Political science is fundamentally concerned with understanding the distribution of political power. Two recent books—The Inclusion Calculation: Why Men Appropriate Women’s Representation, by Melody E. Valdini, and Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender, by Claire Annesley, Karen Beckwith, and Susan Franceschet—add gender to these analyses. Most political power remains in the hands of men, and men’s political dominance means that elites do not descriptively represent the polities over which they govern. In showing that the election and selection of men are predictable and stable gendered outcomes, The Inclusion Calculation and Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender are not “just” books about women in politics; they are uniformly excellent primers on how elites control power and are must-reads for political scientists.
Valdini’s Inclusion Calculation offers a cogent, essential reminder that men elites are rational opportunists. Men let women into the halls of power only when the benefits of women’s inclusion outweigh the threats to their survival. This argument counters portrayals of some men gatekeepers as “angels” (p. 2). When Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau defended his gender parity cabinet with the famously blasé comment, “It’s 2015,” he scored a public relations win, but Valdini shrewdly draws out the rational choice calculations behind the performance. In focusing on the rules of cabinet formation that govern selectors’ choices, Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet’s Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender likewise sees this outcome as calculated. Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet provide a masterful account of how permissive and prescriptive institutional rules, most of them informal but highly regularized, shape cabinet formation. In short, when rules that cabinets must resemble the polity are strong, more women enter.
The Inclusion Calculation cleverly flips the script on previous research analyzing women’s descriptive representation. Instead of asking which institutional, structural, and cultural factors lead to more women in the legislature, Valdini asks, “Why and under what circumstances do members of the in group allow and even encourage members of the out group to be in government?” (p. 3). The answer depends on men elites’ inclusion calculation, which consists of five elements. First are displacement costs, considerations about whether women will displace men overall. For instance, when incumbency is highly valued, as in systems where legislators cultivate personal votes, displacement costs are also high. Second are threat costs, meaning whether women will displace a particular man, like the selector himself. Third are incongruity costs: because the public associates political leadership with men and masculine traits, selectors risk creating cognitive dissonance when they elevate women. Fourth and fifth are responsiveness costs or benefits from domestic audiences and international audiences, respectively. Will the selector reap rewards from promoting women, such as acclaim from domestic women’s movements or increased foreign aid, or will he face backlash?
Incongruity costs are central to Valdini’s argument. The Inclusion Calculation argues that incongruity costs flip to benefits when governments face a sudden loss of legitimacy. In these moments, including women—who are seen as more moral, more honest, and more democratic—allows men elites to recover legitimacy. Valdini tests her argument by focusing on two types of legitimacy loss: massive corruption scandals implicating at least five or more government officials and further democratic backsliding in hybrid regimes, such as when the regime hollows out an election law.
The empirical chapters expertly weave together quantitative and qualitative data. Valdini begins by presenting survey data from the United States and Canada that affirm voters’ attachment to gendered stereotypes. Respondents view women in politics as less desirable, and when they are desirable, it is for stereotypically feminine traits, such as sensitivity, peacefulness, and tolerance. Valdini then shows how massive corruption scandals lead to more women in legislative office, combining a large-N statistical analysis with case studies. In Spain and Portugal, party leaders responded by nominating more women, and in Argentina and Italy, lawmakers adopted gender quotas. Turning to the loss of democratic traits in hybrid regimes, Valdini uses a quantitative analysis to show that the proportion of women legislators increases as countries’ Polity2 scores decline, and case studies of Ethiopia and Bangladesh demonstrate that quota adoption coincided with ruling parties’ efforts to limit electoral competition.
In spelling out men gatekeepers’ cost-benefit analyses so clearly and persuasively, The Inclusion Calculation makes a superb contribution to comparative politics. However, Valdini occasionally overstates the extent to which past scholarship has portrayed men elites as angels or devils. Nonetheless, she correctly notes that this research has championed women’s success at winning nominations or securing gender quotas without always stating why men elites allow these gains to occur. Consequently, her work stands out for returning patriarchy to its rightful place: front and center in studies of elite politics.
Her insight that women’s entrance into politics unfolds on men’s terms is echoed by the key takeaway in Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet’s Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender: cabinet selectors have considerable agency, and they use qualifying criteria that privilege men. Women’s cabinet inclusion increases when changing rules about qualification interact with selectors’ autonomy over cabinet formation.
Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender is inductive, a stellar example of what in-depth qualitative work, especially deep case knowledge, brings to political science. The authors gathered data on 2,229 cabinet appointments from seven countries: Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Their impressive data cover postelection cabinets, from the time the first woman minister enters through 2016. They use media reports, elite interviews, and political memoirs to understand how and why selectors pick their teams.
The book is organized by concept, not by case. The analysis is meticulous, precise, and convincing. The authors begin by identifying the rules governing cabinet selection. They then analyze the rules about who qualifies for the cabinet, focusing on three criteria: experience (political and policy credentials), affiliation (networks and loyalty), and representation (having certain identities, such as race or religion). Throughout, they consider whether rules are prescriptive, prohibitive, or permissive; flexible or specific; and institutionalized or not. Finally, they illuminate the gendered consequences of the rules, arguing that rules about representation facilitate women’s inclusion, attenuating selectors’ choices based on affiliation. Women’s inclusion then triggers a virtuous cycle, reinforcing gender as a desideratum of representation. This virtuous cycle creates concrete floors: minimum thresholds for women’s presence in cabinet that future selectors can elevate, but not fall below. As of 2016, Canada, Chile, Germany, Spain, and the United States had medium concrete floors, meaning cabinets comprised of 20% to 29% women, whereas Australia and the United Kingdom had low floors, with cabinets comprised of less than 10% women.
Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet’s argument about concrete floors makes groundbreaking contributions to studies of women’s political inclusion. First, they show that justifications of cabinet appointments based on merit, and claims that appointing women sacrifice merit, simply hold no water. Experiential criteria are highly flexible: policy background, past political posts, and education can all explain appointment, meaning that many individuals are potentially ministrable. Given that experiential criteria are fungible, “we cannot be confident that experiential criteria are actual grounds of appointment” (p. 130). Instead, selectors (and the media) use experiential criteria retrospectively, to frame and even justify selection after the fact. This crucial insight challenges conventional principal-agent understandings of cabinet formation, which assume that selectors choose the objectively best person for the job.
Second, permissive rules about ministers’ affiliation and prescriptive rules about representation actually govern cabinet formation. Few formal rules constrain prime ministers or presidents in cabinet selection. Selectors use this wide latitude to appoint ministers based on affiliation, drawing from their personal networks, like university drinking clubs. Permissive norms about affiliation overwhelmingly favor men, but run up against prescriptive norms that cabinets should reflect the country’s political and social cleavages. For example, Canada and Germany have strong, informal rules that cabinet members should represent demographics such as race/ethnicity, region, language, and religion, making gender an easy criterion to add. Women have made the most inroads in cabinet in these two countries, as well as in Chile and Spain, where legacies of dictatorship raised the value of representation based on gender. Valdini’s inclusion calculation resonates here as well. Where rules about representation are informal but institutionalized, women ministers are not incongruous, and men selectors reap benefits from including them—and experience costs when they do not.
Third, Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender illuminates that rules matter above and beyond institutions and ideology, because different concrete floors cannot be mapped onto presidential versus parliamentary systems or left versus right governments. Nor do women selectors necessarily choose more women ministers. For example, Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet explain that Australia’s Julia Gillard received less deference as the first woman prime minister, which constrained her ability to act on feminist principles and appoint women. By contrast, Justin Trudeau enjoyed significant discretion: as an empowered male selector in a context with strong representational criteria, he could reap significant benefits for making and keeping his parity cabinet promise. Once again, women’s inclusion depends on men’s calculated gains.
Both Valdini and Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet achieve the impressive feat of drawing out men selectors’ strategies without ignoring women’s political agency. The authors all highlight how women politicians and activists work to impose costs on men selectors who overlook talented women aspirants. Together, their work invites scholars to consider how women’s inclusion on men’s terms matters for long-term change. Just as the first woman in cabinet eventually led to the second or third, women legislators succeeded in making weak quota laws stronger. Men elites do not selflessly dismantle the patriarchy, but they may miscalculate their ability to retain control. For understanding how men elites preserve but also transform the gendered distribution of political power, The Inclusion Calculation and Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender are excellent, timely, and required reads.
