Becoming a Candidate: Political Ambition and the Decision to Run for Office explores the factors that drive political ambition at the earliest stages. Using data from a comprehensive survey of ...thousands of eligible candidates, Jennifer L. Lawless systematically investigates what compels certain citizens to pursue elective positions and others to recoil at the notion. Lawless assesses personal factors, such as race, gender and family dynamics, that affect an eligible candidate's likelihood of considering a run for office. She also focuses on eligible candidates' professional lives and attitudes toward the political system.
This book explores the gendered dynamics of institutional innovation, continuity and change in candidate selection and recruitment. Drawing on the insights of feminist institutionalism, it extends ...the 'supply and demand model' of political recruitment via a micro-level case study of the candidate selection process in post-devolution Scotland.
It Still Takes A Candidate serves as the only systematic, nationwide empirical account of the manner in which gender affects political ambition. Based on data from the Citizen Political Ambition ...Panel Study, a national survey conducted of almost 3,800 'potential candidates' in 2001 and a second survey of more than 2,000 of these same individuals in 2008, Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox find that women, even in the highest tiers of professional accomplishment, are substantially less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to seek elective office. Women are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office. They are less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office. And they are less likely than men to express a willingness to run for office in the future. This gender gap in political ambition persists across generations and over time.
He runs, she runs Brooks, Deborah Jordan
2013., 20130721, 2013, 2013-07-21, 20130101
eBook
While there are far more women in public office today than in previous eras, women are still vastly underrepresented in this area relative to men. Conventional wisdom suggests that a key reason is ...because female candidates start out at a disadvantage with the public, compared to male candidates, and then face higher standards for their behavior and qualifications as they campaign.He Runs, She Runsis the first comprehensive study of these dynamics and demonstrates that the conventional wisdom is wrong.
With rich contextual background and a wealth of findings, Deborah Jordan Brooks examines whether various behaviors--such as crying, acting tough, displays of anger, or knowledge gaffes--by male and female political candidates are regarded differently by the public. Refuting the idea of double standards in campaigns, Brooks's overall analysis indicates that female candidates do not get penalized disproportionately for various behaviors, nor do they face any double bind regarding femininity and toughness. Brooks also reveals that before campaigning begins, women do not start out at a disadvantage due to gender stereotypes. In fact, Brooks shows that people only make gendered assumptions about candidates who are new to politics, and those stereotypes benefit, rather than hurt, women candidates.
Proving that it is no more challenging for female political candidates today to win over the public than it is for their male counterparts,He Runs, She Runsmakes clear that we need to look beyond public attitudes to understand why more women are not in office.
It Takes a Candidate serves as the first systematic, nationwide empirical account of the manner in which gender affects political ambition. Based on data from the Citizen Political Ambition Study, a ...national survey conducted on almost 3,800 'potential candidates', we find that women, even in the highest tiers of professional accomplishment, are substantially less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to seek elected office. Women are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office. They are less likely than men to think they are 'qualified' to run for office. And they are less likely than men to express a willingness to run for office in the future. This gender gap in political ambition persists across generations. Despite cultural evolution and society's changing attitudes toward women in politics, running for public office remains a much less attractive and feasible endeavor for women than men.
Where women run Sanbonmatsu, Kira
2006., 20100209, 2006, c2006.
eBook
Why don't more women run for office? Why are certain states more likely to have female candidates and representatives? Would strengthening political parties narrow the national gender gap? Where ...Women Run addresses these important questions through a rare and incisive look at how candidates are recruited. Drawing on surveys and case studies of party leaders and legislators in six states, political scientist Kira Sanbonmatsu analyzes the links between parties and representation, exposing the mechanism by which parties' informal recruitment practices shape who runs—or doesn't run—for political office in America.
Abstract
Do the media cover men and women politicians and candidates differently? This article performs a systematic analysis of 90 studies covering over 25,000 politicians in over 750,000 media ...stories, and presents the accumulated knowledge in a comprehensive theoretical framework. The paper shows that there is a gender bias in the amount of coverage of politicians in proportional electoral systems, where women politicians lag behind men in media attention, but that, surprisingly, this gender bias is absent in majoritarian electoral systems. In addition, we systematically review gender differences in the content of media reports on political candidates, such as differences in attention to private life and family, viability and horse-race coverage, issue coverage, and gender stereotypes. Overall, women politicians receive more attention to their appearance and personal life, more negative viability coverage, and, to some extent, stereotypical issue and trait coverage. We conclude by pointing out promising avenues for future research.
Voting for Women Dolan, Kathleen A.
2004, 2018, 2003, 2018-03-09
eBook
This book explains how voters evaluate women candidates, who votes for them, and why. Women comprise an ever-increasing percentage of the candidate pool for elective office in the United States. ...Public opinion surveys profess strong support for female candidaes, yet many of these same candidates still encounter skepticism (at best) or hostility (at worst) from the public. The role of candidates gender in elections is a complex one. Yet, our understanding of how voters react to these women is often based on election-specific, anecdotal, or hypothetical evidence. Voting for Women is one of the first book-length treatments of both how the public evaluates female candidates and whether and when people will support them at the polls. It also provides a history of women and elections in the U.S. and analysis of contemporary data on how voting environments can influence women's success.
Is support for democracy in the United States robust enough to deter undemocratic behavior by elected politicians? We develop a model of the public as a democratic check and evaluate it using two ...empirical strategies: an original, nationally representative candidate-choice experiment in which some politicians take positions that violate key democratic principles, and a natural experiment that occurred during Montana’s 2017 special election for the U.S. House. Our research design allows us to infer Americans’ willingness to trade-off democratic principles for other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, and policy preferences. We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence. Our findings echo classic arguments about the importance of political moderation and cross-cutting cleavages for democratic stability and highlight the dangers that polarization represents for democracy.
Avengers. PerSisters. The pink wave. And even badasses. These terms have been used to refer to the unprecedented number of female candidates who ran for elected office in the United Sates in 2018. ...Barbara Burrell explores this phenomenon--in the context of women's candidacies for election to the US House of Representatives--discussing who the women were, why they chose to run, the nature of their campaigns, and their legacy as reflected in the 2020 elections. Not least, her findings clearly challenge traditional perspectives on women's quests for political leadership.
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