Glass Half Full or Half Empty: Does Optimism about Women’s Representation in Elected Office Matter?

ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen an unprecedented number of women candidates running for public office. Does the resulting potential for greater gender equality in political representation have downstream effects on individual-level political attitudes, particularly among women voters? Given the partisan imbalance in women’s candidacies, do Republican and Democratic voters experience the growing gender parity in political representation differently? We explore these questions by employing a survey experiment in the 2018 Cooperative Election Study (CES) that manipulates the perceived trajectory of women’s representation in politics. Our results suggest that priming future optimism as compared to pessimism in women’s representation has little overall effect on the gender gap in political efficacy and interest, but that party affiliation can be a moderator in this context. We discuss the broader implications of our findings for women’s engagement in politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Descriptive representation
• women’s underrepresentation
• political efficacy
• gender gap

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2022.2081444

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In 2016, 182 women ran for US Congress. In 2018, that number jumped to 257 and, in 2020, jumped again to 319 (Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) 2022b).

2. Note that in the survey, this question was placed after our main questions measuring political interest and efficacy. Thus, this question did not prime respondents to think about progress in women’s representation prior to our main outcome measures.

3. See Online Appendix B.1 for full regression table.

4. See Online Appendix B.2 for full regression table.

5. See Online Appendix B.3 for full regression table.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Kraft

Patrick Kraft is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and organizer of the Experimental Politics Lab at the department. He received his PhD from Stony Brook University. Kraft’s teaching and research focus on political psychology and methodology. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Science Research and Methods, among others.

Kathleen Dolan

Kathleen Dolan is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Co-Editor in Chief of American Journal of Political Science. She is the author of When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Voting for Women: How the Public Evaluates Women Candidates (Westview Press, 2004) and numerous peer-reviewed articles.