generating momentum through paradox.

Feminism has been a major equalizing social movement that has faced powerful resistance. To better understand such opposition, we conceptualize, measure, and analyze perceptions of feminism as a threat, using a novel survey measure of feminism-related threat perceptions in Spain. Our results show that general psychological predispositions to feel threatened are among the most important predictors of perceptions of feminism as a threat. Contrary to expectations, women feel similarly threatened by feminism as men, which is driven by women’s generally higher predisposition to feel threatened. Further, men’s and women’s perceptions of feminism as threatening are associated with different political profiles: Men who feel threatened by feminism tend to sympathize with the far right, while women who feel threatened by feminism do not have a particular political profile. Our results highlight that feminism faces challenges that go beyond the expected anti-feminist attitudes driven by the intersection of gender and ideology.

Policymakers influence citizens’ behavior through language and through policy. In this study, we build on this distinction and use Large Language Models to study how fathers are talked about, i.e., portrayals of fathers, in parliamentary documents. The case is Sweden, a forerunner in policies encouraging an engaged father. Portrayals of fathers are related to policymaking and to fathers’ use of parental leave. The results show that an active fatherhood role dominates over a passive role in this type of documents, and that an active positive role dominates over an active negative role. However, over time (1993–2021) there is a narrowing of the gap between mentions of active positive and active negative fatherhood roles, which coincides with stalled developments in fathers’ use of parental leave. We conclude that portrayals of fathers are more mixed than expected and theorize about a signaling mechanism through which language surrounding fathers may influence their behavior.

Since the 1960s, increasing numbers of women have won the highest office in the world’s democracies despite clear gender effects in gaining office. But does reelection show the same gendered effects? Recent research suggests that compared to male leaders, women leaders often come to high office in more difficult conditions; enter with lower approval ratings; and experience more rapid decline in ratings over time. We know little, however, about the conditions that affect their odds of reelection. Does the type of office—president or prime minister—matter? Do economic and political conditions during their tenure affect their odds of success? We analyze gender and leader reelection across electoral democracies in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia,1960–2023. We show that among leaders eligible to run, men and women have roughly equal odds of winning. We also find that women run somewhat more often than men.

What does violence against women in politics (VAWIP) look like in authoritarian regimes that are widely portrayed as stable and “peaceful”? Existing scholarship largely centers on democracies, leaving nondemocratic contexts understudied. This article addresses the gap by examining Kuwait, the Gulf’s most democratic monarchy, where women’s educational and professional gains are highlighted even as political contestation remains tightly controlled. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, and activists, we theorize VAWIP as a core mechanism of women’s exclusion, enabled by the collusion of hollow formal institutions and patriarchal kinship networks. In this patriarchal peace, overt physical repression is rare, but women are governed through psychological harassment, semiotic attacks, and economic pressure that constrain their resources, competence, and visibility. Conversely, male respondents report low-risk political careers. Our analysis extends VAWIP research beyond democracies, generating hypotheses on how regime type and kin-based networks shape nonphysical coercion in ostensibly peaceful authoritarian regimes.

Party youth wings are a vital pipeline to power, but have been overlooked by gender scholars. We investigate the political socialization that youth wings offer their women members, focusing on gendered trends as regards two key political attitudes. We ask: Do women and men in youth wings differ in their acquisition of personal efficacy and electoral ambition? Using YOUMEM survey data from over 3,100 youth wing members in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden, we find that women are more likely than men to report increased desire to influence party policy and stand as candidates – the latter especially in center-right youth wings. In addition, the more exposed members are to the youth wing, the larger the gender gaps in the acquisition of efficacy and ambition. Our results suggest that, insofar as women’s political socialization is concerned, youth wings can be forces of renovation within their parties.

In the last decade, research on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) has increased significantly. First identified by women activists in the Global South, VAWIP refers to behaviors that specifically target women as women by pressuring them to leave politics (Krook and Sanín 2016). Activists in Bolivia and later in other regions of the Global South first called attention to VAWIP in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when countries around the world began adopting gender quotas to increase the presence of women in government (Krook 2019). Most scholarship in this area has focused on violence targeting women candidates and elected officials (Collignon and Rüdig 2020; Dalton 2021; Håkansson 2021; Herrick et al. 2021; Raney and Collier 2024; Schneider and Carroll 2020). Attention to women in formal politics is warranted given their important representational role. Women’s presence in politics is a necessary first step to achieve political change and advance women’s interests (Beckwith 2011).

On March 2, 2026, Iraqi feminist activist Yanar Mohammed was assassinated by armed militants at her home in Baghdad. Since founding the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) in 2004, Mohammed had been repeatedly targeted by anti-rights and fundamentalist forces seeking to repress her advocacy for women’s rights. She was a pioneer in building feminist infrastructure to support women and girls fleeing violence, while also publicly challenging the U.S.-led war, militarization, and patriarchal governance.

Research on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) and research on violence against women activists have made crucial contributions by conceptualizing violence as a gendered phenomenon that targets women in response to their political participation. In these approaches, violence operates as a mechanism to discipline, silence, or expel women from political and public life. Alongside these developments, a growing body of scholarship has examined anti-gender politics as a structured and transnational political project, paying particular attention to its actors, discourses, and strategies.

Cristiana Chamorro Barrios is a Nicaraguan journalist and founder of the Nicaraguan Foundation for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit focused on promoting freedom of expression and public access to information, as well as providing training and support to local journalists. Cristiana was arrested on June 2, 2021, in Managua, Nicaragua, on accusations of tax evasion (International Society for Human Rights 2025). At the time of her arrest, Cristiana, a member of a prominent Nicaraguan family, had recently announced her intention to challenge Daniel Ortega in the November 2021 presidential election and was widely considered the favorite in the race. The charges against Cristiana1— including the vague claim of “abusive management and ideological falsehood” — though made with no evidence, disqualified her from running for office. She was later tried in sham proceedings and sentenced to eight years in prison. In 2023, Cristiana was one of hundreds of political prisoners forcibly expelled from the country and later stripped of their citizenship (Abi-Habib 2023; Confidencial 2021).2

The literature on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) has made substantial contributions to understanding how gender shapes political exclusion. Foundational work by Krook and Restrepo Sanín (2016; 2020) defined VAWIP as a form of hate crime and as systematic backlash against women’s entry into political life. This conceptual scaffolding informs Krook’s (2022) subsequent attention to semiotic and symbolic harm, extending the VAWIP framework beyond physical violence to encompass the representational strategies through which female politicians are delegitimized. Bjarnegård and Zetterberg’s (2023) edited volume extends the framework further, recognizing that gender-based political violence operates across a broader range of contexts and along a “psychological-physical continuum” (7) that is neither temporally nor institutionally confined to election cycles or legislative chambers.

The literature on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) implicitly treats such violence as boundary enforcement: a political field already exists; the violence women encounter marks the edge they are not permitted to cross; and the state stands as the guarantor of protection and redress under the rule of law, whether or not it delivers (Krook 2020; Krook and Restrepo Sanín 2016). In high-capacity authoritarian states like China (Johnston 2019), the premise of this framing does not hold. The political field itself is monopolized and policed by the state, which determines what counts as politics, who is recognized as a legitimate political subject, and what forms of political action are permitted.

Women’s rights advocates and movements play an important role during political transitions, shaping feminist outcomes following these transitions. Women are also often at the forefront of many pro-democratic mobilizations and struggles for political change (Baldez 2002; Goetz 2009; Viterna and Fallon 2008; Waylen 2007; 2011). Yet this participation is not without costs, and one core cost remains undertheorized in the literature: targeted violence against women precisely because of their gender and political engagement.

Violence against women in politics (VAWIP) is a widespread phenomenon that deters women from fully engaging with political activities, particularly from running for office. Not only office seekers but also a broader range of women actors, such as journalists, human rights defenders, and civil servants, experience sexual harassment and assault perpetrated by political actors (Krook 2020). While much of the literature on violence against women in politics focuses on the incidence of such violence and policy solutions, this article broadens the analytical scope to theorize how institutional responses to redress harms may not resolve but instead exacerbate violence through further layers of victimization.

On May 20, 2025, the Swedish parliament passed a new law that criminalizes the purchase of sexual acts taking place “at a distance,” that is, via digital platforms and without physical contact. It prohibits the act of promoting or financially exploiting an individual to perform a sexual act remotely for compensation and specifically bans clients from impacting the content of online sexual acts (Government Bill 2025; SVT Nyheter 2025). By targeting platforms such as OnlyFans, it aims to capture the sex industry’s digitalization and thereby decrease the vulnerability of specific groups and prevent new entries into prostitution.

Kamala Harris, a first multi-racial Black woman, became the official Democratic presidential nominee on August 5, 2025. This historic achievement only amplified the intensity of discussions about Black women’s politics in the United States. As Black feminist political scientists studying Black women’s politics, we knew we needed to document the nuance, dynamism, and historical nature of Harris’s campaign. We were keenly aware that we needed to capture the narratives of Black women voters to fully make sense of this historic moment. The media narrative that Black women were excited about Harris’s nomination (Jones 2024; Walker 2024) and scholarly findings that Black women voters preferred Black women candidates (Brown et al. 2019; Philpot and Walton, Jr. 2007) seemed superficial. We believed that beneath Black women’s support for Harris lay a particularized set of emotions and wide variation in candidate evaluations, which are underexplored because Black women consistently vote Democratic and are the demographic group most likely to support Black women candidates. These varied emotive responses lead to the same political behavior: a vote for Harris. Our research examines how Black women feel about politics and how these emotions translate into political action.