Gender, Crises, and Opportunity Structures in Political Representation

Abstract

This panel brings together five papers that examine the mechanisms influencing women’s entry, persistence, and success in politics, highlighting how gendered opportunity structures interact with environmental shocks, political cultures, and informal practices. The papers investigate: (1) how patterns of political longevity differ by gender, and how institutional and cultural pportunity structures shape women’s career exits and retention; (2) whether environmental crises reshape gendered patterns of political participation through party strategies, voter preferences, or shifts in women’s political activation; (3) how sextortion operates as an underexamined barrier to women’s political entry, undermining aspiration and willingness to run at key recruitment stages; (4) how intersectional exclusions shape minority women’s opportunities, examining the micro- and macro-level factors that enable or inhibit their political advancement; and (5) how natural disasters generate electoral penalties for women, activating gendered stereotypes about leadership and reshaping voter behavior during crisis.

Title	Details
Climate Crises and Women in Politics: Evidence from Brazil and South Africa	View Paper Details
Exploring the Effects of Sextortion on Women's Entry into Politics The Case of Tanzania	View Paper Details
The Political Aftershocks of Natural Disasters: Gender Penalties in Post-Crisis Elections	View Paper Details
The intersectional dynamics of descriptive representation: Political opportunity structures for ethnic minority women in white settler-colonial Aotearoa New Zealand	View Paper Details
Regional Variation in the Gender Longevity Gap among Legislators: Lessons from Canada’s Provinces and Territories	View Paper Details