abstract
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Despite national gains, womens representation at the subnational level has not increased much over time. In this chapter, Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon and Kendall D. Funk present and analyze original data on subnational legislatures and executives in Latin America. They examine the determinants of womens representation in legislative and executive office and show that institutions and cross-arena diffusion are key explanations. Escobar-Lemmon and Funk show that women in local executive and legislative offices have worked to promote gender equality and womens issues and worked to transform political arenas in ways that make them less biased toward women. They do, however, point out some significant challenges for gender equality in subnational politicswomen are not getting into local executive offices to the same extent as they are legislative offices, subnational party politics has not been friendly to women, and gender balance is far from assured in local judiciaries and bureaucracies.