Ambitious Women: Gender and Voter Perceptions of Candidate Ambition

Abstract

Are ambitious women punished in politics? Building on literature from negotiation, we argue that women candidates who are perceived to be ambitious are more likely to face social backlash. We first explore what the term 'ambitious' means to voters, developing and testing a new multidimensional concept of perceived ambition, from desire to run for higher office to scope of agenda. We then test the link between these 'ambitious' traits and voter support for candidates using five conjoint experiments in two countries, the U.S. and the U.K. Our results show that while ambitious women are not penalized overall, the aggregate results hide differences in taste for ambitious women across parties. We find that in the U.S. left-wing voters are more likely to support women with progressive ambition than right-wing voters (difference of 7 percentage points), while in the U.K. parties are not as divided. Our results suggest that ambitious women candidates in the U.S. face bias particularly in the context of non-partisan races (like primaries and local elections), when voters cannot rely on party labels to make decisions.

Gender bias in political candidate evaluation among voters: The role of party support and political gender attitudes

“…More recently, Dahl and Nyrup (2021) conducted a candidate choice experiment showing that left-wing voters prefer women candidates, while right-wing voters show no gender bias in Denmark. By contrast, Saha and Weeks (2020) did allow more fine-grained differences among parties, and show very little impact of partisanship on gender bias in preferences of candidates in the UK.…”

“…There is a long-established link on the party level between broader political ideology and ideas about gender. Economically left-wing political parties tend to promote egalitarian values (Saha and Weeks, 2020) and represent previously excluded groups, such as women (Matland and Studlar, 1996;Htun, 2005). Additionally, progressive, left-wing parties focus on post-materialist issues and favor expanding personal freedoms (Dalton, 1987); Bakker et al, 2015; see Röth and Schwander, 2021), espousing positive views on minority rights and traditional women's issues, such as equal pay, the right to abortion, and preventing gender-based violence.…”

“…Parties on the right, by contrast, usually stand for more traditional gender roles in society and are associated with social conservatism and traditional values (Wolbrecht, 2010;Saha and Weeks, 2020). In the UK, for instance, Conservative politicians have less positive attitudes about affirmative action for women and gender equality attitudes (such as the role of men and women within families) than politicians from the Labor party (Lovenduski and Norris, 2003).…”

Advancing the Study of Misinformation Correction Through Conjoint Experimentation

“…Conjoint methods preserve statistical power by asking respondents to render a judgment (e.g., a rating, ranking, or discrete-choice task) about several treatments; potentially over the course of more than one trial (i.e., collections of experimental treatments). Conjoint experimental designs have been used to assess voting intentions for political candidates and appointees with different socio-political backgrounds (e.g., Sen 2017;Ono & Burden 2019;Rhemert 2020;Saha & Weeks 2020), intentions to vaccinate against COVID-19 across vaccines different characteristics (e.g., Kreps et al, 2020;Motta 2021), the framing and source of pro-climate policies (e.g., Diamond & Zhou 2021), and many other politically-contentious topics both in the US (e.g., Zhang et al, 2020;Myers, Zhirkov, & Lunz-Trujillo 2022) and internationally (Shaffer et al, 2020;Levy 2022).…”

Self Promotion in US Congressional Tweets

“…They also campaigned with more "negative" and "attack-style tweets" than men, which could potentially detract from their image in voters' eyes (Evans and Clark, 2016). However, recent evidence appears to suggest that being seen as am- bitious might no longer adversely affect female candidates (Saha and Weeks, 2020). Therefore, it is worthwhile to re-visit the gender gap in selfpromotion among politicians on Twitter.…”