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Most politicians are men, yet there is a surprising lack of focus within political science on the causes and consequences of male dominance. This article outlines how political science could benefit from greater engagement with scholarship on men and masculinities. The concept of ‘political masculinities’ has focused on the importance of ‘the political’ to masculinities scholarship; we argue for extending this concept to analyse men and masculinities within political science. We identify insights from scholarship on masculinities that would deepen our understanding of power within formal political arenas. We consider how gender and politics scholarship could benefit from expanding its focus on men. We highlight feminist institutionalism as a tool for bringing masculinities into the study of political institutions. We then offer a framework for taking this research agenda forwards, showing how we can better understand male dominance by thinking about how men access, exercise, maintain and reproduce power.

In 2022, Sweden retracted its feminist foreign policy (FFP). What are the consequences for Swedish foreign policy and for FFPs elsewhere?We published an extensive report on the Swedish FFP in 2023, based on a survey that went out to all Swedish diplomats, interviews with more than 30 key foreign policy officials, and hundreds of steering documents from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The article draws out new insights from the report.The retraction is likely to result in a deprioritization of gender equality in Swedish foreign policy.Sweden will likely lose its international leadership role on gender issues.However, FFPs may be more resilient than anticipated because of how foreign policy is governed. Governments that wish to retract FFPs are constrained by three key governance features:First, international agreements and soft law on women's rights place demands on policy content.Second, the decentralized nature of foreign policy implementation allows considerable autonomy on the ground, so that implementors may continue to work with gender equality.Third, longstanding international expectations for Sweden as a gender equality champion create a role-based constraint.These factors contribute to the ‘stickiness’ of FFPs, suggesting that a retraction is unlikely to result in a wholesale abandonment of gender equality activities.The article also examines the enduring legacy of the Swedish FFP beyond its formal retraction, highlighting adoption of FFPs by a growing number of states in different parts of the world.

Election violence is increasingly taking place online. However, we still do not know much about how such attacks affect the representation of politically marginalized groups such as women. This article develops and applies strategies for analyzing (gendered) exposure to and impacts of online attacks against political candidates. It focuses on the 2019 parliamentary election campaign in Tunisia and combines manual analysis of Tunisian candidates’ public Facebook pages with candidate interviews. We find no gendered patterns in exposure to online election violence in the Facebook data and a low general exposure to attacks. The interview data nevertheless suggests gendered perceptions and impacts of attacks, as well as a perception among the candidates that online election violence is widespread and problematic. These discrepancies highlight that we need a combination of methods and materials to capture the multifaceted nature of online election violence, and in particular those that directly link candidate exposure to impact.

This chapter explores corruption as a male-biased institution, informed by feminist institutionalism and critical studies of men and masculinities. It asserts that gendered opportunity structures are intrinsic to corruption, emphasizing the necessity to scrutinize gender dynamics in corrupt transactions. The chapter highlights the importance of investigating gendered pathways to corruption, revealing masculine bias in access, exercise, maintenance, and reproduction. The focus on formal and informal rules illustrates the institutionalization of male bias, providing nuanced insights beyond individual characteristics. Gender disparities in recognizing corruption, notably in sexual corruption where sex serves as a bribe, are underscored. The chapter contends that traditional corruption definitions, centered on monetary transactions, neglect abuse of power in sexual corruption. Studies on sexual corruption advocate for an expanded definition of bribes, increased emphasis on gendered dynamics, and challenges to stereotypes about women’s involvement. The chapter also emphasizes the significance of maintaining focus on power asymmetries and abuse of entrusted power for understanding corruption dynamics.

This symposium aims to help researchers across subfields, epistemologies, and methodological approaches not only understand the importance of reflexivity, but how to apply it in practice. Reflexivity represents a basic, foundational idea: our identity as researchers matters for the validity, outcome, and ethics of our research. For the researcher, reflexivity entails thinking about oneself, one’s thinking, and one’s actions and how they affect the research lifecycle (Ben-Ari 2014, 30).

Research on the dynamics of corruption has rarely considered sex as a currency in corrupt transactions. This article puts forward the argument that the abuse of entrusted power in exchange for personal gain is relevant also when sex, rather than money, is the currency. It then contributes with a careful conceptualization of such transactions as sexual corruption. Anchoring our conceptualization in the abuse of entrusted power, the article defines sexual corruption, its elements, categories and delimitations, and proposes a conceptual framework that can be used to develop research on sexual corruption. We also address the implications of recognizing sex as a currency in corrupt transactions, providing insights as to why abuse of power is often overlooked when sex is the currency of the transaction. Our approach offers analytic precision and contributes to setting an agenda for the study of sexual corruption as an obstacle to good governance, at a time when efforts to collect data on sexual corruption are increasing.

There is growing evidence of the international and domestic political benefits for autocrats to advance women's rights (Bjarnegard and Zetterberg 2016; Bush and Zetterberg 2021; Donno and Kreft 2019; Tripp 2019). Research on the adoption of gender reforms in autocracies-including contributions in this Critical Perspectives section by Audrey L. Comstock and Andrea Vilan (2022) and Aili Mari Tripp (2022)-emphasizes the dual role of international pressure (Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2021; Edgell 2017; Okundaye and Breuning 2021) and women's movements (Giersdorf and Croissant 2011; Htun and Weldon 2012; Tripp 2015). Reforms can be "top-down " if the autocrat advances rights even while suppressing the women's movement, or "bottom-up " if the regime allies with-and seeks to co-opt-civil society groups.

What is the relationship between armed violence and patriarchal values? This question is addressed with the help of a survey of young men in the conflict-affected southern provinces of Thailand. In Study 1 we find that men with more patriarchal values are more prone to volunteer for paramilitary service. Study 2 uses a natural experiment made possible by the conscription lottery in Thailand to compare survey responses of men who were involuntarily enlisted to do Military Conscription Service (treatment group) with the responses of men who participated in the lottery but were not enlisted (control group). We find no difference between the treatment and control groups in patriarchal values. We conclude that patriarchal values drive voluntary participation in armed conflict, whereas military service as a conscript in a conflict zone does not cause patriarchal values.

There has been an increase in testimonies from women politicians who have been targets of violence and from survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. The editors and contributors to Gender and Violence against Political Actors seek to understand how gender influences both physical and psychological forms of violence and how sexual violence affects both men and women.

Chapters focus on theoretical approaches demonstrating how different disciplinary starting points—e.g., politics, violence and gender—give rise to different lenses. Essays examine violence carried out during conflict and peacetime, and relate to the continuum of violence—physical, sexual, psychological, and online. In addition, six country case studies reveal how different types of political actors have been targets of violence.

Gender and Violence against Political Actors ends by providing various approaches to responding to the problem of gendered violence in politics while also evaluating policy responses.