Feminist Approaches to the Study of Political Executives

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter focuses on feminist approaches to the study of executive politics, gender, and power. The chapter examines how feminist executive political analysis has employed gender as a concept and a process, identifying conceptual and methodological challenges for this body of research and discussing four midrange theories of women’s access to presidencies, prime ministerships, and cabinet posts: cultural models, gender norm explanations, supply and demand models, and feminist institutionalist analysis. The chapter concludes with reflections on a future research agenda for feminist scholarship on political executives: detaching gendered analyses of the political executive from the scholarship on women and parliamentary politics; developing institution-specific gendered analyses across and within political executive offices; and focusing on the gendered consequences of the removal function for political executives from office.