American women of color and rational non-candidacy: when silent citizenship makes politics look like old white men shouting

* The underlying quantitative data for this article will soon be available as a public dataset through the Harvard IQSS Dataverse, at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/

Abstract

Candidate emergence research emphasizes the importance of political ambition in determining who runs and, therefore, who governs. Political scientists tend to assume that there is a sufficient quantity of people of sufficient quality and diversity to form good, representative governments. Yet my research finds strong ‘candidate deterrent effects’ for women of color – effectively silencing people who would be strong candidates and representatives. I draw on data from an original survey and interviews with a unique group of young eligible candidates. These data suggest that women of color lack faith in politics’ ability to solve problems and perceive it as a discriminatory space. Their aversion to running is fully rational, based on perceptions of high costs and low rewards involved in candidacies. But their rational decisions lead to a system-level irrationality of continuing unrepresentative government that silences the ‘different voice’ emerging from race and gender diversity.

Keywords:

• political ambition
• silent citizenship
• women of color
• black women
• Hispanic women
• Latinas
• running for office
• candidates
• gender

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by several research centers at Harvard University, including CAPS, IQSS, Ash, and Taubman. Thanks also to Harvard Law School, HKS, and Suffolk Law School, for permission to conduct research on their campuses, and to the many research assistants and transcribers without whose assistance this project would not have been possible. Thank you to the following for substantive advice and assistance: Nicholas Carnes, Johanna Ettin, Claudine Gay, Kristin Goss, Jennifer Hochschild, Jane Mansbridge, Eileen McDonagh, Kay Schlozman, and Sue Thomas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* The underlying quantitative data for this article will soon be available as a public dataset through the Harvard IQSS Dataverse, at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/

1. Although for a contrary perspective see Gay (2001). If there are empowerment effects by race, the literature thus far suggests they are more likely to occur at the local level than in higher levels of office. The effect may also be moderated by ideology; see Griffin and Keane (2006).

2. See also work by Steele and colleagues in Sociology on ‘stereotype threat’ for both race and gender, including Spencer et al. (1999) and Steele and Aronson (1995). Such works suggest that individuals in stigmatized groups often internalize the stereotypes they think others hold of them (such as that women are bad at math, or that blacks do poorly on the SAT test).

3. Calculated from the data given in NCSL (2014).