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While women have participated in a variety of militarized movements across time and space, the determinants of their participation have not been examined systematically. In this article, we seek to explain variation in women's involvement across different violent political organizations. Our research highlights the role that organizational attributes play in influencing women's presence in violent groups. We evaluate our hypotheses using an original dataset on women's participation in and characteristics of 166 violent political organizations across 19 African countries from 1950 to 2011. Our empirical results show strong support for our argument that organization-based opportunities for women's participation explain whether female members are present in a group.

Different beliefs about how to achieve shared goals are common in political organizations such as government agencies, campaigns, and NGOs. However, the consequences of such conflicts have not yet been explored. We develop a formal model in which a principal and an agent disagree about the right policy for achieving their shared goals. Disagreement creates a motivational problem, but we show how both observing policy outcomes and experimenting with policies can ameliorate it. We also show that the principal often defers to the agent in order to motivate him, thereby generating more informative policy outcomes and building future consensus. Most surprisingly, she sometimes allows the agent to implement his desired policy even when she is sure it is wrong, to persuade him through failure that he is mistaken. Using the model, we generate empirical implications about performance measurement and Presidential appointments in U.S. federal agencies.

Abstract
Conceptually, advocacy coalitions are referenced in several policy process theories and frameworks to describe groups of actors that share beliefs and coordinate efforts to influence public policy. In the past decades, advocacy coalitions have received increased attention as a concept and a theoretical approach to understanding collective action in the policy process. In this study, we argue that despite its growing popularity, past empirical research has mainly focused on identifying and describing advocacy coalitions while largely overlooking their role and impact as political organizations. Many of the core premises and assumptions about advocacy coalitions hereby remain understudied and untested. Here, we depart from the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to discuss the political organization of advocacy coalitions by focusing on four dimensions: (1) a basis for engagement in joint strategies, (2) capacity to mobilize political resources, (3) ability to gain influence in policy processes, and (4) perceptions of advocacy coalitions as a political entity. We briefly review the theory and evidence of each dimension and conclude that several core assumptions about advocacy coalitions yet remain to be empirically tested to enable further conceptual specification and theory development within the ACF and beyond. To this end, we propose a research agenda with suggested research questions, designs, and methodological considerations for advancing empirical research on the role and impact of advocacy coalitions in different cases and contexts.