Adolescent Attitudes Toward Male and Female Political Candidates:

Do female politicians empower women to vote or run for office? A regression discontinuity approach

“…do not yet fully understand the reasons why women are elected in the places that they are, associations between a woman's candidacy or election in one district and the outcomes of interest (e.g, Healy 2013) are difficult to convincingly tease apart because we cannot be sure that that all potentially confounding factors have been controlled for. Although scholars have found experimental evidence that female politicians have changed perceptions about women's candidacies in the context of particular case studies and in the lab (MacManus 1981;Gitelson and Gitelson 1981), the difficulty in identifying causal relationships between these intertwined phenomenon has limited the development of research that has been able to make strong causal claims. Supporting these methodological concerns, recent work reexamining the impacts of electing African-Americans to local and state legislative offices has found that strictly observational designs may overstate the causal effects of descriptive representation on participation (Hopkins and McCabe 2013;Henderson, Sekhon, and Titiunik 2013).…”

The missing majority: the recruitment of women as state legislative candidates

“…Unfortunately, the assumptions made with little information do not tend to favor women (Huddy and Terkildsen 1993a;1993b;Alexander and Andersen 19 93). With little else to go on, voters fall back on stereotypes of women as less decisive or less competent (Alexander and Andersen 1993;Gitelson and Gitelson 1981). These stereotypes must be overcome by the woman candidate, a task male candidates do not have to face.…”

“…Fortunately, as more information is gained, the evaluation of women candidates becomes more reliant on the actual candidate rather than stereotypes (Sapiro 1981b;Alexander and Andersen 1993). To wit, simply providing the fact that a woman candidate won an election tends to transform respondents' thinking away from gender and toward their thoughts about successful politicians (Gitelson and Gitelson 1981).…”

“…If the beliefs about female candidates were simply based on an outgroup bias, for example, one would expect that female subjects would produce very different responses than male subjects. Gitelson and Gitelson (1981) found that students' reactions to hypothetical male and female candidates were made very similar by providing the additional information of who won the race. When male winners and female winners were compared, their personality, effort, and likely future were quite similar.…”

“…By asking the party chairs to rate the chances of incumbents versus the chances of challengers, the leaders' attention to role information can be assessed.If they treat incumbent women's chances as they would incumbent men's, this suggests that they have used the role information over the gender information available to them, and that they are not displaying an outgroup bias(Deaux and Lewis 1984;Gitelson and Gitelson 1981). If, on the other hand, party chairs continue to downgrade the chances of an incumbent female, this strongly suggests an outgroup bias as the chairs would be ignoring the information inherent in incumbency.…”