Mentoring the Next Generation of Women Candidates: A Field Experiment of State Legislators

Abstract

This experiment sent state legislators an email from an individual seeking advice on running for office, varying the gender and party of the sender. This project explores two inquiries—who the legislators choose to respond to and how the legislators’ own gender and partisan identities shape that decision. I theorize that women in politics is a salient issue for legislators; therefore, they will be more willing to advise politically ambitious women. Overall, I find that legislators are more willing to offer help when the aspirant is a woman and of the same party. When primed to further consider women in politics, legislators are more likely to offer gender-specific advice. Democrats rather than women legislators drive this heightened responsiveness to the woman aspirant. These findings highlight what role public officials can play in closing the candidate gender gap, and how legislators’ multiple identities intersect and frame their decisions to aid political aspirants.

Are Politicians More Responsive Towards Men’s or Women’s Service Delivery Requests? A Survey Experiment with Ugandan Politicians

“…2 Requests for career mentorship have found null results (Kalla, Rosenbluth and Teele 2017;Thomsen and Sanders 2020) or pro-woman bias (Rhinehart 2020) in the USA, null results in New Zealand (Golder, Crabtree and Dhima 2019) and pro-women bias in Canada (Dhima 2020). Requests for personal help to access services have generated null results in Canada (Loewen and MacKenzie 2019;Dhima 2020) and Latin America (Magni and Ponce de Leon 2020), and pro-woman bias in Europe (Magni and Ponce de Leon 2020).…”

“…Given these competing forces and contextual diversity, the experimental literature on gender bias in politician responsiveness to constituent requests has been unsurprisingly mixed. 5 For example, politicians' responsiveness to requests for mentorship (informal personal assistance) in New Zealand exhibits no bias (Golder, Crabtree and Dhima 2019), while US studies find no gender bias (Kalla, Rosenbluth and Teele 2017) or pro-woman bias (Rhinehart 2020), and a Canadian study shows a pro-woman bias, especially among female politicians (Dhima 2020). Responsiveness to requests for personal help accessing government services show no gender bias in Canada (Loewen and MacKenzie 2019) or in the 4 Indeed, Wiener (Forthcoming) finds that while female politicians are more responsive at baseline to a meeting request from a women's anti-sex trafficking organization, male politicians increase their responsiveness to close that gap when accountability incentives-voter mobilization or informational assistance are mentioned.…”

Do Politicians Ethnically Discriminate Against Hispanics? Evidence from a Field Experiment with State Legislative Offices

“…This could be problematic if differences in perceived gender influence reply rates. Audits have failed to find evidence of gender discrimination in constituency service (Butler 2014; Golder, Crabtree, and Dhima 2019; Rhinehart 2020; Thomsen and Sanders 2019). Nonetheless in future audits I recommend using names with equally gendered perceptions.…”

Women Want an Answer! Field Experiments on Elected Officials and Gender Bias

“…Two studies found no bias in elected officials' responses to young men and women seeking political advice in the USA (Kalla, Rosenbluth, and Teele 2017) and New Zealand (Golder, Crabtree, and Dhima 2019). Two other studiesconducted in Canada and the USAactually found that elected officials respond more to women than men interested in running for office (Dhima 2018;Rhinehart 2020). Another study found no discrimination from bureaucrats toward men and women inquiring about public housing (Einstein and Glick 2017).…”

“…1 Work on gender bias is more limited. The few studies available have examined elected officials' responsiveness to young men and women seeking political mentorship and found no bias (Golder, Crabtree, and Dhima 2019;Kalla, Rosenbluth, and Teele 2017) or a positive bias toward women (Dhima 2018;Rhinehart 2020). Another study assessed how officials' gender influenced citizens' engagement with their representatives (Costa and Schaffner 2018).…”