New Institutionalism has shown that the 'rules of the game' are crucial to structuring political life in terms of constraining and enabling political actors and influencing political outcomes. A limitation of this approach, however, has been its overemphasis on formal rules, with much less attention paid to how informal rules work alongside and in conjunction with formal institutions to shape actors and outcomes. This article contributes to an emerging literature that highlights the importance of informal institutions by bringing into focus one element that has been hidden in these debatesthe influence of gender norms and practices on the operation and interaction between formal and informal institutions. It highlights some of the key benefits of a gender analysis for understanding political institutions in both their formal and informal guise and considers some of the challenges in building a research agenda that requires new methods and techniques of inquiry.

This paper makes two claims: insights from gender research improve understandings of informal institutions and institutional change, and studying informal institutions helps scholars understand the gap between formal institutional change and outcomes. Informed by institutional analysis and feminist institutionalist scholarship, it explores the relationship between informal institutions, institutional change, and gender equality, using gender equality to scrutinize issues central to institutional change, demonstrating that institutional analyses improve when gender dynamics are incorporated. Showing the gendering of power relations highlights power in institutional change in new ways, improving understandings of why institutional change rarely happens as intended by institutional designers.

This article examines the impact of gender relations on democratization. It considers a number of key questions: what role do women's movements play in the transition to democratic rule and what impact does a return to competitive electoral politics have on women and women's movements. The starting point is a critique of the existing literature on democratization. That literature cannot provide a satisfactory analysis of the role of women in transition politics because of the narrow definitions of democracy used and the top-down focus of much of it. The article then develops a gendered analysis through a comparison of the different processes of transition in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. It highlights the significance of the relationship between civil society and the state and the existence of “political space.”

This article highlights a number of themes useful in the gendered analysis of democratic consolidation in Latin America by means of a comparative analysis of Argentina and Chile. It starts from the assumption that much of the work on democratisation in Latin America – both orthodox and the literature concentrating on women and transitions – produced up until now, has been too voluntaristic in its approach. It argues that what is needed, particularly in the study of democratic consolidation, is an analysis not only of the impact of women and women's organisations on institutions and structures but also of how these institutions and structures can shape and change gender relations and different women's activities. Any gendered analysis of democratic consolidation must begin by examining the terms of transition which, while they can be subject to some renegotiation later, affect the nature of the subsequent system and the space available to different actors. It is argued that a number of characteristics of the post-transition system are significant: first the impact of more arbitrary populist or presidential systems, second the importance of women's organising both inside and outside the state and party systems and third the existence of an institutionalised party system.

This article explores the conditions under which women's mobilizations during transitions to democracy can achieve some of their aims. It broadens the comparative analysis of gender and transitions undertaken to date by looking at a case in which gender outcomes, measured in terms of women's descriptive and substantive representation, have been relatively positive. Unusually women, organized as women, had some input into the negotiations during the South African transition. The article argues that a complex interaction of variables contributed to the achievement of certain positive gender outcomes. A broad women's coalition, the Women's National Coalition, did play an important role. However, two other sets of factors—a favorable political opportunity structure and the strategic actions and alliances of certain key women actors— made a crucial contribution to its effectiveness in influencing this transition, as women's mobilization on its own is no guarantee of success.

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This article discusses the gendered nature of politics (as practice) and political science (as an academic discipline). It studies the sex-typing characteristic of most institutions in the modern world and describes how gender shapes the ways people organize, think, and know about the world. The article then identifies the changes that have occurred in politics and political science over the last hundred years and examines the politics and gender scholarship. Finally, it presents an understanding of the evolution of the gender and politics subfield as well as some of the challenges that remain.

Many democracies are widely perceived to be suffering a serious crisis of representation, participation and legitimacy. As part of this 'crisis', the male domination of democracy -both in terms of its institutions and who participates -has been identified as problematic, even emblematic, of a more generalized democratic crisis. Increasing the participation of women is advocated as one solution. Using examples drawn from both long-standing and newer democracies (parliamentary and presidential), particularly from Europe and Latin America, this article explores the gender dynamics of the 'crisis of democracy'. The 'crisis' has two gendered aspects. First, and paradoxically, although democracy still privileges predominantly white, elite, heterosexual, men, more women now participate in democratic institutions, leading to claims that the 'male monopoly' has ended (Dahlerup and Leyenaar 2013). Second, the 'crisis of democracy' may provide opportunities to further enhance women's participation, as the demands of those favouring greater gender equality and those looking for solutions to the 'crisis' appear to coincide.Many democracies have been undergoing significant changes in the last few decades and are widely perceived to be suffering a serious crisis of representation, participation and legitimacy. As evidence that something has gone badly wrong with democracy, The Economist (2014) claims that first, democracy has not proved as easy to 'transplant' as expected (as shown by the experience of Iraq and recently democratized countries such as South Africa) and second, the dysfunctional elements of long-standing democracies such as gridlock in the US, disillusionment in the EU together with the impact of globalization, the power of the banks and international financial institutions (IFIs) have led to voter disengagement and lack of trust in politicians, in combination with important changes in party and party systems. Academics argue that many of these trends are visible