Theorizing Women’s Political Leadership: Cross-National Comparison

Comparative Perspectives Symposium: Challenges to Women’s Leadership Challenges to Women’s Political Representation in Europe

Explicating Opinion Leadership: Nonpolitical Dispositions, Information Consumption, and Civic Participation

What are the sources of opinion leadership? Do opinion leaders seek informational media, and if so, how do they consume it? Are opinion leaders active in civic life, or is it that those who are active think of themselves as opinion leaders? Is opinion leadership a cause or a consequence of political efficacy? To answer these questions, we use data from two large national surveys: a cross-sectio...

Development, Democracy, and Women’s Legislative Representation: Re-Visiting Existing Explanations of Gender Variation in the World’s Parliaments

Previous studies have found that the substantial cross-national variation in women’s legislative representation is not explained by cross-national differences in socioeconomic development. We re-visit an existing study and demonstrate that economic development does matter. Accepted explanations fit rich nations much better than poor nations and obscure the effects of democracy on women’s repres...

Political leadership and conflict resolution: An African example

Challenges to post-conflict leadership in African states highlight the need for democratic capacity building, with clear participatory processes involving communities and the leadership as a necessary condition to mitigate new or resurrected conflicts. This article explores transformational leadership and how it relates to democratic capacity building in Rwanda. We argue that community capacity...

Theorizing Black Lesbians within Black Feminism: A Critique of Same-Race Street Harassment

Street harassment is a form of sexual terrorism that reminds women of their vulnerability to violent assault in public and semipublic spaces. Black women’s experiences of street harassment are complicated by their race, and by the race of their harasser(s). Black feminists’ political vocabulary of intersectional analysis offers a useful framework for portraying the indivisibility of race and ge...