The Gender Lacuna in Comparative Politics

Abstract

What accounts for the glaring inattention to work on gender within mainstream political science? Part of the problem lies in the substance of scholarship itself. The concepts, central questions, and key variables that predominate in the mainstream literature on comparative democratization and in the literature on gender and democratization have contributed to the gulf between them. But a more fundamental explanation lies in the starting assumptions of scholars in the two camps. Mainstream scholars rarely question whether gender is relevant to politics, and gender scholars rarely question whether gender isn't relevant to politics. I illustrate some ways in which gender could be incorporated into mainstream work, and discuss how gender research could be made more broadly comparative.