The Political Psychology of Women in U.S. Politics

Angela L. Bos, Monica C. Schneider, Angela L. Bos, Monica C. Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134831272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The Political Psychology of Women in U.S. Politics is a comprehensive resource for students, researchers, and practitioners interested in women and politics. Highly original and drawing from the best available research in psychology and political science, this book is designed to summarize and extend interdisciplinary research that addresses how and why men and women differ as citizens, as political candidates, and as officeholders. The chapters in this volume are focused on differences in the political behavior and perceptions of men and women, yet the chapters also speak to broader topics within American politics – including political socialization, opinion formation, candidate emergence, and voting behavior. Broadly, this volume addresses the causes and consequences of women's underrepresentation in American government.

This book is the ideal resource for students and researchers of all levels interested in understanding the unique political experiences of diverse women, and the importance of rectifying the problem of gender disparities in American politics.

1
Studying the Political Effects of Gender Using a Psychology Lens

Angela L. Bos and Monica C. Schneider

It is difficult to ignore the importance of gender in the 2016 presidential election. Examples abound within the Democratic nomination process, in which Hillary Clinton appears poised to be the first woman nominee for a major party. Prior to the race, journalists questioned whether Clinton would pursue the presidency, or instead embrace her gender-conforming role as a grandmother. Journalists have been condemned for their seeming reliance on pervasive gender stereotypes in their criticisms of Clinton. For example, media pundits stated her voice was “shrill,” and had a “decidedly grating pitch and punishing tone” (Chozick 2016). After her victory speech for winning Democratic primaries in Ohio and Florida, male reporters helpfully suggested that she should “smile.” The salience of these comments, coupled with the historic nature of a possible female president and Clinton’s campaign focus on gender issues, such as pay equity, has spiked her support among (particularly female) voters committed to gender equality (McConnaughy 2016). Yet, female supporters of Hillary Clinton were disparaged for relying on “a shallow criterion” of candidate gender in determining their support, while a subset of young, male Bernie Sanders supporters, dubbed “Bernie Bros,” made crude and sexist attacks against Clinton online, only to be dismissed by Sanders himself. The 2016 presidential campaign illustrates that women’s political experiences as candidates and citizens are still largely shaped by social constructions of gender. These gendered dynamics—involving elite and voter scrutiny of Hillary Clinton based on stereotypes and traditional expectations of women—invite consideration of individual-level explanations for prejudice against women, which the field of psychology is well equipped to address.

Despite these observations about the 2016 campaign, many scholars see reason for optimism, arguing that sex and gender pose fewer impediments to women’s involvement in U.S. politics than in the past. Women now out-register and out-vote men (Center for American Women and Politics 2015) and win elections for political office at the same rate as their male counterparts, even if they run at much lower numbers (Seltzer, Newman, and Leighton 1997). Hillary Clinton, at a campaign rally in D.C. at the conclusion of her 2008 campaign, referred to the historic number of votes she received, noting that her campaign created “about eighteen million cracks” in the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” (June 7, 2008). Thus many scholars conclude that, to the extent that women want to be involved in politics, they will be successful, since the major legal and social barriers, such as media bias and the outright refusal to vote for a woman, have been removed (e.g., Brooks 2013; Dolan 2014; Hayes and Lawless 2015; Lawless and Fox 2005).

While there have been gains for women in politics, however, numerous political “gaps” between men and women persist. Women are less engaged in politics relative to men, reporting lower levels of interest in politics, political knowledge, participation in areas such as donating money and volunteering time, and ambition to seek political office and careers (Burns, Schlozman, and Verba 2001; Lawless and Fox 2005; O’Connor and Yanus 2009). Women differ from men with regard to political attitudes; for example, compared to men, women are more likely to support maintained or increased government spending and are less likely to support the military’s use of force (e.g., Norrander 2008). In every presidential election since 1980, women were far more likely to support Democratic candidates, compared to Republican candidates (Center for American Women and Politics 2014b).

A psychological—as opposed to a structural or economic—approach represents a promising way to better understand these gaps; the field of psychology is rich with explanations for why people have attitudes and behave the way that they do. The stakes are high in understanding attitudinal and behavioral gaps between men and women because the political consequences for women are dramatic: Despite gains, women are descriptively underrepresented at every level of elected office and in non-elective positions (Center for American Women and Politics 2014a; EEOC 2013). In particular, only 19.3 and 20 percent of the U.S. House and Senate, respectively, are currently composed of women (Center for American Women and Politics 2016b; Center for American Women and Politics 2016c), and 24.5 percent of state legislatures (Center for American Women and Politics 2016a). Simply put, these inequalities reflect women’s disadvantage in terms of both the resources and the influence necessary to affect their government.

The chapters in this book address how gender shapes political experience. The interdisciplinary approach of this book—specifically the integration of political science and psychology—has unique strengths that can best explain the attitudinal and behavioral gaps between men and women that result in women’s lack of influence in the political process. A well-executed interdisciplinary approach draws on the strengths of multiple disciplines. Using small-N experimental methods, as psychologists do, combined with large observational studies used by political scientists, triangulates findings (Kinder and Palfrey 1993). Generally, political science values research designs that account for macro-level social and political context through control variables, and analyze data from representative samples to enhance external validity. In contrast, psychology’s emphasis falls on precision in understanding individual-level causal mechanisms, and establishing cause-and-effect, to maximize internal validity (Borgida, Federico, and Sullivan 2009). Substantively, political science offers normative grounding as to why we should care about issues of gender equality and representation in a democracy, while psychology offers well-developed theories, such as those related to human cognition, emotion, and motivation, to explain attitudes and human behavior and which can be applied to politics. This volume illustrates the combinations of these two approaches.

Consider a substantive example: The gender gap in political attitudes and its relationship with voting behavior. The goal for political scientists has been to identify robust gender differences in attitudes over time in representative samples (e.g., Norrander 2008), and to demonstrate whether gaps persist when controlling for important political variables such as party identification (Kaufmann and Petrocik 1999). In one study, authors conducted regression analyses of large-N observational studies to test different explanations for the origin of the gender gap, such as feminism, socioeconomic status, value differences, and women’s autonomy (Howell and Day 2000). In a study from psychology, researchers manipulated the issue positions of a fictitious candidate, ascribing issue positions where a gender gap does or does not exist, to demonstrate a causal link between the gender gap in individual issue positions and voting behavior (Eagly et al. 2003). This example illustrates psychology’s tendency to use experimental research to focus on identifying causal mechanisms.

While neither field offers a definitive understanding of the origins or consequences of gender gaps in attitudes, we believe more can be gleaned from an integrative approach. In Chapter 4 of this volume, for example, Mary-Kate Lizotte draws from psychology’s Social Role Theory, which offers precise explanations for women’s and men’s behavior, and tests its explanatory power in explaining gender gaps in issue attitudes using a nationally representative American National Election Studies sample. By drawing from the best features of both disciplines, this approach and those like it can help us understand the pervasive role that gender plays in shaping political experiences.

Overview of the Political Psychology of Women in U.S. Politics

By integrating approaches, this volume offers a set of chapters designed to break new ground. This volume is not intended to be an exhaustive collection but a sampling of existing research and its extension through innovative approaches, the meticulous application of psychological theories, and, in many cases, new data sets or analyses. The chapters also speak to broad themes within the study of American political behavior—including political socialization, opinion formation, candidate emergence, voting behavior, candidate evaluations, and elite decision-making. However, unlike other approaches to these questions, each chapter applies psychological theory to advance a scholarly understanding of the ways in which the political experiences of women continue to be gendered, causing significant differences in the behaviors and preferences of men and women. We conceptualized the volume to address three different classifications of women, summarized here: women as citizens, women as candidates, and women as officeholders.

Women as Citizens

We begin with the process of political socialization. Zoe Oxley goes beyond traditional models of party identification acquisition, which examine the causal relationship between the party identification of parents and children (e.g., Jennings and Niemi 1968), to investigate how gender affects socialization and whether children are more likely to share the party identification of their mother or father. Using data from the 1990s and 2010s, she uses social learning theory to predict that mothers, especially those who have a large role in child-rearing, will be more likely than fathers to transmit party identification to their children. She finds evidence for this hypothesis, and, moreover, that children are more likely to be influenced by the parent with whom they share a gender identity. Thus, the transfer of party identification is gendered because it depends upon the gender identity of both parents and children.

We know that the teenage years are formative in political development, particularly in an era where many youth are disillusioned with politics (Lawless and Fox 2015). In Chapter 3, Britney Brinkman problematizes traditionally narrow definitions of activism that exclude activities in which adolescent girls engage. In this way, she asks readers to rethink the stereotype that adolescent girls do not participate in politics. Moreover, she finds that a set of lectures and activities, the Girls, Activism and Social Change Program, developed the social capital and skills of adolescent girls and increased their engagement in activism. These findings suggest avenues for increasing girls’ activism.

The work on socialization to politics sets the stage for understanding gender gaps in adult political attitudes and engagement. In Chapter 4, Mary-Kate Lizotte’s findings from original data analyses illustrate how gender differences in policy attitudes are partially explained by women’s roles as mothers. Lizotte reviews the many well-documented gender differences in public policy attitudes (e.g., women are less likely than men to support the use of force) and social science explanations for them. She pushes the research forward by drawing from psychological theory, specifically Social Role Theory (SRT), to explain gender differences in policy attitudes. SRT provides a framework for understanding how the intersecting and overlapping roles of men and women, specifically parenthood and gender identity, affect attitudes towards government spending and services.

In Chapter 5, Heather Bullock and Harmony Reppond demonstrate the ways that redistributive programs in the U.S. are gendered, as women are disadvantaged relative to men. The authors review explanations for differences in support for redistributive policies (e.g., intergroup stereotypes, self-interest, and ideology), arguing that no single explanation can fully account for these divergences. They focus on how beliefs such as individualism underlie “hierarchy-enhancing” beliefs (e.g., system justification, belief in a just world, and social dominance orientation) and motivate citizens to keep things the way they are with respect to income inequality. Members of subordinate groups often support these hierarchy-enhancing beliefs, which partially explains women’s reluctance to fully support redistributive policies.

Moving from gender gaps in political attitudes to gender gaps in engagement, in Chapter 6, Rachel Calogero offers a new explanation for women’s depressed political engagement: The deeply-entrenched beauty socialization and sexual objectification women regularly encounter in westernized societies. In particular, Calogero presents empirical evidence that self-objectification (a self-perspective that reflects internalized objectification) depresses women’s motivation to participate in changing the political and social systems that treat them unfairly. This chapter highlights sexual and self-objectification as key sociocultural and psychological factors that impact women’s political consciousness and activism. In conclusion, Calogero considers the wider implications of learning to view and value oneself predominantly through an appearance-focused lens on compliance with traditional gender roles and gender social change.

While multiple chapters in this volume discuss how intersectional roles influence women’s political attitudes and experiences, Christina Bejarano, in Chapter 7, synthesizes what we know about intersecting identities using the psychological literature on social identity and identity consciousness, while laying out a clear path for future empirical work to pay closer attention to how gender intersects with identities such as race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Bejarano pushes past the idea of an “either-or” model where voters and candidates might choose one of their identities as the lens through which to evaluate politics. Rather, she considers the interaction of multiple identities as truly intersectional, creating their own sense of group consciousness, their own stereotypes, and their own unique effects on political outcomes. This chapter neatly lays out the complications of studying the multiple identities of voters and of candidates and the ways that those identities interact. This chapter also serves as a bridge from discussing women as citizens to women as candidates.

Women as Political Candidates

Political candidates must take the first step of deciding to run for political office. Thus, Chapters 8 and 9 posit contrasting psychological approaches for explaining women’s political ambition. Kristin Kanthak synthesizes theories from economics, such as cost-benefit analyses, and theories from psychology, particularly work on personality traits and risk taking, to illuminate the interaction between personal factors (i.e., the personal attraction of men and women to politics) and structural effects (i.e., the “playing field,” or forces outside of an individual candidate) on political ambition. She outlines her own work, a series of unique experiments demonstrating that women have electoral aversion, a generalized reluctance to enter into an election. However, Kira Sanbonmatsu and Susan J. Carroll question the applicability of traditional theories of ambition to women’s decisions to run for office on grounds that the dominant model of ambition may not apply as well to women as to men. Instead, they argue that women more often than men focus on relationships in making candidacy decisions. Their “relationally embedded” model offers a unique psychological perspective on how women decide to run for office.

We move from women choosing...