Publications

The 2nd edition of this textbook describes the role of gender in the American electoral process through the 2008 elections. Tailored for courses on women and politics, elections, and gender politics, it strikes a balance between highlighting the most important developments for women as voters and candidates in the 2008 elections and providing a deeper analysis of the ways that gender has helped shape electoral politics in the United States.  Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding presidential elections, voter participation and turnout, voting choices, the participation of African American women, congressional elections, the support of political parties and

Voters hold stereotypes about candidate gender and candidate party. Yet little is known about the intersection of gender and party stereotypes. This article investigates whether gender stereotypes transcend party. It considers whether gender stereotypes affect woman politicians differently by party and examine the effect of partisan identification on gender stereotypes. The authors find that the public perceives gender differences within both political parties. Thus the presence of the party cue does not preclude a role for candidate gender. However, the authors also find that the implications of gender stereotypes are somewhat different for Democratic and Republican women.

Carroll and Sanbonmatsu compare the background characteristics and experiences of women and men state legislators over time using data from the 2008 and 1981 CAWP Recruitment Studies. 

Carroll and Sanbonmatsu find important gender differences in the initial decision to seek state legislative office. They find that women are more likely than men to seek office because they were encouraged to run and that family and organizational support play a larger role in women’s candidacy decisions than in men’s. 

Reflecting on the 2008 presidential election, Carroll examines the role that gender stereotypes seem to have played in key decisions made by the Clinton campaign, as well as the power and sexism that the media exhibited in their coverage of the Democratic race. 

The author introduces the idea of a backlash against women's representation, proposes several preliminary hypotheses about a backlash, and discusses ways of testing them.

The desire to elect more women to public office is likely to affect a range of political behaviors and may explain the relatively low levels of women's descriptive representation overall. Yet, little is known about the public's view of the ideal gender composition of government. The authors find that the public expresses a preference for higher levels of women's representation than the country has experienced. Women are more likely than men to express a view, though men and women do not differ in their preferences on the ideal percentage of male officeholders. The article examines the role of gender stereotypes and the experience of being represented by women officeholders in shaping support

This chapter examines the influence of committee assignments on women legislators' ability to achieve their policy goals. It analyzes whether or not there is discrimination in the committee assignment process that can create obstacles for women legislators to make policy influence.

Sanbonmatsu's chapter is a review essay of scholarship on gender and political parties. She argues that future research should integrate theories about descriptive representation with theories about party representation. 

This chapter examines the phenomenon of the “security mom” and the role she played in the 2004 election. Through content analysis of print media coverage and analysis of exit poll data, Carroll shows that the empirical data collected from voters offer little support for the characterization of security moms as portrayed in media accounts. She argues that the attention paid to “security moms” in the presidential race very much worked to the benefit of the Bush campaign, fitting into the campaign’s overall strategy and detracting interest away from women voters whose concerns could be represented by existing interest groups, thus weakening any accountability that the victorious candidate might