Are you my mentor? A field experiment on gender, ethnicity, and political self starters

Kalla, Joshua; Rosenbluth, Frances McCall; Teele, Dawn Langan

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2857402

Cited by 26 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Second, an additional concern with conjoint experiments, and survey research more generally, is that these findings may reflect “cheap talk.” In the real-world setting where political elites must actively recruit, mentor, and assist aspiring candidates, and where voters must pay the costs of learning about candidates and voting, these biases might operate differently. Although it is possible that settings in which actions have greater costs than those imposed in survey experiments will provide more fertile conditions for bias to emerge, a highly powered recent correspondence experiment on gender and political mentorship showed that female students contemplating a career in politics were more likely to receive encouraging email responses from public officials than male students (Kalla, Rosenbluth, and Teele 2018), suggesting that even in a context where politicians have to exert effort to communicate, women do not necessarily face a wall of exclusion 26…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ties That Double Bind: Social Roles and Women's Underrepresentation in Politics

2018

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This paper theorizes three forms of bias that might limit women's representation: outright hostility, double standards, and a double bind whereby desired traits present bigger burdens for women than men. We examine these forms of bias using conjoint experiments derived from several original surveys—a population survey of American voters and two rounds of surveys of American public officials. We find no evidence of outright discrimination or of double standards. All else equal, most groups of respondents prefer female candidates, and evaluate men and women with identical profiles similarly. But on closer inspection, all is not equal. Across the board, elites and voters prefer candidates with traditional household profiles such as being married and having children, resulting in a double bind for many women. So long as social expectations about women's familial commitments cut against the demands of a full-time political career, women are likely to remain underrepresented in politics.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ties That Double Bind: Social Roles and Women's Underrepresentation in Politics

2018

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“…Answering this question is difficult due to the potential for post-treatment bias. To test this possibility, we examined the length of each reply [14] and whether officeholders provided the requested information or meeting. Results based on these measures (available on request) were once again null.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In all of these experiments, we randomly varied whether public officials received correspondence from a more or less affluent person by varying the individual’s stated occupation (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or biographical narrative (Experiment 3). This follows the approach of similar recent audit studies on racial, ethnic, age, and gender bias [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15], which typically use relatively small manipulations (e.g. changing the name of the sender).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do public officials exhibit social class biases when they handle casework? Evidence from multiple correspondence experiments

Carnes

Holbein

2019

PLoS ONE

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Are public officials more responsive to requests from affluent or poor constituents? A growing body of evidence suggests that lawmakers are more responsive to the rich when they craft policy. However, some scholars theorize that officials also exhibit a corresponding bias in favor of the poor when they handle casework, essentially giving policy to the rich and services to the poor. In this paper, we test this casework prediction using four experiments in which confederates sent simple requests to state or local officials. In each, our confederates’ reported social classes were randomly assigned and signaled with a brief introductory statement mentioning the sender’s occupation or economic situation. Across our samples, we find precisely-estimated null effects of social class biases: the officials we studied were equally likely to respond regardless of the constituent’s class. These findings raise doubts about whether casework is really a class-biased process.

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“…It makes sense, then, that government officials rely on groups as service providers (Bauer, de Sola Poole, and Dexter 1963; Leifeld and Schneider 2012), and access to officials spreads along with resources. Powerful groups lobby more broadly (Hojnacki and Kimball 1998), and officials are willing to grant meetings to individuals from dominant groups (e.g., Carnes and Holbein nd; Kalla, Rosenbluth, and Teele 2018). Therefore, if communication is used to help maintain relationships with officials and bolster the importance of their voice, the group would not signal minority status, fear, and threat, but majority status, confidence, expertise, agreement, and promise.…”

Section: Dynamics Of Flexibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicating in Good Faith? Dynamics of the Christian Right Agenda

Wilson

Djupe

2020

Politics and Religion

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It is an article of faith that organized interests represent members to elected officials making use of synchronized communication channels. Rarely, if at all, have researchers had access to multiple, internal, and external channels to test this notion. We mine a trove of nearly 2,500 emails the Family Research Council (FRC) sent to list subscribers from 2007 to 2018. Text tools allow us to depict message flexibility of the FRC. We then consider how internal and external messages may be linked by examining the issue content of emails in relation to press releases. Finally, we note the bills lobbied by FRC and the frequency these are mentioned in the internal email messages. Our findings are twofold. First, they support the conditional independence of communication channels in ways that appear to conform to the requisites of the different audiences: elected officials are likely mobilized by different signals than members are. Second, our evidence shows that the flexibility organized interests have in composing their communications can mean that different audiences are presented with considerably different political agendas. While FRC has significant sophisticated message flexibility, our data set indicates that such flexibility can raise serious concerns about good faith representation.

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Are you my mentor? A field experiment on gender, ethnicity, and political self starters

Cited by 26 publications

References 3 publications

The Ties That Double Bind: Social Roles and Women's Underrepresentation in Politics

The Ties That Double Bind: Social Roles and Women's Underrepresentation in Politics

Do public officials exhibit social class biases when they handle casework? Evidence from multiple correspondence experiments

Communicating in Good Faith? Dynamics of the Christian Right Agenda

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