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AbstractThe connection between women leaders and superior pandemic performance is likely spurious. This narrative overlooks that women currently govern precisely the kinds of countries that should mount effective pandemic responses: wealthy democracies with high state capacity. This article maps where women currently serve as presidents and prime ministers. The article then uses data from the Varieties of Democracy Project and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to show that many women-led countries score high on state capacity and that high-capacity states have low coronavirus mortality regardless of whether they are led by women or by men. Arguments emphasizing women chief executives' superior pandemic performance, while offered in good faith, are misleading.

As gender quotas change the formal rules governing candidate selection, party leaders use informal practices in order to preserve the choicest candidacies for men. This article uses a critical case to highlight how the opposite also occurs. In Mexico, female elites built informal, cross-partisan networks that, in collaboration with state regulators, successfully eliminated political parties' practices of allocating women the least-viable candidacies. Traditional party elites rely on informal tactics to secure the status quo, but female party members devise their own strategies to force changes to candidate selection, signalling that informality cannot be theorized as wholly negative for women.

AbstractThis article examines two decades of strengthening, expansion, and diffusion of gender quota laws in Latin America. The analysis departs from studies of quotas' adoption, numerical effectiveness, or policy impacts, instead focusing on states' use of coercive power to integrate women into public and private institutions. Viewing these policies in light of feminist theories of the poststructuralist state reveals how state institutions act to restructure government and promote gender equality. In building this argument, the article presents an up-to-date empirical survey and conceptual understanding of quota evolution in Latin America, including recent developments in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.

Seven Latin American countries—Ecuador, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama—have recently shifted from quota laws to parity regimes. This paper offers the first scholarly examination of the discourses underlying this parity shift, exploring how proponents frame and justify the measure in these seven cases. I find that Latin America's parity advocates appeal to universal human rights and the equality of outcomes (rather than the equality of opportunities); in doing so, they establish parity as a prerequisite of the democratic state. This framing is further legitimated by court decisions validating the constitutionality of affirmative action. I conclude by arguing that these discourses have significant policy implications: parity will continue to diffuse rapidly across Latin America.