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.
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.
When defined in terms of social identity and affect toward copartisans and opposing partisans, the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased. We document the scope and ...consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit, and behavioral indicators. Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters' minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on nonpolitical judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, doing so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.
We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns. Our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1929 Finnish political candidates ...from 10,011 respondents (of which 3708 were Finnish). As Finland has a proportional electoral system, we are able to compare the electoral success of non-incumbent candidates representing the same party. An increase in our measure of beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 20% in the number of votes for the average non-incumbent parliamentary candidate. The relationship is unaffected by including education and occupation as control variables and withstands several other robustness checks.
Social Science for Pennies BOHANNON, JOHN
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
10/2011, Volume:
334, Issue:
6054
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Social scientists are turning to online retail giant Amazon.com to cheaply recruit people around the world for research studies
Social scientists nowadays are ordering research subjects through ...Amazon.com. The company runs an online marketplace called Mechanical Turk for people across the world available to do work on computers. (The name is a reference to an 18th century chess-playing "machine" that actually worked by virtue of a man hidden inside.) For tiny sums, anyone can hire people to perform almost any kind of simple task, such as tagging items in images. It's predicted that many more social science papers using MTurk will appear in the coming years.
We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence ...of party leaders and followers is strongly supported in Swedish data. We use a novel approach, based on register data for the earnings of the whole population, to measure the competence of all politicians in 7 parties, 290 municipalities, and 10 elections (for the period 1982-2014). We ask how competence was affected by a zipper quota, requiring local parties to alternate men and women on the ballot, implemented by the Social Democratic Party in 1993. Far from being at odds with meritocracy, this quota raised the competence of male politicians where it raised female representation the most. We argue that resignation of mediocre male leaders was a key driver of this effect.
Despite the wide application of the label "populist" in the 2016 election cycle, there has been little systematic evidence that this election is distinctive in its populist appeal. Looking at ...historical trends, contemporary rhetoric, and public opinion data, we find that populism is an appropriate descriptor of the 2016 election and that Donald Trump stands out in particular as the populist par excellence. Historical data reveal a large "representation gap" that typically accompanies populist candidates. Content analysis of campaign speeches shows that Trump, more so than any other candidate, employs a rhetoric that is distinctive in its simplicity, anti-elitism, and collectivism. Original survey data show that Trump's supporters are distinctive in their unique combination of anti-expertise, anti-elitism, and pronationalist sentiments. Together, these findings highlight the distinctiveness of populism as a mechanism of political mobilization and the unusual character of the 2016 race.
Online social networks constitute a major platform for the exchange of moral and political ideas, and political elites increasingly rely on social media platforms to communicate directly with the ...public. However, little is known about the processes that render some political elites more influential than others when it comes to online communication. Here, we gauge influence of political elites on social media by examining how message factors (characteristics of the communication) interact with source factors (characteristics of elites) to impact the diffusion of elites' messages through Twitter. We analyzed messages (N = 286,255) sent from federal politicians (presidential candidates, members of the Senate and House of Representatives) in the year leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election-a period in which Democrats and Republicans sought to maximize their influence over potential voters. Across all types of elites, we found a "moral contagion" effect: elites' use of moral-emotional language was robustly associated with increases in message diffusion. We also discovered an ideological asymmetry: conservative elites gained greater diffusion when using moral-emotional language compared to liberal elites, even when accounting for extremity of ideology and other source cues. Specific moral emotion expressions related to moral outrage-namely, moral anger and disgust-were impactful for elites across the political spectrum, whereas moral emotion expression related to religion and patriotism were more impactful for conservative elites. These findings help inform the scientific understanding of political propaganda in the digital age, and the antecedents of political polarization in American politics.
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