That the COVID‐19 pandemic has affected the work conditions of large segments of the society is in no doubt. A growing body of journalistic accounts raised the possibility that the lockdown caused by the pandemic affects women and men in different ways, due mostly to the traditionally gendered division of labor in the society. We attempt to test this oft‐cited argument by conducting an original survey with nearly 200 academics. Specifically, we explore the extent to which the effect of the lockdown on child‐care, housework and home‐office environment varies across women and men. Our results show that a number of factors are associated with the effect of the lockdown on the work conditions of academics at home, including gender, having children, perceived threat from COVID‐19, and satisfaction with work environment. We also show that having children disproportionately affects women in terms of the amount of housework during the lockdown.

We compare patterns of change in budgetary commitments by countries during periods of democracy and authoritarianism. Previous scholarship has focused almost exclusively on democratic governments, finding evidence of punctuated equilibria. Authoritarian regimes may behave differently, both because they may operate with fewer institutional barriers to choice and because they have fewer incentives to gather and respond to policy-relevant information coming from civil society. By analysing public budgeting in Brazil, Turkey, Malta, and Russia before and after their transitions from or to democracy, we can test punctuated equilibrium theory under a variety of governing conditions. Our goal is to advance the understanding of the causes of budgetary instability by leveraging contextual circumstances to push the theory beyond democracies and assess its broader applicability.

We compare patterns of change in budgetary commitments by countries during periods of democracy and authoritarianism. Previous scholarship has focused almost exclusively on democratic governments, finding evidence of punctuated equilibria. Authoritarian regimes may behave differently, both because they may operate with fewer institutional barriers to choice and because they have fewer incentives to gather and respond to policy-relevant information coming from civil society. By analysing public budgeting in Brazil, Turkey, Malta, and Russia before and after their transitions from or to democracy, we can test punctuated equilibrium theory under a variety of governing conditions. Our goal is to advance the understanding of the causes of budgetary instability by leveraging contextual circumstances to push the theory beyond democracies and assess its broader applicability.

A large body of literature has focused on potential causes and consequences of candidate nomination procedures. One of the received wisdoms in this literature is that loyalty to the party leadership in centralized systems and personal vote-earning attributes in decentralized systems rank in priority for representatives’ career prospects. However, the determinants of candidate nomination in countries with centralized nomination procedures have been significantly undertheorized, due in part to the implicit assumption that party loyalty outweighs any other factor in determining career decisions. We close this gap by analyzing nomination and promotion decisions in Turkey, a closed-list PR system with highly centralized nomination procedures. We argue that representatives’ parliamentary performance such as parliamentary activeness and issue concentration influence parties’ nomination and promotion decisions. Utilizing original data sets of biographies of 1100 MPs who served in parliament between 2002 and 2011, and over 18,000 parliamentary speeches and 1040 bill cosponsorships, we estimate empirical models that are explicitly derived from the underlying theoretical model and find evidence that party leaderships favour incumbents who make more speeches and who display higher issue concentration, while penalizing electorally safe incumbents who seek legislative influence through private members’ bills (PMBs). Results offer important implications for the study of intraparty politics and parliamentary behaviour in general, and candidate nomination in particular.

How does the symbolic power of a female president affect female parliamentary behavior? Whereas female descriptive representation has increased around the world, women parliamentarians still face significant discrimination and stereotyping, inhibiting their ability to have a real voice and offer “thick” representation to women voters. We leverage the case of Malawi, a case where the presidency changed hands from a man to a woman through a truly exogenous shock, to study the effect of a female president on female parliamentary behavior. Drawing on unique parliamentary transcripts data, we argue and show that women MPs under a female president become empowered and less confined to stereotypical gendered issue-ownership patterns, leading to a significant increase in female MP speech making. Our results directly address theories of symbolic representation by focusing particularly on intraelite role-model effects.

Much research within the punctuated equilibrium framework demonstrated that policy agendas are invariably punctuated, due in part to cognitive and institutional frictions that constitute barriers to change in attention. While the bulk of past scholarship explored the extent to which institutional friction varies by organizational design, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the empirical examination of the cognitive aspect of disproportionate information processing. In an attempt to close this gap, I utilize a newly available dataset that codes nearly a million Americans’ responses to the ‘most important problem’ question from 1939 to 2015 to analyze the distribution of annual changes in the policy priorities of the American public. Drawing on the punctuated equilibrium theory literature, I argue and show that punctuations in the public’s policy priorities are more severe and frequent than those in institutional agendas. These results emphasize the need for a more subtle treatment of disproportionate information processing within the public, calling for relaxing the implicit assumption that cognitive friction is constant within organizations and across issues.

The literature on nomination procedures and intra-party politics shows that engagement in personalized parliamentary activities helps legislators get re-elected and promoted in the party list. However, as a considerable body of scholarly work suggests, women in leadership positions who are perceived to disconfirm the well-known gender stereotypes by being “too assertive” and “agentic” in the workplace may suffer from what social psychologists call the “backlash effect” (i.e., facing economic and social sanctions). Integrating insights from the literatures on perceptions of female leadership and intra-party politics, we reveal the differential effect of legislative speechmaking on the career prospects of male and female members of parliament (MPs). Specifically, using an original dataset of over thirty-five thousand parliamentary speeches and the biographies of 2,140 MPs who served in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey between 1995 and 2011, we show that the well-documented positive effect of engagement in parliamentary activities on career prospects holds for male MPs, but not for their female counterparts. In fact, we found that female MPs who were active on the legislative floor were significantly less likely to get renominated and promoted in the party rank. These results imply that the challenges facing women in leadership positions go beyond electoral competition.

Why do representatives prioritize certain types of constituency service in parliamentary systems? This study argues that the choice for constituency-oriented activities is conditioned by both partisan factors and legislative role orientations. Two novel data sets combining behavioral and attitudinal measures of constituency-oriented behavior are used for empirical tests: an elite survey including detailed interviews with 204 members of the Turkish parliament and 4000 parliamentary questions tabled by these members. The results from a series of ordered logit, ordinary least squares (OLS), and negative binomial regression estimations confirm that members of parliament choose different types of constituency-oriented activities based on their visibility to the party leadership and their constituency. This choice is primarily driven by partisanship and members of parliament’s perceptions about the influence of party leader in renomination. The analysis provides important insights about the role of partisan factors as drivers of parliamentary behavior.