This paper advances a research agenda specifying how we can best account for and evaluate the presence of women in the executive branch. The authors argue that researchers need to move beyond theories that were developed to explain women’s presence in legislatures and instead, develop new conceptual approaches and theoretical tools for explaining women’s routes to executive office and their capacity to operate successfully as ministers and chief executives.
The paper brings together two bodies of literature, feminist institutionalism and executive branch scholarship, to craft the research agenda and conceptual framework for studying women’s access to and roles within executive institutions. In so doing, we show how feminist approaches shed light on some of the unanswered questions that are common in executive branch research. We argue that a feminist institutionalist approach has two advantages over conventional approaches to studying executives: 1) an explicit assumption that the rules and practices that characterize political institutions reflect unequal power relations, particularly those based on socially constructed identities such as gender, class, and race; and 2) a focus on the informal dimensions of institutions and particularly those that reflect ideas about appropriate roles and behaviour for women and men. Bringing together these two literatures and approaching them using a feminist institutionalist lens will permit researchers to learn which institutional arrangements are more likely to facilitate women’s access to executive office and which arrangements, norms, and practices obstruct women’s access to and success within the executive branch.
