Public Perceptions of Women’s Inclusion and Feelings of Political Efficacy

Abstract

Theoretical work argues that citizens gain important symbolic benefits when they are represented by gender-inclusive institutions. Despite the centrality of this claim in the literature, empirical evidence is mixed. In this article, I argue that these mixed findings are—in part—because many Americans hold beliefs about women’s inclusion that are out of step with reality. Leveraging variation in survey respondents’ beliefs about women’s representation, I examine how these perceptions influence attitudes toward Congress and state legislatures. In both cases, I find that believing women are included is associated with higher levels of external efficacy among both men and women. Using panel data, I then show that when citizens’ underestimations (overestimations) are corrected, their levels of efficacy increase (decrease), shedding further light on this relationship. The findings presented in this research add new theoretical insights into when, and how, Americans consider descriptive representation when evaluating the institutions that represent them.

This One’s for the Boys: How Gendered Political Socialization Limits Girls’ Political Ambition and Interest

“…The tendency for children to draw male scientists has decreased over time as more women have entered the sciences (Hill, Corbett, and St. Rose 2010;National Science Foundation 2017) and as popular media (Rawson and McCool 2014) and textbooks have reflected that increase (Pienta and Smith 2012). Some evidence within politics also demonstrates role model effects (Campbell and Wolbrecht 2006;Stauffer 2021;Wolbrecht and Campbell 2007). With an increase in the number of women who have taken on political leadership roles (elected and nonelected), including highly visible leadership roles, future children may be more likely to associate women with political leadership.…”

Loud and Negative: Exploring Negativity in Voter Thoughts About Women and Men Politicians

“…Whereas negativity drives and affectively anchors the initial (implicit) processing of a candidate image, gender marks the context for the (explicit) rationalization of the vote decision. This finding underlines the important role of public perceptions of women in politics for opinion formation (Stauffer, 2021) and adds to recent research suggesting that actively reminding voters of existing biases can be a viable strategy for women candidates (Brooks & Hayes, 2019). This study comes with several limitations.…”

Can’t We All Just Get Along? How Women MPs Can Ameliorate Affective Polarization in Western Publics

“…Whereas some of these causal pathways require citizens to recognize the gender compositions of different parties’ parliamentary delegations, others do not. And, though existing work suggests that citizens are broadly aware of the gender composition of political institutions (Dolan 2010; Stauffer 2021) and respond to the makeup of political parties (O’Brien 2019), more research is needed to identify the individual-, party-, and system-level factors that predict knowledge of party gender composition.…”

“…First, we examined whether our findings hold for both men and women survey respondents. Because existing literature yields competing expectations on this front (see Clayton, O’Brien, and Piscopo 2019; Klar 2018; Ondercin and Lizotte 2021; Stauffer 2021), we reestimated our models separately on all self-identified women survey respondents and then on men. These estimates, reported in columns 3 and 4 of Table 1 above, show that both women and men partisans reward out-parties with higher proportions of women MPs.…”