This is an ambitious book that takes a comprehensive and multimethod approach to understanding the question of women's participation in parliaments. Miki Caul Kittilson proposes a gendered-institutions argument that focuses on political parties as the key mechanism for increases in women's parliamentary representation. She moves away from supply arguments that place the onus on women to run by instead focusing on how parties can be transformed to encourage women to run. She argues that women will be most effective in their efforts to gain a political foothold where they “recognize favorable conditions within the party and party system, and where they devise context-contingent strategies for inclusion” (p. 2).

In an extensive and timely literature review, Kittilson conscientiously places her work within the context of the literature on women's parliamentary representation. She starts by pointing out the limitations of comparative studies that place a large emphasis on electoral rules. She points out that while explanations looking at the favorability of proportional representation over single-member plurality systems are persuasive in static cross-national comparison, they lose leverage when making cross-temporal comparisons. While many Western European electoral systems have remained stable over the past 20 years, the number of women in office has increased. The other dominant explanation in comparative studies focuses on changing attitudes toward women: as nations adopt more egalitarian gender attitudes there will be an increase in women's political participation. The author argues that this type of explanation is also limited because although values do not vary across Western European nations, women's representation does.

As an alternative to these explanations, Kittilson builds upon the research presented in Joni Lovenduski and Pippa Norris's Gender and Party Politics. This 1993 book illustrated the variation in women's participation across parties and within the same party over time. The authors found that parties differ in the number of women they nominate, how they rank women on party lists, and ultimately in the number of women they place in office. It is within this context of party-centered explanations that Kittilson places her work. However, whereas Lovenduski and Norris make these observations through the case studies in an edited volume, Kittilson goes a step further by proposing a more systematic, multimethod approach.

To approach this question of women's representation in Western European parties and parliaments, Kittilson uses both quantitative and qualitative data. For the quantitative analysis she uses cross-national, cross-party, and cross-temporal statistics drawn from national surveys and party data handbooks. The data set she uses includes data from 10 Western European countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Britain. For the qualitative analysis, she uses case studies of select parties in Britain, Germany, and Finland. She provides a careful explanation for why these countries were included, and is conscientious of the limitations that might exist in generalizing the analysis.

Kittilson's approach is comprehensive in that she does not only focus on the role that political parties play in facilitating women's representation in legislatures, but she also looks to the reasons and motivations that might lead a party to be more proactive in including women. In Chapters 3 and 4, she looks at the inclusion of women in party leadership and the adoption of quotas. In addressing the issue of women's representation in party leadership, she examines women's mobilization, party structure, party ideology, and party rules as explanatory variables. She finds that parties that are more centralized and fractionalized, with New Left values and formal rules, are more likely to have women in positions of power, and she ultimately concludes that women's efforts to gain power are embedded in institutions. In addressing the question of parties adopting quotas, Kittilson includes two categories of explanations: political opportunity structures (% of women in legislature, % of women in party, % of women in leadership) and institutional opportunity structures (electoral system, year of the first quota, leftist ideology, level of candidate nomination, degree of institutionalization of party, and age of party). Her findings show that the number of women in party leadership, leftist ideology, and the contagion effect of other parties adopting quotas all play a significant role in explaining the adoption of quotas.

Although the findings in these chapters are intuitively persuasive and are later supported by the qualitative analysis, there is some question as to whether the statistical tools used are the most appropriate. Kittilson uses ordinary least squares models for party leadership and event history analysis for party quotas. Because she uses party rules as an explanation for women in party leadership in Chapter 3 and women in party leadership as an explanation for adopting party rules in Chapter 4, there is a question of determining causal direction. Although she brings up the troublesome nature of the relationship between these two variables, she does not account for the problems this might cause in the reliability of her statistical analysis.

In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, Kittilson uses qualitative analysis in an examination of in-depth case studies of political parties in Britain, Germany, and Finland. She examines a number of possible explanatory factors, including the influence of electoral rules, the gender gap, attitudes on the women's movement, the presence of women's organizations, party competition, women's placement within the party hierarchy, and rule changes. Of particular interest is the role that increased or changing competition plays in motivating parties to increase women's participation in both Britain and Germany. The author argues persuasively that it is this new electoral pressure, combined with women's activism, that accounts for the relevant increases in women's representation. A similar story is not found in Finland; instead she finds that it was the women's initial strategy of working with and within the party system, along with favorable electoral rules, that accounted for the high levels of women's political representation. These chapters provide compelling support for Kittilson's proposition that women are most effective at gaining political representation when they recognize favorable conditions and devise context-appropriate strategies.

Chapter 8 returns to the use of statistical analysis to address the question of women's representation as party members of parliament. Through multivariate analysis, Kittilson finds further support for her proposition that it is both the bottom-up pressures and top-down strategies that contribute to the increase in women's representation. Her findings pull together the different components of the book, both qualitative and quantitative, by demonstrating that the parties most likely to have higher numbers of women in office are those with a higher percentage of the women's vote, more women in party leadership, and gender quotas.

After summizing the many findings and implications of her studies, Kittilson includes an “Afterword” that looks at the issues of women's representation raised in European party politics from 1998 to 2004. It is in looking at these contemporary issues that she demonstrates not only the persuasiveness of her work but also its timely relevance. Changing Parties, Changing Parliament is a book with interesting and thought-provoking contributions that make it relevant to those looking at issues of women's representations, to those studying gender politics, European politics, and party politics more broadly, and to those interested in the political representation of any marginalized group.