Personality and Gendered Selection Processes in the Political Pipeline

Abstract

Most research on the causes of women's underrepresentation examines one of two stages of the political pipeline: the development of nascent political ambition or specific aspects of the campaign and election process. In this article, we make a different kind of contribution. We build on the growing literature on gender, psychology, and representation to provide an analysis of what kinds of men and women make it through the political pipeline at each stage. This allows us to draw some conclusions about the ways in which the overall process is similar and different for women and men. Using surveys of the general U.S. population (N = 1,939) and elected municipal officials such as mayors and city councilors (N = 2,354) that measure the distribution of Big Five personality traits, we find that roughly the same types of men and women have nascent political ambition; there is just an intercept shift for sex. In contrast, male and female elected officials have different personality profiles. These differences do not reflect underlying distributions in the general population or the population of political aspirants. In short, our data suggest that socialization into political ambition is similar for men and women, but campaign and election processes are not.

Re‐Assessing Elite‐Public Gaps in Political Behavior

“…Dynes, Hassell, and Miles 2019; Clifford, Kirkland, and Simas 2019; Dynes et al. 2019). These traits may not only help us theoretically better understand the origins of elite‐public gaps, but point to important moderators of treatment effects in paired experiments.…”

“…2003; Dynes et al. 2019), or whether leaders are more self‐interested (LeVeck et al. 2014) or more rational (LeVeck 2019).…”

Who Enters Politics and Why?

“…For instance, the pioneering work of Lasswell (1986) established the behavioral foundations of political leadership by examining the relationship between personality types and leadership. More recently, Dynes et al (2019) compare the Big Five personality traits of a sample of the US population and elected municipal officials to show that personality profile differences between men and women emerge at the election stage but not before.…”

Candidate Aggression and Gendered Voter Evaluations

“…Recent research suggests that observable differences across individual sex may not be driven by biological sex differences but by the gendered traits individuals attribute to themselves (Bittner & Goodyear-Grant, 2017;McDermott, 2016). People generally exhibit personal and behavioral characteristics embodying a mix of femininity and masculinity, but those who exhibit dominantly masculine traits are more likely to participate in politics over those who exhibit dominantly feminine traits, both for ordinary citizens (McDermott, 2016) and political candidates (Dynes, Hassell, Miles, & Preece, 2021;Oliver & Conroy, 2017). We investigate how one particular masculine personality trait, aggression, affects how individuals respond to the behaviors of political candidates.…”