Tessa Ditonto

Two’s a Crowd: Women Candidates in Concurrent Elections

ABSTRACT Most research on evaluations of women candidates considers single elections in isolation. Using two Dynamic Process Tracing experiments, this article examines whether voters alter their evaluations of women candidates, as well as their willingness to learn about and vote for them, based on the presence of other women running simultaneously in concurrent contests. We find a consistent pattern in which female candidates are not adversely affected when they are the only woman on a voter’s ballot, but they are disadvantaged when other women appear on the same party’s ballot in other races. This effect is more prominent for women in lower offices: women running for the House of Representatives are more disadvantaged than women running for higher offices are.

He Runs, She Runs: Why Gender Stereotypes Do Not Harm Women Candidates by Deborah Jordan Brooks

The continued underrepresentation of American women in political office has led many scholars of gender and politics to search for the origins of this inequality. A number of studies and many media accounts have pointed to gender stereotypes and double standards held by voters as likely contributing factors to this phenomenon. While the notion that women candidates face detrimental stereotypes that negatively affect their chances at winning elections has long been the “conventional wisdom,” in He Runs, She Runs: Why Gender Stereotypes Do Not Harm Women Candidates, Deborah Jordan Brooks provides some compelling evidence that the effects of gender stereotypes may be less consequential than they once were. Most of the seminal work that found effects of gender stereotypes on women candidates was conducted in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Brooks rightly questions whether the findings from these studies are still valid, given the progress that has been made in gender relations in the past four decades. She begins by providing a theoretical framework in which she pits two competing theories against one another: the double standards theory, which posits that women candidates are indeed affected by voters’ stereotypes and double standards, and the leaders-not-ladies theory, which suggests that women candidates will be seen first and foremost as leaders, rendering gender-based evaluations less important than other, more politically relevant considerations. Indeed, one of the major contributions of this book is this rich theoretical foundation that provides a comprehensive framework from which hypotheses regarding the effects of stereotypes can be generated. It also makes the important distinction between “descriptive” and “prescriptive/proscriptive” stereotypes of women, which emphasizes the difference between stereotypes based on how men and women do act versus how they should act. Brooks expects to find more support for her leaders-not-ladies theory than for the double standards theory, and this is indeed what the data show. Through a series of nationally representative, survey-based experiments in which she manipulates the gender of a realistic but fictitious member of Congress who is running for Senate, Brooks shows that women candidates