PSCI111 - Gender and Elections

This course tackles four theoretical and empirical challenges related to gender and political equality: the extension of citizenship rights and voting rights to women; the problem of women's persistent under-representation in politics; the nature of the gender gap in preferences across time and space; and the possibilities for substantive representation. We will focus about half the class on the US (contrasting the experiences of white and black women and men in politics) and the other half on other countries, detailing how different party systems, variation in electoral rules (like proportional representation), and institutional innovations such as gender quotas, enable or constrain gender equality in politics.