Frances McCall Rosenbluth

Failures of representation and democracy cannot be solved by weakening parties. Rather, democratic success requires political competition among strong parties that can identify and defend the broad interests of the community as a whole. The fragmentation of political parties reduces spending on public goods, and weakening party discipline diminishes political accountability.

It is well known that regime types affect international conflicts. This article explores political parties as a mechanism through which they do so. Political parties operate in fundamentally different ways in democracies vs. non-democracies, which has consequences for foreign policy. Core supporters of a party in a democracy, if they are hawkish, may be more successful at demanding hawkish behavior from their party representatives than would be their counterparts in an autocracy. The study draws on evidence from paired experiments in democratic Japan and non-democratic China to show that supporters of the ruling party in Japan punish their leaders for discouraging nationalist protests, while ruling party insiders in China are less likely to do so. Under some circumstances, then, non-democratic regimes may be better able to rein in peace-threatening displays of nationalism.

This paper theorizes three forms of bias that might limit women's representation: outright hostility, double standards, and a double bind whereby desired traits present bigger burdens for women than men. We examine these forms of bias using conjoint experiments derived from several original surveys—a population survey of American voters and two rounds of surveys of American public officials. We find no evidence of outright discrimination or of double standards. All else equal, most groups of respondents prefer female candidates, and evaluate men and women with identical profiles similarly. But on closer inspection, all is not equal. Across the board, elites and voters prefer candidates with traditional household profiles such as being married and having children, resulting in a double bind for many women. So long as social expectations about women's familial commitments cut against the demands of a full-time political career, women are likely to remain underrepresented in politics.

Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party swept both houses of parliament in December 2012 and July 2013 on a platform of Keynesian spending. Better known for fiscal stringency, the LDP “changed its spots” in part because 1994 electoral reforms force parties to compete on party platforms in place of clientelism.

Human osteological data provide a rich, still-to-be-mined source of information about the distribution of nutrition and, by extension, the distribution of political power and economic wealth in societies of long ago. On the basis of data we have collected and analyzed on societies ranging from foraging communities to the ancient Egyptian and modern European monarchies, we find that the shift from hunting and gathering to complex fishing techniques and to labor-intensive agriculture opened up inequalities that had discernible effects on human health and stature. But we also find that political institutions intervened decisively in the distribution of resources within societies. Political institutions appear to be shaped not only by economic factors but also by military technology and vulnerability to invasion.

The service sector is beginning to transform the political landscape by giving working women a new and distinct set of preferences over policy. The growth of services has increased the demand for female labor in tandem with the disappearance of the “brawn premium” in the workplace. But until social norms about caregiving create a more equal burden for family work, women are more likely to work the “second shift” at home, reducing their leisure time and their satisfaction with levels of public services for children and the elderly. A striking result of the growth of the service sector, therefore, illustrated in this chapter, is a gender voting gap in which women are more likely to support parties and platforms that pledge an increase in government spending on education and social services. Ironically, the gender voting gap tends to be larger in countries with greater gender equality, however measured, because the gap tracks female labor force participation. How parties respond to the new configuration of women’s political preferences depends on how electoral rules aggregate interests and on other factors, but the gender voting gap is here to stay unless and until societies share family burdens more equally.

4 9 R T H E T W O F A C E S O F F E M I N I S M F R A N C E S M c C A L L R O S E N B L U T H ‘‘Today the combat takes a di√erent shape: instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavours to escape from one.’’ – Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex From where she sat in Paris in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir thought victory in the ‘‘battle of the sexes’’ was within sight – for both sides. Previously, woman chafed against inferior status by ‘‘mutilating, dominating man . . . she contradicts him, she denies his truth and his values.’’ Seducing where possible and haranguing where not, women often coped with male domination by way of emotional manipulation and belittlement. Male-directed hostility gave rise to innumerable defensive acts and small triumphs of self-assertion without bringing about systematic change. If women could break out of prison rather than shackle men, dealings between the sexes would no longer have to be so disagreeable. In modern diplomacyspeak , there would be a win-win outcome. Beauvoir painted a grim picture of the status of women in postwar France, but she was far more optimistic about the possibility of greater equality for those who would come after her. Despite the tenacity of social norms that kept women in the home 5 0 R O S E N B L U T H Y (only 36.5 percent of French women were in the labor force in 1946, dropping slightly to 34.6 percent in 1954 as men returned to civilian labor markets), French women had gained the right to vote in 1944. Because their second-class citizenship was a social construct that rested not only on men’s false understandings of women’s ‘‘true nature’’ but also on women’s resignation to their lot, Beauvoir hoped that the natural confidence and buoyancy of a new generation of girls growing up with the expectation of equality would become self-fulfilling. ‘‘It seems almost certain that sooner or later they will arrive at complete economic and social equality,’’ she wrote in the conclusion to The Second Sex. More than half a century after Beauvoir wrote those expectant words, that day has not yet come. In France as in other Western countries, to say nothing of the developing world, women lag behind men in positions of authority in nearly every realm of human life. In rich democracies education is now virtually equal across the sexes, and more women now work outside the home than ever before, but the ratio of men to women in positions of political and economic leadership remains starkly skewed. Women earn between fifty and eighty cents for every dollar earned by men, depending on the country and sector of the economy. If Beauvoir were alive today, she would no doubt have turned her attention, as her feminist heirs have done, to the ‘‘glass ceiling ’’ against which women still seem to be bumping their heads. If career success resembles a pyramid for men, it is for women a truncated one because fewer women than men make it to the peak in virtually every profession. Beauvoir would have noticed that two kinds of arguments have been advanced to explain this invisible ceiling, from which follow two sorts of solutions. One kind of argument focuses on the unconscious bias that infects people who have grown up accustomed to seeing women in inferior roles – that is to say, the unconscious bias lodged within everyone on the planet, including women themselves . Countless associations of women with lower levels of authority translate unconsciously into assumptions about less competency , ambition, and capacity for leadership. Social scientists have found, for example, that people (women and men) asked to judge a fictitious C.V. give lower scores on competence when the C.V. bears a female name. Although measurement has proved elusive T H E T W O F A C E S O F F E M I N I S M 5 1 R and scholarly opinion remains divided on the magnitude of unconscious bias, there...

(2007). Gender and Development: The Japanese Experience in Comparative Perspective. Feminist Economics: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 169-174.

1. The Political Economy of Low Fertility was published in The Political Economy of Japan's Low Fertility on page 1.