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Drawing on the strikingly different records of the 103rd and 104th Congresses — congresses in which women’s proportional presence was roughly similar — this introduction to Part I highlights the empirical evidence of the complexity belying the probabilistic relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women. This lays the foundation for comparing and contrasting gender’s impacts on policymaking as the environment changes, examining how women’s efforts to bring (feminale) gendered perspectives to the policymaking process affect and are affected by (masculine) gendered institutions, assessing the implications for the connection between descriptive and substantive representation of women, and exploring what this may mean for all citizens in a representative democracy. Special attention is devoted to why the 103rd and 104th Congresses are an ideal laboratory for exploring the dynamic, probabilistic relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women.

Early socialist welfare regime (1948–1968) in Hungary had a close fit between state architecture and transmitted consistent messages about the nature of social entitlement. Policies reshaped work and family institutions, while welfare agencies linked clients to these structures. This chapter explores the inner workings of the regime process in which need was socialized in an attempt to restructure social and economic institutions. This socializing need is revealed through an examination of re/distributive and interpretive practices. Entitlements are not linked to the needs of individuals or social groups. Instead, the institutions of economic and social life are interpreted to be in need. Drawing on national-level policy data, documents and files, the link between entitlement and recipient's institutional positions are explicated through the use of central plan and enterprise related benefits. In addition, the process in which welfare workers restructured clients' institutional relations is described. Assistance claims were based on clients' collective roles and responsibilities. In this era, the existing institutions of work and family mediated the relationship between the state and its clients.

Chapter 2 argues that self-conscious pluralism enabled festival advocates to negotiate a secure institutional position during a period of cultural retrenchment that began in Poland in the late 1950s. This approach to concert programming developed behind the scenes, during planning meetings in which Warsaw Autumn organizers selected repertoire, grouped works and composers into stylistic and geopolitical categories, and determined of what the festival should consist. Equally important were the maneuvers that took place in printed discourse, wherein critics and other commentators positioned the Warsaw Autumn as an empty frame—that is, a neutral zone in an otherwise polarized world of new music performance. The chapter contends that these negotiations were necessary because, despite rhetoric to the contrary, few observers thought the Warsaw Autumn was truly objective.