Research and Scholarship

In an analysis of state legislative election results, the author finds few gender differences in candidates' vote share and success rates—two widely used measures of the status of women candidates. Yet many party leaders report that one gender has an electoral advantage. These party leader perceptions are related to the objective measures of women's electoral success to some extent. However, most analyses reveal a gap between elite perceptions and objective measures of women's status as candidates. This disjuncture suggests that scholars may have overestimated the extent of party leader and voter support for women. 

The “social eligibility pool” stands as one of the most common, and most powerful, explanations for women's underrepresentation in elective office. In this article, Sanbonmatsu revisits the eligibility pool account of women's representation and argues that it has significant shortcomings as a causal explanation. She proposes that scholars direct their attention to how changes occur in beliefs about the types of backgrounds that are thought to be desirable in politicians—the “informal qualifications” for public office. She suggests that scholars work to identify the conditions under which women can take a “women's path” to the legislature from

In 2004, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the voter turnout rate for women was 60.1% compared with 56.3% for men, and across the United States 8.8 million more women than men voted. Women have voted at higher rates than men in all presidential elections since 1980, with the gap between women and men growing slightly larger in each subsequent election year. Moreover, in 2004, women outvoted men (in terms of both turnout rates and actual numbers) in every racial and ethnic group—African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, and whites (Center for American Women and Politics 2005a).

Drawing on surveys and case studies of party leaders and legislators in six states, the author analyzes the links between parties and representation, exposing the mechanism by which parties’ informal recruitment practices shape who runs – or doesn’t run – for political office in the United States.