Knowing the Competition: Gender, Qualifications, and Willingness to Run in Elections

Abstract

In spite of significant gains in recent elections, women’s under-representation in U.S. politics remains an empirical fact. Scholars have identified the persistent gender gap in political ambition as a key component. Research to date has focused on explaining the gender gap in political ambition by identifying gender differences in factors such as self-assessed qualifications, recruitment experiences, risk aversion, and competitiveness. The conventional wisdom emerged that because of these gender differences, potential women candidates need more encouragement than men to overcome reservations about running for office. These propositions remain largely untested. Using an innovative experimental design that allows us to directly examine how individuals respond to information about candidate qualifications in real time, we make several substantive contributions to understanding the role of gender in the decision to run for office. First, we find that women are highly responsive to information about their qualifications to run for office, in some cases more so than their male counterparts. In doing so, we shine a spotlight on how men often ignore information about their own unsuitability to run for office. We also find that being presented with multiple chances to run for election has a positive, but limited effect on women’s political ambition.