The Bureau on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) advanced democratic development around the globe, with a focus on building strong institutions and protecting citizens’ rights. Julie Denham (JD) served as Senior Advisor on Elections and Political Transitions. The gender team at DRG included Caroline Hubbard (CH) as Senior Gender Advisor and Team Lead, Rebecca Gordon (RG) as Senior Gender Specialist, Alessia Stewart (AS) as Gender Advisor, and Meg McClure (MM) as Coordinator of the Network for Gender Inclusive Democracy. In early 2025, the Donald Trump administration officially shut down USAID, including the democracy, human rights, and governance portfolio. This is an edited and compiled version of five interviews that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on December 16, 2025; January 9, 2026; January 15, 2026; January 27, 2026; and January 28, 2026.

The Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues (S/GWI or GWI) at the United States Department of State was established in 2009 when Hillary Clinton served as U.S. Secretary of State during the administration of Barack Obama. S/GWI’s mandate was to promote the rights and empowerment of women and girls through U.S. foreign policy. During the administration of Joe Biden, Kat Fotovat (KF) served as Senior Bureau Official and, for two years, as Acting Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues. Rachel Wein (RW) was the Women, Peace, and Security Advisor, and Varina Winder (VW) served as Senior Advisor and Chief of Staff. In 2025, the Donald Trump administration eliminated S/GWI as well as the Ambassadorship. This is an edited and compiled version of three interviews that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on January 7, 2026; January 14, 2026; and January 30, 2026.

The National Security Council (NSC), established in 1947, advises and assists the President of the United States on matters of national and international security. Members of the NSC include staff seconded from government agencies, like Andrea Freeman (AF) from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Cailin Crockett (CC) from the Department of Defense. During the Joe Biden administration, CC also held a unique position dual-hatted as a Director on the NSC and as a Senior Advisor on the White House Gender Policy Council. This is a slightly edited version of interviews that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on January 5, 2026, and February 2, 2026.

The White House Gender Policy Council (GPC) was established by President Joe Biden in 2021. It built on earlier offices like the White House Council on Women and Girls, which was created during the Barack Obama administration but was dissolved under the first Donald Trump administration, and the White House Office for Women’s Initiatives and Outreach, which existed during the Bill Clinton administration but was eliminated by the George W. Bush administration. The GPC was responsible for the advancement of gender equity and equality in both domestic and foreign policy. Jennifer Klein (JK) and Rachel Vogelstein (RV) served, respectively, as Director and Deputy Director until the GPC was dismantled by the second Trump administration in 2025. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on February 16, 2026.

The Women, Peace, and Security Policy Advisor at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) served as the agency’s lead responsible for implementing the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Act of 2017 and the 2023 U.S. Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security. Tazreen Hussain (TH) served as the USAID Women, Peace, and Security Policy Advisor from 2024 to 2025. In early 2025, the Donald Trump administration officially shut down USAID, including the women, peace, and security portfolio. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on December 12, 2025.

The United States Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons was established by presidential mandate and sat in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. The position was established in 2015 when John Kerry served as the U.S. Secretary of State during the second Barack Obama administration. It did not exist during the first Donald Trump administration. Special Envoy Jessica Stern (JS) became the second person to hold this position when she was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021. The post has not existed since January 2025. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on January 5, 2026.

The United States Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues led the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues at the U.S. Department of State. The position was created in 2009 when Hillary Clinton served as U.S. Secretary of State during the administration of Barack Obama. Ambassador Geeta Rao Gupta (GRG) was the fourth Ambassador-at-Large and the first woman of color to hold the position. In 2025, the Ambassadorship and Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues were eliminated by the Donald Trump administration. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on February 4, 2026.

The Senior LGBTQI+ Coordinator at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) led the Agency’s work on LGBTQI+ issues, integrating LGBTQI+ people across all inclusive development programs, policies, research, and training. The position was created in 2014 during the administration of Barack Obama to ensure that the promotion and protection of LGBTQI+ rights were fully incorporated into all aspects of USAID’s work. Jay Gilliam (JG) was appointed during the Joe Biden administration as the second Senior LGBTQI+ Coordinator, as the position remained vacant during the first Donald Trump administration. In 2025, Trump dismantled the entire Agency, including the LGBTQI+ portfolio. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on January 28, 2026.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No matter the methodology, gaining access to potential research participants is one of the more difficult aspects of conducting field research. Sometimes, potential participants may be “hard to reach”—for example, they are physically located in remote areas where the lack of infrastructure necessitates extensive travel and/or difficult logistics. Alternatively, they may be “vulnerable” due to disenfranchisement (incarcerated populations), stigma (those living with HIV/AIDS), or at risk if they share their experiences (people living in authoritarian states). Or participants may be “hidden”—that is, no record of their experiences exists, which, in turn, makes it difficult to find and recruit them (Ellard-Gray et al. 2015).1

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.

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.

Measuring the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation presents empirical and theoretical challenges. This article makes a distinctive empirical contribution that draws on the latest theoretical developments on the substantive representation of women (SRW). I provide an explorative qualitative analysis of representative claims in French parliamentary debates over a twenty-year period. I focus on three core questions: who is making claims? What are the claims saying? Which women are represented by the claims? The analysis considers the interplay between these questions and finds that SRW is complex and full of contestations. Most SRW comes from women and parties of the left, while most resistance (anti-SRW) comes from men and parties of the right. However, some women cross party lines to work together, while ideological differences emerge between women sharing descriptive traits. Crucially, I find that support for SRW is often restricted to claims that uphold the gendered and racialized status quo.

Self-placement measures of masculinity and femininity have been gaining popularity in political science research, but questions remain about their long-term stability and the extent to which political views may impact gender identities. Taking advantage of two waves of measures of masculinity and femininity self-placement in an online panel, a categorical measure of masculinity and femininity (making use of a six-point scale, anchored scale) is found to be both highly stable and more stable than a scalar measure (making use of a 0 to 100 scale). The scalar measure is also found to be responsive to political views, such that men who report support for Donald Trump in the US Presidential elections identify as more masculine in the follow-up study. Overall, both measures are found to be relatively stable, bolstering the case that they are measuring a stable underlying construct.

How does gender shape patterns of parliamentary speechmaking? We theorize and test three types of effects. The direct effect posits that female MPs speak less than their male peers. The access effect claims that the feminization of parliaments and parties is associated with higher gender bias in speech levels. The career effect foresees a greater gender bias in speech levels among MPs holding positions of power. Drawing on parliamentary speeches in South Africa (1999–2024), where high rates of female representation coexist with sexist norms and practices, we find evidence for all three effects. Female MPs make fewer speeches, and the growing feminization of institutions and the appointment of female MPs to leadership roles are not sufficient to reverse entrenched gender biases against women. Our findings highlight the need to go beyond the politics of presence and focus on the informal mechanisms that hinder women from performing their roles even when occupying positions of power.

Intersectionality is increasingly being operationalized as part of gender mainstreaming efforts across national and multilateral contexts. One prominent example can be located in Sweden’s 2015 institutional commitment to centering future gender equality policy in an intersectional analysis. This article explores the complexities of institutionalizing intersectionality in Swedish gender equality policy processes, drawing on the situated insights of public sector gender experts and Afro-Swedish feminist activists and politicians. Key findings include the prevalence of additive interpretations of intersectionality that privilege gender, limitations in statistical practices, and uneven commitments to intersectional policymaking across different institutional contexts. Recommendations for enhancing intersectional policymaking include the incorporation of ‘Equity Data’ and qualitative insights through structured dialogues with intersectionally marginalized communities. Ultimately, this article emphasizes the necessity of centering the voices of both institutional insiders and intersectionally marginalized stakeholders to address the shortcomings of intersectional practice to enhance its transformative potential in Sweden.

Following a 2018 FEC ruling, US congressional candidates are increasingly using campaign funds for childcare expenses incurred while campaigning. This policy has the potential to increase descriptive representation, but the policy’s viability is dependent on how voters react to candidates using campaign funds for childcare. Using a national survey experiment, we find that the framing around the use of this policy influences public opinion in meaningful ways. For Democratic respondents, positive framing treatments increase support for a hypothetical woman candidate, and candidate attack frames do not decrease candidate support. For Republican respondents, positive framing treatments do not increase candidate support, while candidate attack frames decrease candidate support. Regarding support for the policy of permitting the use of campaign funds for childcare, results were universally positive. Both positive and negative frames increased support for the policy. This research contributes to multiple literatures by evaluating the public opinion effects of candidates using campaign funds for childcare.