Jessica Robinson Preece

Recruitment and Perceptions of Gender Bias in Party Leader Support

Gender differences in who gets recruited by political party elites contribute to women’s underrepresentation on the ballot, but recent evidence suggests that even when women are recruited to the same extent as men, they are still less likely to be interested in seeking office. Why do men and women respond differently to invitations to seek office? We hypothesize that women view party recruitment as a weaker signal of informal support than men do. We use a survey experiment on a sample of 3,640 elected municipal officeholders—themselves prospective recruits for higher office—to test this. We find that female respondents generally believe party leaders will provide female recruits less strategic and financial support than male recruits. In other words, even when elites recruit women, women are skeptical that party leaders will use their political and social capital on their behalf. This difference may account for many women’s lukewarm responses to recruitment.

Mind the Gender Gap: An Experiment on the Influence of Self-Efficacy on Political Interest

In a healthy democracy, one would expect to see roughly equal levels of political participation among men and women. Yet—aside from voting—women are significantly less politically engaged than men at both the mass and elite levels (Atkeson 2003; Bennett and Bennett 1989; Burns, Schlozman, and Verba 2001; Lawless and Fox 2010; Verba, Burns, and Schlozman 1997). The political engagement gender gap suggests that some form of “adverse selection” is at play in the system (Mansbridge 1999, 632). This takes many forms: women have traditionally had less access to resources, more burdensome family obligations, and fewer relevant role models. However, emerging research demonstrates that even when accounting for many of these factors, women remain less engaged with politics than similarly situated men. This suggests that changing these structural factors is not enough to close the gender gap in political engagement—we must address the “gendered psyche” that prevents many women from fully participating in civic life (Lawless and Fox 2010, 12).

Gender Inequalities in Campaign Finance

Previous research suggests that female candidates do not face fundraising barriers; however, female politicians consistently report that fundraising is more difficult for them than their male colleagues. Using a regression discontinuity design to hold district characteristics constant, we study whether there is a gender gap in campaign fundraising for state legislators from 1990 to 2010. We find that male candidates raise substantially more money than female candidates. Further, male donors give more money to male candidates, while female donors, political parties, and PACs give approximately equally to men and women. At the same time, men face challengers who raise more money; consequently, male and female incumbents do not differ in the proportion of the overall district money that they raise in their next reelection bid. These results suggest that there are gender inequalities in campaign finance, but they may not have immediate consequence for womens representation.

More Women Can Run: Gender and Pathways to the State Legislature by Susan Carroll and Kira Sanbonmatsu

In this book Susan Carroll and Kira Sanbonmatsu provide a number of very valuable insights into the causes of women’s legislative underrepresentation as they analyze data from 2008 Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) survey of state legislators. The 2008 survey is a follow-up to a similar survey done by CAWP in 1981, which allows for fascinating comparisons over time. With responses from 1,268 state legislators and in-depth telephone interview with 22 female state legislators, this is a very rich dataset. Their first insight is that male and female state legislators continue to come from fairly different backgrounds. Despite decades of workplace changes since the 1981 survey, women are still significantly less likely to come from the worlds of law, business, and farming; they are significantly more likely to come from the worlds of education, nursing, nonprofits, and homemaking. Educationally, female legislators are more likely to have master’s degrees, whereas men are more likely to have JDs. The family backgrounds of men and women are also different: women are much less likely to be married and are less likely to have children at home. They tend to be older than the men. Finally, women in the legislature are much more likely to have political experience on a host of measures, including working for a campaign or working as a staffer. They were also somewhat more involved in party leadership before running and much more likely to have attended a campaign training program or workshop. More importantly, however, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu examine the ways in which male and female state legislators make decisions about whether to run for office. Only about half of the women in their survey were “selfstarters,” who considered running for office before anyone else suggested it to them. The other half had never considered running before someone suggested it to them, a situation that was much less common for the men. Women were also much more likely to report being recruited by a political party leader and to say that being asked to serve their party was one of the main reasons they ran. These findings challenge the traditional “political ambition” story that assumes that prospective candidates actively look for opportunities to run for office on their own. Although this model fits the men’s data reasonably well, it fails to capture women’s typical experience.