Jennifer M. Piscopo’s research while affiliated with Royal Holloway University of London and other places

What is this page?


This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.

Publications (69)


Still Marginalized? Gender and LGBTQIA+ Scholarship in Top Political Science Journals
  • Article
  • Full-text available

January 2025

·

19 Reads

Political Science and Politics

Jennifer M. Piscopo

Is political science research that explores gender and LGBTQIA+ politics still underrepresented in the discipline’s top journals? This article examines publication trends in gender research and LGBTQIA+ research in five top political science journals, between 2017 and 2023 (inclusive). I find that gender research and LGBTQIA+ research together account for 5% to 7% of published research in the selected top journals; however, most of this research is on gender politics rather than LGBTQIA+ politics. Overall, gender research and LGBTQIA+ research largely appears in top journals when it conforms to disciplinary norms about methods and author gender. The majority of published gender and LGBTQIA+ research is quantitative. Men author gender research at rates almost three times their membership in the American Political Science Association’s Women, Gender, and Politics research section and also are overrepresented as authors of LGBTQIA+ research. This study suggests that editorial teams’ signaling influences which manuscripts land at which journals.

Download


The foundational effects of gender: Exploring Latin American Elites’ perceptions of corruption

July 2024

·

148 Reads

Legislative Studies Quarterly

Do women perceive corruption differently from men and why? Using elite survey data from over 3000 Latin American legislators nested in 49 country-years, we explore who perceives corruption as an important national problem. We find that women legislators place more importance on corruption than men. We further examine three potential mechanisms to understand why: support for effective states, power marginalization, and corruption salience. We explore whether these mechanisms work through pathways of moderation or mediation. We find little support for hypotheses that gender interacts with these factors, but we do find that gender mediates who supports effective states and who is marginalized from power. In both the moderation and mediation analyses, we continue to find an underlying, robust effect of being a woman on rating corruption's importance. Thus, while debate over mechanisms remains, gender is foundational to explaining elites' corruption perceptions. Women consistently perceive corruption as more important than men.


New institutions, new actors, new rules: gender parity and feminist constitution writing in Chile

January 2024

·

52 Reads

·

1 Citation

European Journal of Politics and Gender

Formal and informal rules mediate the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation. Women may be present in office but struggle to influence outcomes in the same way as their male counterparts, especially because parliaments and parties carry masculine blueprints that limit women’s individual and collective power. Yet, what happens when new institutions incorporate new actors to write new rules and when women occupy these institutions under gender parity from the start? Using participant observation and interview data from Chile’s first constitutional convention, we analyse how gender parity and newness combined to give ‘feminist designers’ significant influence over the convention’s procedural rules and, consequently, the final document. Newness and parity helped women secure the adoption of a feminist procedural code, which eliminated many of the masculine blueprints found in traditional parliaments. In turn, women delegates organised explicitly as feminists and led the redaction of a thoroughly feminist document.


Lessons from a Late Adopter: Feminist Advocacy, Democratizing Reforms, and Gender Quotas in Chile

November 2023

·

2 Reads

·

1 Citation

Journal of Politics in Latin America

Many Latin American and other Global South countries adopted gender quotas during democratic transitions. What explains late-adopting cases like Chile? We analyze two instances: the 2015–2016 electoral reforms, which finally introduced a 40-percent gender quota, and the 2020–2023 constitutional process, which introduced gender parity. Using a qualitative analysis that draws on 39 elite interviews, we posit that efforts to redesign national political institutions in order to address democratic deficits create transition-like moments. In turn, these moments create windows of opportunity for quota advocates. We show how quota advocates in the parties, congress, and civil society leveraged growing voter discontent to pressure their resistant colleagues and ultimately secure gender quotas (and later gender parity) as part of larger reform efforts. Our analysis of the Chilean case elevates two factors explaining quota adoption: the long arc of democratization and women's role as protagonists in electoral reforms.


Figure 3. 'Historic Documents' video screenshot
Figure 6. Left panel: Words and stems associated with the six topics in the open-ended responses to viewing Washington speaking at the US Constitutional Convention. Right panel: Marginal effect of respondent gender on topic prevalence. Data are from an STM analysis of open-ended responses (n = 1,002).
Respondents' self-reported political ambition, combined scale
Differences in men respondents by response category in the control condition and Founding Fathers condition
Men respondents' self-reported political ambition, combined scale, by race

+1

Founding Narratives and Men's Political Ambition: Experimental Evidence from US Civics Lessons

October 2023

·

70 Reads

·

3 Citations

British Journal of Political Science

One oft-cited reason for women's political underrepresentation is that women express less political ambition than men. We reframe the puzzle of women's ambition deficit, asking why men have an ambition surplus. Drawing on the concept of symbolic representation, we theorize that political symbols convey to men their capacity for exceptional political leadership. We test our expectations with a US-based survey experiment in which respondents watch one of three ‘two-minute civics lessons’. Men who watched a video featuring the accomplishments of the Founding Fathers reported significantly more political ambition than men assigned to the control group. Additional studies indicate that the effects are specific to the Founding Fathers (as compared to early American statesmen). Men are also more likely than women to identify the Founding Fathers as inspiring figures and to feel pride when considering them. Our findings suggest how history is told contributes to men's persistent political overrepresentation.



Party over Gender: Young Adults’ Evaluations of Political Leaders in California and Texas

June 2023

·

7 Reads

This is the first multi-country, factorial experiment on candidate gender designed to avoid social desirability bias and provide a real-world measure of the importance of gender via direct quantitative contrasts with party effect size (the experimental control, which was statistically significant in all cases). The eight countries: Canada in Alberta and Quebec, Chile, Costa Rica, England, Israel, Sweden, Uruguay, and the United States in California and Texas, are established presidential and parliamentary democracies that jointly offer variance on incorporation of women in government, policy agenda, electoral rules, and party system. Young-adult participants come from highly diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in all cases. Political science and psychology literatures are the basis of a multi-dimensional framework about how context molds mental templates of leadership, yielding eleven hypotheses. The 2×2×2 experimental factors, treatments (a lengthy candidate speech with partisan jargon and buzz words), field implementation, and ANOVA techniques used for analysis are outlined in detail. Resident in-country experts who implemented the experiment interpret findings against key country-specific historic and current events in separate country chapters, followed by a chapter providing a meta-analysis of all hypotheses across cases. Though many broad and case specific conclusions can be drawn, the main finding is that traditional leadership images (leaders are men) appear only where defense dominates the political agenda. Otherwise, in diverse contexts, women candidates are accepted as leaders by the participants, indicating young adults’ approval of women’s ability to hold diverse posts, win votes, and manage stereotypically masculine policy areas.


The Image of Gender and Political Leadership: A Multinational View of Women and Leadership

May 2023

·

59 Reads

·

5 Citations

Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson

·

·

Gerardo Hernández Naranjo

·

[...]

·

Alejandra Ramm

This is the first multi-country, factorial experiment on candidate gender designed to avoid social desirability bias and provide a real-world measure of the importance of gender via direct quantitative contrasts with party effect size (the experimental control, which was statistically significant in all cases). The eight countries: Canada in Alberta and Quebec, Chile, Costa Rica, England, Israel, Sweden, Uruguay, and the United States in California and Texas, are established presidential and parliamentary democracies that jointly offer variance on incorporation of women in government, policy agenda, electoral rules, and party system. Young-adult participants come from highly diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in all cases. Political science and psychology literatures are the basis of a multi-dimensional framework about how context molds mental templates of leadership, yielding eleven hypotheses. The 2×2×2 experimental factors, treatments (a lengthy candidate speech with partisan jargon and buzz words), field implementation, and ANOVA techniques used for analysis are outlined in detail. Resident in-country experts who implemented the experiment interpret findings against key country-specific historic and current events in separate country chapters, followed by a chapter providing a meta-analysis of all hypotheses across cases. Though many broad and case specific conclusions can be drawn, the main finding is that traditional leadership images (leaders are men) appear only where defense dominates the political agenda. Otherwise, in diverse contexts, women candidates are accepted as leaders by the participants, indicating young adults’ approval of women’s ability to hold diverse posts, win votes, and manage stereotypically masculine policy areas.


Exclusion by Design: Locating Power in Mansbridge’s Account of Descriptive Representation

March 2023

·

29 Reads

Politics and Gender

A much-circulated image during the Donald Trump administration showed Vice President Mike Pence and members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus discussing the removal of maternity coverage from the Affordable Care Act—with not a single woman or person of color among them. In another image, white men watched approvingly as Trump signed an executive order reinstating the global gag rule, which bans foreign nongovernmental organizations that receive American aid from supporting abortion access. These images contrast with one from early in Joe Biden’s presidency. In his first address to Congress, Biden was backed by two women occupying the second- and third-most-powerful positions in the country, Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, respectively. After acknowledging “Madame Speaker, Madame Vice President,” Biden said, “No president ever said those words and it is about time.”


Citations (43)


... Most scholars of women's substantive representation operationalize it as promoting or pursuing "women's interests" (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2014;Franceschet, Krook, and Piscopo 2012;O'Brien and Piscopo 2018), although more recent research has sought to study it more agnostically. Celis (2007) and Erzeel (2012), for example, avoid predetermining the content of women's interests, instead examining the representative claims MPs make about women. ...

Reference:

Do Women Politicians Know More about Women’s Policy Preferences? Evidence from Canada
The Impact of Women in Parliament
  • Citing Chapter
  • October 2018

... La innovadora enmienda constitucional de 2014 que requiere la paridad de género en todas las legislaturas fue fortalecida en 2019 bajo la administración de López Obrador para incluir "Paridad en todo". Estas reformas colocaron a México a la vanguardia de la participación política de las mujeres a nivel mundial (Piscopo & Vázquez Correa, 2023). Los derechos reproductivos se fortalecieron sustancialmente mediante fallos recientes y relevantes de la Corte Suprema en 2021 y 2023. ...

From 30 percent to gender parity in everything: the steady route to raising women’s political representation in Mexico
  • Citing Article
  • September 2023

International Feminist Journal of Politics

... However, some caveats are in order. Most importantly, we focus exclusively on Finland, and it is entirely possible that contrasting results would be found elsewhere, especially as the extant literature has suggested that the institutional and societal context in countries may affect how politicians of different genders are evaluated (Taylor-Robinson and Geva, 2022). It may be that the salience of gendered expectations is different in contexts where women political leaders are less common. ...

The Image of Gender and Political Leadership: A Multinational View of Women and Leadership
  • Citing Chapter
  • May 2023

... Another natural extension of our work is to consider the conditions under which gender backlash spurs parties, and women within parties especially, to engage more politically and claim back rights (e.g. Clayton, O'Brien & Piscopo 2023). in migration She was scientific coordinator of EU funded FP7 research projects on Gender and Gender Equality Policies. ...

Women Grab Back: Exclusion, Policy Threat, and Women’s Political Ambition

American Political Science Association

... Esta voluntad de cambio se reflejó el 25 de octubre de 2020, como parte de la fase inicial del proceso constitucional acordado por el Gobierno de Piñera y la mayoría de los partidos políticos con representación parlamentaria, se celebró un plebiscito en el cual se consultó al pueblo de Chile sobre la aprobación o rechazo de modificar el texto constitucional (Viera et al., 2021). El 78% votó a favor de iniciar el proceso de redacción de una nueva Constitución, y el 79% optó por que fuera una Convención elegida por votación popular en lugar de un órgano compuesto por delegados electos y miembros del Congreso (Piscopo y Siavelis, 2023 incorporaba amplios derechos para diversos grupos, incluidos indígenas, mujeres, personas LGBTQ+, chilenos afrodescendientes y personas con discapacidad. Según Piscopo y Siavelis, el documento abordaba las demandas de numerosos sectores sociales, de modo que casi todos los chilenos podrían encontrar algún aspecto de su identidad mencionado en el texto final. ...

Chile's Constitutional Chaos
  • Citing Article
  • January 2023

Journal of Democracy

... German Chancellor Angela Merkel, 1 New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, 2 Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-Wen, 3 and Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg 4 are all female leaders who were at the forefront of media reports on successful management of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. For the first time in the current generation's history, the entire world has been hit by what might be considered a global "feminine crisis" (Johnson and Williams 2020;Dimitrova-Grajzl et al. 2022;Davidson-Schmich et al. 2023;O'Brien and Piscopo 2023). It has been suggested that " [t]here is clear evidence that some traits considered feminine are more suited to handling the current crisis than more masculine traits." 5 Health issues, in general, seem to be perceived as being within the purview of women more than finance, economy, interior, or foreign affairs (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2016; Goddard 2019; Krook and O'Brien 2012), which are considered as more prestigious (Kroeber and Hüffelmann 2022). ...

Gender and Political Representation in Times of Crisis
  • Citing Article
  • January 2023

Politics and Gender

... David and Greenstein (2009) highlight key areas such as family roles, workforce participation, and views on male privilege. In the political sphere, Alexander et al. (2023) identify three critical factors: commitment to egalitarianism, recognition of ongoing inequalities, and support for equity-promoting policies. The debate on gender equality underscores the importance of gender quotas, which Htun and Piscopo (2014) argue have enhanced women's political representation in Latin America. ...

Opening the Attitudinal Black Box: Three Dimensions of Latin American Elites’ Attitudes about Gender Equality
  • Citing Article
  • January 2023

Political Research Quarterly

... One reason for the diminished prestige of gender and LGBTQIA+ research is the discipline's prioritization of empirical approaches using quantitative methods and the perception (correct or not) that gender and LGBQTIA+ research is insufficiently empirical and quantitative (Ayoub 2023;Shames and Wise 2017;Teele and Thelen 2017). A triple disadvantage appears for gender research: gender scholarship is held in less prestige; most gender scholars are women; and women scholars are underrepresented in political methodology (Piscopo et al. 2023;Shames and Wise 2017;Teele and Thelen 2017). Reason exists to suspect a similar compounding disadvantage for LGBTQIA+ research: it is (presumed to be) conducted by those who identify as LGBTQIA+, who face disciplinary marginalization for reasons of their LGBTQIA+ identity and/or their perceived epistemology (Ayoub 2023;Novkov and Barclay 2010). ...

Reproducing Hierarchies at the APSA Annual Meeting: Patterns of Panel Attendance by Gender, Race, and Ethnicity

Political Science and Politics

... As a consequence of this deeply gendered distribution of labor, the pandemic posed an acute threat to the social status, financial well-being, mental health, and physical security of women (Burki, 2020;Madgavkar et al, 2020;Zamarro et al, 2020). Reflecting the gender biases inherent in their societies, few governments considered the gendered implications of COVID-19 mitigation policies (see Greer et al, 2021;Piscopo and Och, 2021;Waylen, 2021), and fewer still adopted strategies explicitly designed to ameliorate the unequal burden that the disease and the chosen mitigation policies imposed on women. 2 While governments largely overlooked (or ignored) the gender-specific consequences of the pandemic, they were widely discussed in the Western media (Donner, 2020;McDonald, 2021;The Economist, 2021). Indeed, some journalists, scholars, and activists called for a "feminist response" to the crisis, asking individuals committed to the principles of gender equality and gender egalitarianism to collaborate and to coordinate their responses to COVID-19 (see Abirafeh, 2020;Izadora and Hinz, 2020). ...

Protecting public health in adverse circumstances: subnational women leaders and feminist policymaking during COVID-19
  • Citing Article
  • September 2021

Gender and Development

... Analizando los resultados de las elecciones de diputados de 2013 y 2017, Cabezas et al. (2023) confirmaron el efecto positivo del gasto en el desempeño electoral, pero con mayor impacto cuando la magnitud de distrito era menor, cuando hubo mayores asientos vacantes y cuando la condición de incumbencia fue más pronunciada. Luego, si bien los estudios anteriores muestran evidencia de que el gasto en campaña importa en contiendas legislativas y municipales (Jofré, 2023;Vergara y Tapia, 2021;Carrasco et al., 2023), que hay diferencias en la recaudación de fondos entre hombres y mujeres (Piscopo et al., 2022) y que las reglas electorales impactan en el efecto del gasto (Gamboa y Morales, 2021;Cabezas et al., 2023), todos los estudios anteriores -salvo Álvarez Martínez y Navia (2024)analizaron contiendas en las que hubo candidatos incumbentes. ...

Follow the Money: Gender, Incumbency, and Campaign Funding in Chile
  • Citing Article
  • July 2021

Comparative Political Studies