Women's groups emphasize the view that women are viable candidates in American politics with the popular slogan “when women run, women win.” What do party leaders believe about women's electoral chances? Do parties know that “women win”? In an analysis of state legislative election results, I find few gender differences in candidates' vote share and success rates—two widely used measures of the status of women candidates. Yet I find that many party leaders report that one gender has an electoral advantage. These party leader perceptions are related to the objective measures of women's electoral success to some extent. However, most analyses reveal a gap between elite perceptions and objective measures of women's status as candidates. This disjuncture suggests that scholars may have overestimated the extent of party leader and voter support for women.I thank Timothy Frye, Claudine Gay, Kathryn Pearson, Beth Reingold, Lisa Sanbonmatsu, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. I also thank Nanaho Hanada, Heidi Bruns, Lyndsey Young, Huma Khan, and Tina Pierce for research assistance.

Having and raising children bring about tremendous change in the lives of parents, and it seems likely that these changes may have a political dimension to them. In this article, we use National Election Studies data from 1984 to 2000 to explore the impact of children on social welfare policy attitudes, with special focus on how children influence the sexes differently. Our findings show that having children does have a significant effect and affects the views of men and women differently. Women with children were significantly more liberal on social welfare issues than those without, whereas children had either no effect or possibly a conservative impact on the views of men. Moreover, the impact of parenthood grows stronger across the 1990s. We argue that two factors lie behind the increased and gendered impact of parenthood: the changing nature of the American family, particularly the role of mothers, and the politicization of the American family.

Candidate dropouts are a crucial and understudied population; they represent a significant source for increasing women's candidacies and addressing the gender imbalance in office. Survey evidence demonstrates that women are discouraged from running in districts in which their party is strong, while men are discouraged from running in districts in which their party is weak. Are women more likely to drop out of an election race than are men? If so, why? Using election records and an original survey, this article examines the experiences of all declared candidates for the state legislature in Florida in 2000 and 2002. The sample includes candidates who won office, who lost their races, or who dropped out along the way. Evidence here shows that women are no more likely to drop out of a state legislative race than are men. Among dropouts, however, women are disproportionately likely to drop out from districts in which their party is strong. The results offer support for the contention that political elites continue to value men's political leadership more than women's, and that increasing the number of female officeholders may require efforts to support declared women candidates in the earliest stages of their candidacies.A previous version of this research was presented as a paper at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. My thanks to Kira Sanbonmatsu for helpful comments on this study.

Women's representation by elected women is a major research arena for scholars of women and politics. Comparativists and U.S. politics scholars, as well as feminist theorists, have given extensive attention to the question of whether or not women's political presence in legislatures is necessary for advancing policies favorable to women. Recent research and theorizing have sought to identify the conditions under which women-friendly policy might be advanced and the explanatory links between women's parliamentary presence and public policy outcomes. A key potential explanatory model has been partially constructed on the concept of “critical mass”: a threshold number (or percentage) of women in a legislature necessary for transforming the legislative context from one in which women-friendly policy is unlikely to one in which the opportunities for women's policy success are increased. If, as Mansbridge asserts, women's descriptive representation improves women's substantive representation, do increasing numbers of women in legislatures result in more and better public policy for women? Is there a critical mass of elected women that, once achieved, accelerates their policymaking opportunities? If so, what mechanisms explain such a transformation? Should activist women target a specific critical mass as a political strategy for advancing favorable legislation? The following four critical essays address these questions, taking in their different ways a critical perspective on the concept of critical mass.

Political scientists concerned with gender relations have long been interested in the numbers of women in national legislatures. Women make up slightly more than 50% of the world's population, yet average only 16% of the world's elected political posts. This has led to calls for action that would increase the number of women in legislatures based both on arguments of justice and on claims that an increase will substantively change decision-making processes and outcomes. Part of the debate about substantive changes in political decision making has centered on whether women in a legislature must reach a “critical mass” in order to bring about change in the political arena. The term critical mass is frequently used by politicians, the media, and academics, but can it offer insights into the influence of gender on political processes and outcomes? In this essay, I argue that critical mass is only useful if we discard the belief that a single proportion holds the key to all representation needs of women and if we discard notions that numbers alone bring about substantive changes in policy processes and outcomes. I use a longitudinal textual analysis of New Zealand parliamentary debates to begin development of a joint-effect model that can better explain the factors that aid (or hinder) the substantive representation of women.

Yesterday's suffragists and today's female activists who call for more women to be elected to parliament share some ideological grounds: They believe that women exercising the rights of citizenship, whether by voting or by being elected to office, can make a difference in politics. This reasoning was fed by the notion of critical mass, introduced in the political debates in 1988 by Drude Dahlerup. Elevated to lawlike status (or should I say dogma?), the concept of critical mass was quickly made the object of abusive interpretations, becoming synonymous with a relationship of cause and effect between presence and ideas (or between representation and responsiveness), and thus leading one to believe in the existence of a sisterhood among political women and a dialogue on their representational activities. Taking a leaf from the politicians' book, political scientists lost all prudence, abandoning themselves to blind generalizations with the powers that frame female politicians' words and acts. One of these forces is the electoral system. Although it plays a very important role in women's access to parliament, it was completely ignored by those who believe that in greater number, women will change politics.

The theory of a “critical mass” seems to live a life of its own, in spite of reservations expressed by researchers, my own reservations included. In debates about women's political representation, the importance of a certain number or percentage of women in political assemblies is often stressed. According to conventional wisdom, research has shown that it takes a certain minimum representation, for example, 30%, before the minority, here women, are able to make a substantial difference in politics.

Today's historic level of women in national parliaments—while still far short of parity at 16%—owes much to the global spread of gender quotas. This process, in turn, owes much to the concept of “critical mass”: International organizations, transnational networks, party politicians, women's activists, and even ordinary citizens argue that women should constitute 30% of all political bodies, the magic number where female legislators are said to be able to make a difference. As the notion of critical mass has gained wide currency in the real world, however, many scholars have come to question its utility and relevance for analyzing women's legislative behavior. Indeed, as the number of studies grows, it is increasingly obvious that there is neither a single nor a universal relationship between the percentage of women elected to political office and the passage of legislation beneficial to women as a group: In some cases, women are able to work more effectively together as their numbers grow, but in others, women appear to make a difference—in fact, sometimes a greater difference—when they form a small minority of legislators, either because their increased numbers provoke a backlash among male legislators or because their increased numbers allow individual women to pursue other policy goals. These contradictions thus raise the question: Should feminists give up on critical mass? Or are there any compelling reasons—either theoretical or practical—for retaining the concept in debates on women's political representation?

Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. Edited by Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2005. 310 pp. $24.94.

The transnational dimensions of women's rights are an important emerging area of analysis. Just Advocacy? provides timely and critical insights into this area of study. This edited book is unique in that it applies a cultural lens to the study of political questions relating to rights, transnationalism, and representation, questions which are conventionally conceived through legal, institutional, or social movement theories. The critical feminist stance of the authors draws out the complex and often contradictory nature of human rights—especially as they relate to the operation of gender and to women's lives—and conceives of both feminism and transnationalism in diverse ways.

Governing Codes: Gender, Metaphor, and Political Identity. By Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler. New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. 2005. 241 pp. $70.00 cloth, $28.95 paper.

Fortunately, in the last 20 years, the scholarship on women in politics has grown considerably, as have the number of women running for office, the number of women holding office, and thus the amount of data, artifacts, contexts, and situations to be analyzed. Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler, in Governing Codes, offer a solid, interesting, and insightful addition to this growing line of work. With the presentation of four intriguing case studies, the authors provide a rich and informative analysis from a revealing vantage point—the use of metaphor—to uncover what remains the frustrating and challenging language that four credible and politically astute women had to overcome, as well as some of the rhetorical strategies they successfully employed in doing so.

Eight Women Philosophers: Theory, Politics, and Feminism. By Jane Duran. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. 308 pp. $64.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Searching for evidence of women's presence in the canon of philosophy, I found that the Cambridge Companion Series, an extensive and prestigious set of 110 volumes offering the “most convenient and accessible guides to the major philosophers available” (from their Website), has only two such volumes devoted to women philosophers. The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt was published in 2000, The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir in 2003. Jane Duran, in contrast, has found eight women philosophers to study (seven in addition to Beauvoir), and her book offers a rich introduction to important themes in the work of Hildegard of Bingen, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor Mill, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir.

The U.S. Women's Movement in Global Perspective. Edited by Lee Ann Banaszak. Rowman & Littlefield. 2006. 272 pp. $72.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Despite its considerable successes, the U.S. women's movement has frequently been seen as a disappointment from a global perspective. For instance, in their analysis of global women's movements' influence on the major multinationals, Robert O'Brien and colleagues state that “in the case of the US women's movement, even though it is the largest and most powerful women's movement in the world, its focus is squarely domestic, not international” (Contesting Global Governance, 2000, p. 53). Similarly, in a chapter in the current volume, Joyce Gelb points out that, although the United States has been a standard-bearer in regard to gender equity policy, a “politics of insularity” has sometimes prevented the movement from achieving new gains (p. 177).