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AbstractDo messages that evoke a gendered leadership style affect attitudes toward well-known candidates? If so, among what sorts of voters? I show that voters' evaluations of national politicians, including Hillary Clinton, can be influenced by presenting candidates as stereotypically masculine or feminine leaders. In two survey experiments of California registered voters (n= 1,800 each) conducted at the height of the 2016 presidential election campaign, I find that, on average, voters seemed to prefer both male and female politicians more when they were described as having feminine leadership styles. However, clear heterogeneous treatment effects occurred: Democrats, liberals, and women from all parties evaluated politicians more favorably when they were described as feminine; Republicans, conservatives, and voters for Donald Trump evaluated the same candidates less favorably when described as feminine. The findings have implications for scholarship that links gender stereotyping, partisanship, and ideology to voter behavior.

Are women more likely to quit politics after losing their first race than men? Women's first-time candidacies skyrocketed in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Yet we have little sense of the long-term impact of this surge in women candidates on women's representation writ large: Inexperienced candidates are more likely to lose, and women might be especially discouraged by a loss. This might make the benefits of such a surge in candidacies fleeting. Using a regression discontinuity design and data that feature 213,966 candidates across 22,519 jurisdictions between 1950 and 2018, we find that women who narrowly lose these elections are no more likely to quit politics than men who narrowly lose. Drawing on scholarship on women's lower political ambition, we interpret these findings to mean that women's decision-making differs from men's at the point of entry into politics—not at the point of reentry.

Who gets to "speak up" in politics? Whose voices are silenced? We conducted two field experiments to understand how harassment shapes the everyday experiences of politics for men and women in the United States today. We randomized the names campaign volunteers used to text supporters reminders to participate in a protest and call their representatives. We find that female-named volunteers receive more offensive, silencing, and withdrawal responses than male-named or ambiguously named volunteers. However, supporters were also more likely to respond and agree to their asks. These findings help make sense of prior research that finds women are less likely than men to participate in politics, and raise new questions about whether individual women may be perceived as symbolic representatives of women as a group. We conclude by discussing the implications for gender equality and political activism.

AbstractResearch shows that voters often use gender stereotypes to evaluate candidates, which should help women in some electoral contexts and hurt them in others. Yet, most research examines a single context at a time—usually US national elections, where partisanship is strong—and employs surveys and experiments, raising concerns that citizens' responses may not reflect how they actually vote. By analyzing returns from thousands of nonpartisan local elections, we test whether patterns of women's win rates relative to men's match expectations for how the electoral effects of gender stereotyping should vary by context. We find women have greater advantages over men in city council than mayoral races, still greater advantages in school board races, and decreasing advantages in more conservative constituencies. Thus, women fare better in stereotype-congruent contexts and worse in incongruent contexts. These effects are most pronounced during on-cycle elections, when voters tend to know less about local candidates.

Are women more likely to quit politics after losing their first race than men? Women's first-time candidacies skyrocketed in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Yet we have little sense of the long-term impact of this surge in women candidates on women's representation writ large: Inexperienced candidates are more likely to lose, and women might be especially discouraged by a loss. This might make the benefits of such a surge in candidacies fleeting. Using a regression discontinuity design and data that feature 212,805 candidates across 22,473 jurisdictions between 1950 and 2018, we find that women who narrowly lose these elections are no more likely to quit politics than men who narrowly lose. Drawing on scholarship on women's lower political ambition, we interpret these findings to mean that women's decision-making differs from men's at the point of entry into politics—not at the point of reentry.

Women's underrepresentation in American politics is often attributed to relatively low levels of political ambition. Yet scholarship still grapples with a major leak in the pipeline to power: that many qualified and politically ambitious women decide against candidacy. Focusing on women with political ambition, we theorize that at the final stage of candidate emergence, household income, breadwinning responsibilities, and household composition are interlocking obstacles to women's candidacies. We examine these dynamics through a multimethod design that includes an original survey of women most likely to run for office: alumnae of the largest Democratic campaign training organization in the United States. Although we do not find income effects, we provide evidence that breadwinning—responsibility for a majority of household income—negativelyaffects women's ambition, especially for mothers. These findings have important implications for understanding how the political economy of the household affects candidate emergence and descriptive representation in the United States.

The IGS Poll serves a dual purpose: to take a snapshot of California public opinion on impoirtant political and policy matters, and to generate new data for more extensive analysis by researchers. This brief describes the results of the 2016 poll in measuring public opinion among registaered voters on several statewide measures that will be on the ballot this November, and on related public issues. The poll sought to provide an in-depth examination of the political attitudes of Asian-American voters, a group that is growing rapidly, but which displays some differences from other voters, including a greater likelihood to register as independents. The results of further analysis of the Poll data will be released at a later date by the Institute.