Women are dramatically underrepresented in legislative bodies, and most scholars agree that the greatest limiting factor is the lack of female candidates (supply). However, voters’ subconscious biases (demand) may also play a role, particularly among conservatives. We designed an original field experiment to test whether messages from party leaders can affect women's electoral success. The experimental treatments involved messages from a state Republican Party chair to the leaders of 1,842 precinct‐level caucus meetings. We find that party leaders’ efforts to stoke both supply and demand (and especially both together) increase the number of women elected as delegates to the statewide nominating convention. We replicate this finding in a survey experiment with a national sample of validated Republican primary election voters (N = 2,897). Our results suggest that simple interventions from party leaders can affect the behavior of candidates and voters and ultimately lead to a substantial increase in women's descriptive representation.
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.
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).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.