The year 2018 has been dubbed the Year of the Woman because of the increased number of women who ran for office. What helps explain the dramatic increase in the number of women running for office? This paper examines how the political environment shapes white women’s emotional reactions to politics and in turn their political ambition. We focus on major aspects of the 2016 election: Trump’s treatment of women, Clinton’s historic run for office, the Women’s March, and the #MeToo movement. We argue that each of these factors leads to distinct emotional reactions, and that some of these reactions can increase political ambition. We explore support for these arguments with an experiment conducted with a sample of highly educated white women, an experiment fielded on the 2019 CCES, and with in-depth interviews conducted with first-time women candidates in 2018. We find that Trump’s treatment of women and Clinton’s historic run for office inspired political ambition, but through different emotional pathways. Trump’s treatment of women increased anger and in turn political ambition, while Clinton’s historic run increased ambition through enthusiasm. We find more muted effects for the Women’s Marches and the #MeToo movement.

Even though a record number of women ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020, Clinton’s loss in 2016 led pundits, party elites, and voters to worry about whether the country would be willing to support a woman for president, and polling organizations regularly asked questions that tapped into such concerns. While the vast majority expressed willingness to vote for a woman for president in polls, people were more skeptical about how their neighbors felt. Our research question cuts to the heart of this issue: How does polling information about comfort with the idea of a woman president affect perceptions of the electability of actual women running for their party’s nomination, and in turn voting decisions? We expect that exposure to signals of low comfort with a woman president will reduce perceptions of electability, and in turn dampen support for women at the nomination stage, but there are competing hypotheses for how signals of high comfort will be received. We further expect that Democratic women will be most affected by such information. We test these expectations with an experiment fielded on the 2019 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Our findings have important implications for media coverage of polls related to women running for executive office.

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Lakoff's model of political ideology proposes people's beliefs about how government should operate are grounded in beliefs about how families should operate. Previous research shows the left-right political spectrum can be explained by differences in preferences for nurturant (Democrats) and disciplinarian (Republican) parenting styles. We extend the theory to another dimension, helicopter versus free range parenting styles. In Study 1, we find parenting attitudes strongly predict paternalistic policy attitudesmore than ideology, party identity, or any other measured demographic variables. In Study 2, we attempt to establish a causal link, but find manipulating preferences for helicopter parenting does not influence policy preferences as Lakoff's model would suggest. In Study 3, we identify a latent variable that predicts preferences for paternalism in parenting, policy, and a host of other domains such as business, medicine, and education. We discuss implications for Lakoff's theory, the political psychology of libertarianism/paternalism, and society at large.

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