Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments: Women and Elected Office in Contemporary Western Europe. By Miki Caul Kittilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2006. 190 pp. $64.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

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 her book, Lisa H. Schwartzman engages several liberal theorists as well as some “postmodernists” from a feminist perspective. She makes use of a number of feminist thinkers to assist her in developing her arguments and clarifying her theoretical alliances. The author agrees with some liberal feminists that liberalism may be able to accommodate many feminist claims. However, she argues that even a reformed liberalism cannot meet the higher standard of being able to root “out problems that stem from systems of oppression” (p. 161). Schwartzman does not find that postmoderism, as she understands it, can meet this test adequately either. She claims, therefore, to offer an alternative method for a liberally informed feminist theory that seeks to end the structural domination of women based in the concrete experiences of women themselves. The book is tightly written and coherently argued. Each chapter is well organized and the prose is clear.

Why has the pace of electing women to the U.S. Congress been so slow? This is the central question addressed by Barbara Palmer and Dennis Simon. Their volume is a welcome addition to the gender and politics scholarly literature and is the first book since Barbara Burrell's 1994 A Woman's Place Is in the House to provide a broad overview of the role of gender in congressional elections.

Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism. By Joan Wallach Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. 2005. 184 pp. $55.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

French women were granted full political rights in 1944, yet 50 years later, they accounted for only 6% of the members of the national assembly. In her book, Joan Scott discusses the constitutional reform adopted in 2000 to answer this chronic underrepresentation of women. Rather than engaging philosophical arguments, Scott adopts the perspective of an “historian of the present” (p. ix). She traces the movement for parité from its inception in the late 1980s among feminist groups and European bodies to the adoption of the law, after the movement lost much of its original trenchancy along its transposition into mainstream political discourse.

Over the past 15 years, gender quota debates have emerged in national politics all over the world. More than 40 countries have reformed their constitutions or passed new electoral laws requiring that women comprise certain percentages of aspirants, candidates, or legislative seats, while in many other countries, political parties have adopted quotas on their own. This phenomenon raises both normative and empirical questions, ranging from whether gender quotas are appropriate to why countries adopt them and how effective they have been. Drude Dahlerup's edited book addresses these concerns with the first worldwide compilation of gender quota studies. The editor brings together a diverse group of authors who examine quotas in seven regions of the world, and she brackets their contributions with theoretical chapters on quota adoption and implementation. The result is the most comprehensive resource on gender quotas to date.