In this book, Pedro A. G. dos Santos and Farida Jalalzai examine the effects of Dilma Rousseff’s rise and fall as president on women’s empowerment in Brazil. This is not a simple or straightforward task, as Rousseff was elected as the first female president of Brazil and one of the very few in the world and was ousted in a controversial impeachment process amid political and economic turmoil halfway through her second term. The authors establish solid theoretical foundations to show that gender was a defining aspect of Rousseff’s victory and defeat as president (chapters 1 and 2). They also demonstrate that Rousseff sought to and generally succeeded in promoting women’s empowerment through cabinet appointments (chapter 3), enacting federal policies for women (chapter 4), and shaping public perceptions and discourse about women in politics (chapter 5).

To present and support their central claim that Rousseff’s presidency had a positive impact on different dimensions of women’s representation in Brazil, dos Santos and Jalalzai conduct a careful and comprehensive examination of events and processes surrounding Rousseff’s rise to and fall from to power. The book’s ambitious enterprise uses a variety of data sources, such as fieldwork, participant observation, interviews, public opinion surveys, and official statistics. Moreover, while presenting a general argument that Rousseff as candidate and president indeed empowered women in Brazil, dos Santos and Jalalzai also explore many contradictions in Rousseff’s efforts, which also shed light on her role and that of her party (the Workers’ Party or PT) in their own political defeat and in the later setbacks that Brazil experienced with regard to women’s empowerment. Therefore, the answer the book provides is complex and does justice to the process it examines, revealing intricate dynamics of women’s empowerment through presidential leadership.

Chapters 1 and 2 explore the gendered components that shaped both of Rousseff’s successful presidential bids, as well as the impeachment process that removed her from office. Through detailed descriptions and analyses of multiple events, dos Santos and Jalalzai demonstrate that sexism and misogyny played a central role in public debates about Rousseff as both candidate and president. According to chapter 1, Rousseff’s gender was clearly part of the most common frames and symbols of the 2010 election, used strategically both by Rousseff’s side, to depict her as the Mother of Brazil, and by the opposition and media, which portrayed and criticized her candidacy through more negative stereotypical lenses. In 2014, gender again played a central but complex role, since Rousseff’s gender continued to be a salient element of public debates and because Rousseff and the PT conducted a defamation campaign against the other female candidate, Marina Silva. In chapter 2, the authors make a compelling case that misogyny was a central element of Rousseff’s impeachment, exemplified by instances such as the tchau, querida (bye, dear) campaign and many other symbols that sought to put Rousseff “in her place.”

In chapter 3, dos Santos and Jalalzai investigate whether Rousseff sought to foster women’s descriptive representation through an institutional device that presidents can control more directly: cabinet appointments. The authors compare Rousseff’s choices with those of her immediate predecessor (Lula) and successors (Temer and Bolsonaro) to show a clear pattern: Rousseff appointed significantly more women to the Cabinet than any other Brazilian president. Moreover, an examination of her public speeches strengthens the case that Rousseff was personally committed to promoting women’s descriptive representation. But the book once again elegantly explores some complexities in this process. The comparison between Rousseff’s first (“honeymoon”) and second (crisis) terms shows that her discretion over cabinet appointments became more limited by coalitional pressures over time. The authors provide rich details about the tensions over the ways Rousseff negotiated diverging interests and pressures; she later nominated women considered to be more “technical” than “political,” which may have alienated some groups in her coalition. As the book shows, that decision possibly undermined her leadership and cost her political support during the crisis.

Chapter 4 shows the effectiveness of Rousseff’s efforts to foster women’s substantive representation through four large-scale policies. It also highlights some contradictions in the way she led that process, which may have ultimately contributed to women’s “losing it all” after her impeachment. The authors provide a detailed analysis of Rousseff’s agency in promoting such ambitious policies, which had clear short-term positive effects on women’s empowerment. At the same time, the authors also explore how the centralized and personalized features of Rousseff’s leadership seem to have undermined the success of some initiatives. For instance, programs such as Casa da Mulher Brasileira (House of the Brazilian Woman) and Rede Cegonha (Stork Network) were strongly pushed by Rousseff while being largely opposed, either in form or in substance, by specialists in Rousseff’s administration and by the feminist movement. As the authors show, both programs had limited results. The policies analyzed in this chapter either were scrapped or suffered severe budget restrictions during and after Rousseff’s second term.

In chapter 5, dos Santos and Jalalzai show that Rousseff sought to foster women’s symbolic representation not only by personifying a symbol of women’s success in politics, but also by emphasizing women’s empowerment in her rhetoric. The authors show how the debates around the term Presidenta intentionally promoted by Rousseff—activated women’s political participation and candidacies. Later events, such as the #Elenão campaign and massive demonstrations against Bolsonaro, as well as the mobilization around the assassination of councilwoman Marielle Franco, indicate that Rousseff’s efforts to galvanize women’s voices in the political arena paid off. But the authors also point to some of the contradictions in Rousseff’s actions. Her prolife stance on abortion during the 2010 presidential campaign and her recurring reinforcement of women’s traditional roles were met with pushback by women’s movements, for example. While the authors describe small increases in female congressional candidacies and victories after Rousseff’s victory, those are more likely to have resulted from adjustments in the country’s quota law. Moreover, some of the most prominent female victories for Congress were achieved by conservative women with active voices against women’s rights, which suggests as much backlash as empowerment.

As a case study grounded primarily on solid theorization and qualitative approaches, dos Santos and Jalalzai’s book is a rare contribution to recent political science. Its focus on real and complex political processes is the reason the book offers a sophisticated and intricate answer to a type of question that other methodological approaches often oversimplify. The insights offered by the authors will certainly help in efforts to refine existing theories and develop new perspectives about women in politics, particularly in executive office.

The book must also be praised for contributing enormously to the study of presidential politics more generally, and especially the challenges of achieving minority representation through the institution of the presidency. Rousseff’s case is, after all, the case of a president attempting to promote a political agenda. By showing Rousseff’s positive effects on women’s empowerment, as well as highlighting the missteps and setbacks of her leadership in that process, dos Santos and Jalalzai point to possible inherent contradictions in presidential power. The high personalization and centralization of leadership and policymaking that define presidential systems facilitate the effective promotion of short-term goals, as dos Santos and Jalalzai cleverly demonstrate with Rousseff’s trajectory. However, those same features of the presidency probably make some of those achievements fickle, since their pursuit is continuously subject to errors and idiosyncrasies of judgment, as well as vulnerable to other short-term factors, such as unstable coalitions and changes in the presidency itself.

Since the empowerment that we observe in Brazil’s case is directly tied to the president’s agency and political support, it is also tied to that president’s strength and weakness. In this sense, given that research shows that women in power are more scrutinized and more harshly evaluated than their male counterparts, the advances in women’s representation that stem from presidential agency could have less stable foundations, which must be addressed by future scholarship. All in all, Rousseff’s trajectory–brilliantly analyzed by dos Santos and Jalazai—seems to highlight how the personalized, centralized, and winner-take-all nature of presidencies may be somewhat incompatible with the goal of building permanent foundations for women’s empowerment. In this sense, dos Santos and Jalalzai’s terrific book provides a rich but also troubling depiction of the struggle for representation in presidential systems.