The Victoria Schuck Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best book published on women and politics.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Cecilia Josefsson’s book, Defending the Status Quo: On Adaptive Resistance to Electoral Gender Quotas, engages the important yet under-studied subject of the strategic resistance to legislative gender quotas by party elites. In it, Josefsson develops a resistance stage framework to better understand techniques of quota resistance and, drawing on feminist institutionalism, offers a unique theoretical perspective on how status quo defenders adapt their resistance strategies at both quota adoption and implementation points. This book makes an important and unique contribution to our understanding of gender quotas, as Josefsson urges us to look beyond contextual factors when analyzing quota failure, and to instead take status quo defenders’ agency and resistance seriously. In addition, Josefsson offers a historical analysis of quota reform attempts and successes in Uruguay, which includes elite interviews with key actors in Uruguayan quota reform as well as process tracing through transcripts of three parliamentary debates. This detailed and precise case analysis includes repeated reform attempts and prolonged conflict between quota advocates and status quo defenders, and is thus an incredibly valuable resource for understanding quota reform and resistance. In sum, while there is substantial existing research on gender quotas, Josefsson’s book offers an entirely new angle on this important subject, thereby providing us with both a better scholarly understanding of the dynamics of gender quota adoption and implementation as well as broader, practical knowledge of how gendered institutional change can occur in the face of strong and persistent resistance.
Cecilia Josefsson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Uppsala University, Sweden. She received her PhD in Political Science from Uppsala University in 2020. Her dissertation, “Adaptive Resistance: Power Struggles over Gender Quotas in Uruguay,” was awarded the Joni Lovenduski PhD Prize in Gender and Politics by the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in 2023.
Josefsson’s research lies at the intersection of gender and politics, political institutions, and democratic representation, across diverse contexts including sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Scandinavia. She investigates how formal and informal institutions shape women’s political inclusion, how resistance to gender-equal reforms unfolds, and how gendered dynamics manifest in legislative processes, political speech, and violence in politics.
She is a member of the Uppsala Gender and Politics (UPPGAP) research group and one of the directors of the Feminism and Institutionalism International Network (FIIN). She has been actively engaged in promoting gender equality in the Swedish parliament and in academia, including through mentorship and pedagogical innovation in quantitative methods.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Melody Valdini (Chair) of Portland State University, Dr. Kristen Williams of Clark University, and Dr. Young-Im Lee of California State University, Sacramento