Our understanding and treatment of gender in the United States has evolved significantly over the past four decades. Transgender individuals in the current U.S. context enjoy more rights and protections than they have in the past; yet, room for progress remains. Moving beyond the traditional male–female binary, an unprecedented number of people now identify as transgender and nonbinary. Transgender identities are at the forefront of gender policy, prompting responses from public agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. Because transgender individuals face increased rates of discrimination, violence, and physical and mental health challenges, compared to their cisgender counterparts, new gender policy often affords legal protections as well as identity-affirming practices such as legal name and gender marker changes on government documents. These rights come from legal decisions, legislation, and administrative agency policies. Despite these victories, recent government action targeting the transgender population threatens the progress that has been made. This underscores the importance of comprehensive policies and education about transgender identities to protect the rights of transgender people.
Article
Kristen P. Williams
The traditional/mainstream international relations (IR) study of foreign policy has primarily focused on state behavior in the international system, examining factors such as the influence of decision-makers’ attitudes and beliefs, regime type, domestic political actors, civil society, norms, culture, and so forth on foreign policy. Much of this research has neglected to address women and gender in the context of studying foreign policy actors, decisions, and outcomes. Given that women are increasingly gaining access to the political process in terms of both formal government positions and informal political activism, and recognition by the international community of women’s roles in peace and war, feminist international relations (IR) scholars have challenged the assumptions and research focus of mainstream IR, including the study of foreign policy. Feminist international relations (IR) scholars have shown that countries with greater gender equality have foreign policies that are less belligerent. How do we account for foreign policies that are explicitly focused on women’s empowerment and gender equality? The main questions motivating the research on feminism in foreign policy are as follows. Is there a gender gap between men and women in terms of foreign policy? If so, what explains the gender gap? Research shows that the evidence is mixed—for example, men and women often agree on foreign policy goals and objectives, but sometimes differ on what actions to take to achieve those goals, primarily whether to use force.
In considering where the women are in foreign policy, scholars examine women’s representation and participation in government, as gender equality is related to women’s representation and participation. While an increasing number of women have entered formal politics, whether as heads of state/government, cabinet and ministerial positions, and ambassadorships, for example, women remain underrepresented. The question also arises as to whether and how women’s participation and representation (descriptive and substantive representation) impact foreign policy. Does increased women’s participation and representation lead to a foreign policy focused on “women’s issues” and gender equality? Is a critical mass of women necessary for policies that promote gender equality and women’s empowerment? Finally, what does it mean to have a feminist foreign policy?
Article
Mirya R. Holman and Erica Podrazik
Religiosity is a combination of public and private religious practices, beliefs, and experiences. While diversity exists in how religiosity is measured, three central components are consistent across the scholarship: organizational religious engagement, non-organizational religious activities, and subjective religiosity. To measure organizational religious engagement, scholars frequently look at church attendance and participation in congregational activities. Non-organizational religious activities include frequency of prayer, reading the Bible or other religious materials, or requesting others to pray for you. Subjective or intrinsic religiosity includes self-assessed religiousness (where respondents are asked, “How religious would you consider yourself?”) or strength of affiliation, as well as specific beliefs, such as views of the afterlife, hell, and whether the Bible is the literal word of God.
Various groups express different levels of religiosity. One of the most well-documented and consistent group-based differences in religiosity is that women, including white women and women of color, are more religious than are men across religions, time, and countries. Women report higher rates of church attendance, engagement in religious practices (including prayer and reading the Bible), and more consistent and higher levels of religious interest, commitment, and engagement. Many explanations for these gaps in religiosity exist including differences in personality and risk aversion, gendered socialization patterns, and patriarchal structures within churches. Scholars have engaged in robust debates around the degree to which explanations like risk assessment or gender role theory can account for differences in religious behavior between men and women. Yet unresolved, these discussions provide opportunities to bring together scholarship and theories from religious studies, sociology, gender studies, psychology, and political science.
Religiosity shapes a variety of important political and social attitudes and behaviors, including political ideology and participation. The effects of religiosity on political attitudes are heterogeneous across men and women—for example, highly religious women and men are not equally conservative, nor do they equally oppose gay rights. The process by which religiosity shapes attitudes is also gendered; for example, the effects of women’s religiosity on political attitudes and participation are mediated by gendered attitudes. And while religiosity increases political participation, the effects are not even for men and women, nor across all groups of women. Future research might examine the differing effects of religiosity on subgroups of men and women, including evaluations of how intersecting social categories like race, gender, and class shape both levels of religious engagement and the degree to which religiosity influences other political and social behavior.
Article
Erin Mayo-Adam
There is a growing body of research on law and policy concerning lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) family law and policy. LGBTQ families have existed for centuries despite laws and policies that criminalize their relational practices. However, the legal landscape has shifted a great deal over the past few decades, in large part due to the increased visibility of LGBTQ kinship networks and new constitutional protections for same-sex marriage. With this said, legal protections for LGBTQ families vary widely by state, especially parental, adoption, and foster care rights. Historically, family law and policy has fallen within the realm of state power, with some important exceptions (e.g., the Supreme Court has recognized a fundamental right to parent for legal parents). For this reason, there are broad protections afforded to LGBTQ kinship networks in some states, especially those with large urban and more liberal populations, and barriers that stand in the way of LGBTQ parental rights in other states that are more conservative or rural. The legalization of marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges did standardize some protections for same-sex couples in traditional relationships across the United States. Yet the case also presents new problems both for LGBTQ families that are more heteronormative and those that are not because it fails to recognize a fundamental right to parent for LGBTQ people who create non-biological families and live non-traditional lives.
In addition to these legal and policy changes, social scientists have used both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to shed light on the problems faced by LGBTQ families politically and legally. Researchers have examined how LGBTQ families attempt to protect their ability to parent in family court, how LGBTQ kinship networks identify innovative legal and political strategies aimed at overcoming barriers to legal recognition, and how LGBTQ identity is both constituted and made invisible through family law. Furthermore, scholars have produced a wealth of research refuting the myth that LGBTQ people are inadequate parents since the late 1980s and this research has been used in court cases across the United States to facilitate the legal recognition of LGBTQ families. Despite this research, gaps in both scholarship and legal recognition remain. Scholarship remains startlingly sparse given the legal and political barriers that stand in the way of LGBTQ family recognition, especially for LGBTQ people of color and trans and queer people. In order to address this gap, scholars should devote more resources to research on families that include LGBTQ people of color and trans and queer people, research on non-traditional queer kinship networks, and research on the unique ways that LGBTQ families are responding to political and legal barriers at the local level.
Article
Helena Salim de Castro
In the early 21st century, the number of women incarcerated in Latin America for drug-related offenses has increased dramatically. Many women are engaging in drug trafficking for different reasons, and in most cases, they play inferior roles in the drug supply chain, working as couriers or carrying drugs inside their bodies, which make them vulnerable to the justice system. This increase in female incarceration is one of the consequences of a repressive and prohibitive framework against the use and trafficking of drugs in the Americas. The “War on Drugs” policy was developed in the 1970s by the U.S. government, almost 50 years ago. This policy spread a regional fight against drug use and trafficking, which was reinforced by the United Nations Conventions on Drugs and committees of the Organization of American States.
Even though some international and regional organizations and government institutions have been alarmed by the increase in female incarceration rates, the discussions and documents concerning this issue have some gaps. As analyzed by a feminist and gender literature, stereotypes about femininity persist. The official documents consider women mere victims in the drug world and do not debate their reasons for entering criminality, as an economic necessity, for example. In the same sense, little effort has been made by governments to change the actual repressive anti-drug policy. Focusing just on the lowest level of the drug supply chain, the “War on Drugs” policy continues to drive many people, especially women, younger, and black poor people, to jail.
Article
Jeff Carter and Giacomo Chiozza
What choices do political leaders make in the international arena? And why? In what ways do the patterns of politics in the international arena shape the selection and prospects of leaders in power? These questions frame a thriving research agenda that has emerged over the last 20 years in political science and international relations. This agenda seeks to answer the fundamental questions of war and peace and cooperation and contestation from a perspective that focuses on leaders, leaders’ motivations, and leaders’ characteristics.
Two major approaches frame the analysis of leaders and foreign policy: the survival approach and the personal attribute approach. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but they are analytically distinct. The survival approach starts from the premise that leaders seek to remain in power. It then assesses the reciprocal relation between leaders’ quest to remain in power and their foreign policy choices. Specifically, research in the survival approach analyzes how leaders’ choices can be explained in light of the assumption that leaders seek power and how, in turn, leaders’ survival in power can be explained by their choices in the international arena. With the survival approach, leaders have agency but, in the end, they are exchangeable: they all seek power. The personal attribute approach, on the other hand, points to the many features that distinguish the personal profiles of leaders and seeks to provide a systematic explanation of how those features account for leaders’ foreign policy choices. In particular, research in the personal attribute area has explained leaders’ choices in terms of their orientation toward the use of force, their psychological traits and beliefs about the world, and their personal characteristics and background experiences.
The study of politics from the perspective of leaders integrates insights from the subfields of American politics, comparative politics, and international relations, and in so doing holds the promise to foster a productive and fruitful dialogue across the discipline of political science. Scholars who study politics from the perspective of leaders have generated a number of new theoretical developments, new typologies, new data collections, and new findings. Overall, the study of leaders and foreign policy has proved to be analytically fruitful, empirically rich, and politically relevant.
Article
Richard C. Eichenberg
Scholars and governments are interested in four sets of questions concerning public opinion on foreign policy and national security policy. First, what do public opinion polls measure? How do citizens, who are generally uninformed about foreign policy and world affairs, form opinions on these matters? Second, how rational is public opinion? Is it stable or volatile? Are opinions coherent? Do opinions plausibly reflect the flow of world events? Third, what factors influence the formation of citizen opinions? Specifically, what is the impact of fundamental attitudes toward war and military force, partisanship, ideology, and gender? Finally, how universal are the determinants of citizen opinion, especially on crucial issues of war and peace? Are the findings in global comparisons the same as those in the American or European contexts?
Considerable scholarship has been devoted to these four questions. Scholars now characterize public opinion as rational, in the sense that it is fairly stable, coherent, and responsive to real world events. Attitudes toward war and military force are a major focus of the research literature because many specific policy attitudes flow from fundamental views of war. Gender has also become a major focus of research because many studies find that women are less supportive of the use of military force for most purposes. Finally, scholars are beginning to discover that some opinion patterns are universal across societies, while others are more affected by the individual characteristics of national societies. Studies of global public opinion have expanded greatly, with recent scholarship focusing on global attitudes toward gender equality, immigration, and climate change.
