2024/01/16 by Christopher F. Karpowitz, J. Quin Monson, Jessica Preece +1 · 1 voice · 30 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Democracy #Demographic economics #Economics #Gender Politics and Representation #Gender Roles and Identity Studies #Gender gap #Gender studies #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies #Law #Masculinity #Political science #Politics #Presentation (obstetrics) #Psychology #Representation (politics) #Social psychology #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1017/s0003055423000783
published in American Political Science Review 118(4), 1873-1894 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2024/01/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
The gap between women’s representation in the Democratic and Republican parties has grown significantly in the last three decades. We argue existing explanations undervalue voters’ contributions to this trend by focusing on voter responses to candidate sex rather than candidate gender. We theorize that Republican voters (especially the most conservative) prefer masculine candidates in intraparty and entry-level elections. Because sex and gender are correlated, this limits the number of Republican women who advance through the political pipeline. Experimental vignettes from two rounds of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study ( N = 2,000) and two large surveys of Republicans ( N > 10,000) show that Republican (but not Democratic) voters penalize candidates with “feminine” self-presentation regardless of the candidate’s sex. Original data on the self-presentation of Republican candidates for entry-level office ( N = 459) confirm Republican candidates often present themselves in gender-stereotypical ways. In short, voters play an underappreciated role in the partisan gap in women’s representation.