Gender Stereotypes,Information Search,and Voting Behavior in Political Campaigns

It is still unclear exactly how gender influences vote choice. Using an information processing perspective, we argue that instead of directly influencing vote choice, candidate gender guides the amounts and types of information that voters search for during a campaign, and that effects of gender on vote choice ultimately come from differences in information search influenced by candidate gender. Using two unique experimental datasets, we test the effects of candidate gender on vote choice and information search. We find that subjects change their search based on a candidate’s gender, seeking out more competence-related information about female candidates than they do for male candidates, as well as more information related to “compassion issues.” We also find that evaluations of candidates’ traits and issue positions are important predictors of subjects’ vote choice.     

The Political Economy of Gender: Explaining Cross-National Variation in the Gender Division of Labor and the Gender Voting Gap

Mainstream political economy has tended to treat the family as a unit when examining the distributional consequences of labor market institutions and of public policy. In a world with high divorce rates, we argue that this simplification is more likely to obscure than to instruct. We find that labor market opportunities for women, which vary systematically with the position of countries in the international division of labor and with the structure of the welfare state, affect women's bargaining power within the family and as a result, can explain much of the cross country variation in the gender division of labor as well as the gender gap in political preferences.     

Rising to the Top: Gender,Political Performance,and Party Leadership in Parliamentary Democracies

Party leaders are the main actors controlling campaign strategies, policy agendas, and government formation in advanced parliamentary democracies. Little is known, however, about gender and party leadership. This article examines gendered leadership patterns across 71 political parties in 11 parliamentary democracies between 1965 and 2013. It shows that men and women have different access to, and experiences in, party leadership and that these gendered political opportunity structures are shaped by parties' political performances. Women are more likely to initially come to power in minor opposition parties and those that are losing seat share. Once selected for the position, female leaders are more likely to retain office when their parties gain seats, but they are also more likely to leave the post when faced with an unfavorable trajectory. Together, these results demonstrate that prospective female leaders are playing by a different (and often more demanding) set of rules than their male counterparts.     

Conceptualizing Usage in Voting Behavior for Political Marketing: An Application of Consumer Behavior

Political marketing has borrowed and adapted many terms from mainstream marketing, such as image management (segmentation, targeting, and positioning) and consumer (voter). In marketing, the terms “user” and “usage” have been established, yet their application to political marketing is less clear. This paper analyzes the feasibility and usefulness of usage in the political context. Drawing from the literature on usage, a model is developed and applied to four voting environments: Britain, Australia, Russia, and Belarus. One critical factor that emerges is the concept of choice, whereby the voter may chose to indicate their preference for one party yet be forced to use a different party as chosen by collective choice. Another issue is the potential for habitual voting behavior to limit decision making. It is concluded that usage needs to be contextualized specifically for political marketing.     

Party and Gender Stereotypes in Campaign Attacks

Research on negative campaigning has largely overlooked the role of stereotypes. In this study, we argue that the gender and partisan stereotypes associated with traits and policy issues interact with a candidate’s gender and partisanship to shape the effectiveness of campaign attacks. We draw on expectancy-violation theory to argue that candidates may be evaluated more harshly when attacks suggest the candidate has violated stereotypic assumptions about their group. Thus, attacks on a candidate’s “home turf,” or those traits or issues traditionally associated with their party or gender, may be more effective in reducing support for the attacked candidate. We use two survey experiments to examine the effects of stereotype-based attacks—a Trait Attack Study and an Issue Attack Study. The results suggest that female candidates are particularly vulnerable to trait based attacks that challenge stereotypically feminine strengths. Both male and female candidates proved vulnerable to attacks on policy issues stereotypically associated with their party and gender, but the negative effects of all forms of stereotype-based attacks were especially large for democratic women. Our results offer new insights into the use of stereotypes in negative campaigning and their consequences for the electoral fortunes of political candidates.     

Reprecincting and Voting Behavior

Despite the expansion of convenience voting across the American states, millions of voters continue to cast ballots at their local precincts on Election Day. We argue that those registered voters who are reassigned to a different Election Day polling place prior to an election are less likely to turn out to vote than those assigned to vote at the same precinct location, as a new precinct location incurs both search and transportation costs on reassigned voters. Utilizing voter file data and precinct shape files from Manatee County, Florida, from before and after the 2014 General Election, we demonstrate that the redrawing of precinct boundaries and the designation of Election Day polling places is not a purely technical matter for local election administrators, but may affect voter turnout of some registered voters more than others. Controlling for a host of demographic, partisan, vote history, and geospatial factors, we find significantly lower turnout among registered voters who were reassigned to a new Election Day precinct compared to those who were not, an effect not equally offset by those voters turning to other available modes of voting (either early in-person or absentee). All else equal, we find that registered Hispanic voters were significantly more likely to abstain from voting as a result of being reassigned than any other racial group.     

Retrospective Voting and Political Representation

This article develops a theoretical model of political representation under the single-member district system. I establish the existence of equilibria in which legislative voting of each legislator depends only on her preference and her electorate's preference and voters sanction badly behaved incumbents and retain well-behaved ones based solely on their own representatives' roll-call records. In equilibrium, voters achieve a partial representation with respect to representatives' behavior in each district. However, with respect to representation of the social majority, my findings are indeterminate. On the one hand, there exists an equilibrium in which the majority-preferred alternative is the outcome guaranteed, except in very special circumstances. On the other hand, this equilibrium is not generally the unique equilibrium, and, for some parameter values, there is an equilibrium in which the majority-preferred alternative is less likely than the alternative preferred only by the minority to be the outcome.     

War,the Presidency,and Legislative Voting Behavior

An extraordinary body of scholarship suggests that war, perhaps more than any other contributor, is responsible for the emergence of a distinctly modern presidency. Central to this argument is a belief that members of Congress predictably and reliably line up behind the president during times of war. Few scholars, however, have actually subjected this argument to quantitative investigation. This article does so. Estimating ideal points for members of Congress at the start and end of the most significant wars in the past century, we find consistent—albeit not uniform—evidence of a wartime effect. The outbreaks of both world wars and the post‐9/11 era—though not the Korean or Vietnam wars—coincided with discernible changes in member voting behavior that better reflected the ideological leanings of the presidents then in office. In the aftermath of all these wars, meanwhile, members shifted away from the sitting president’s ideological orientation. These findings are not confined to any single subset of policies, are robust to a wide variety of modeling specifications, and run contrary to scholarship that emphasizes ideological consistency in members’ voting behavior.     

Legislative vs. Executive Political Offices: How Gender Stereotypes Can Disadvantage Women in Either Office

Political Behavior - Different stereotypes exist for women politicians in a way that is not true for men; a difference that may affect voter evaluations. While some...     

Federalist Institutions, Voting Behavior, and Party Systems in Spain

With the establishment of the 17 autonomous communities in Spainin the early 1980s, representation has been compounded. Thisarticles assesses the empirical implications of compounded representationin Spain by analyzing regional, national, and European electoraldata over time. Comparisons are also drawn across Spanish regions.In addition, the article discusses the effects of compoundedrepresentation on party systems and government formation inthe regions. Voting patterns vary depending on the level ofelection and also across regions. Party systems, subjectiveregional identity, and types of government in the regions arelinked as well. The evidence suggests that the federalizationof Spain has compounded representation by adding new layersof elections and representative institutions.     

Competing Principals, Political Institutions, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting

Almost all legislators are subordinate to party leadership within their assemblies. Institutional factors shape whether, and to what degree, legislators are also subject to pressure from other principals whose demands may conflict with those of party leaders. This article presents a set of hypotheses on the nature of competing pressures driven by formal political institutions and tests the hypotheses against a new dataset of legislative votes from across 19 different countries. Voting unity is lower where legislators are elected under rules that provide for intraparty competition than where party lists are closed, marginally lower in federal than unitary systems, and the effects on party unity of being in government differ in parliamentary versus presidential systems. In the former, governing parties are more unified than the opposition, win more, and suffer fewer losses due to disunity. In systems with elected presidents, governing parties experience no such boosts in floor unity, and their legislative losses are more apt to result from cross-voting.     

APSA Organized Sect. 32: Elections,Public Opinion,and Voting Behavior Invites Nominations and Applications for Editor of Political Behavior

Political Behavior -     

Gender Stereotypes and the Policy Priorities of Women in Congress

Political Behavior - Scholars find that women who run for Congress are just as likely to win as men are, yet women face considerable challenges related to their sex on the campaign trail. Women are...     

The Gender Gap in Norwegian Voting Behaviour*

In the period 1957-81 women in Norway voted less frequently for the socialist parties than did men. In most recent years this pattern has changed so that women are now more likely than men to support the socialist bloc. This shift has been especially strong among the younger and the more educated women. In the younger age group the polarization by gender is also very striking; women have moved to the left and men to the right. While changing demographic patterns partially explain the gender gap in voting behaviour, differences in values must also be taken into account. The most consistent finding is that stronger religious feelings among women make them more likely to vote for the Christian People's party. Values that suggest a greater emphasis on human interactions, less emphasis on material goods, and a concern with peace, increase female support for the socialist parties.     

Sophisticated Behavior under Majoritarian and Non-Majoritarian Voting Procedures

This study addresses the issue of sincere and sophisticated voting under majoritarian and non-majoritarian voting procedures. By conducting experimental voting games, we compared a common majoritarian procedure, Plurality Voting (PV) with a non-majoritarian procedure, Sequential Voting by Veto (SVV). We focused on two different aspects of the subject: the likelihood of sophisticated voting under each one of the voting procedures and the conditions that foster sincere and sophisticated voting under these procedures. The results highlighted the significant differences between majoritarian and non-majoritarian voting procedures as a key factor in determining the tendency of voters to use sincere or sophisticated voting. Clearly, the sincere model was dominant in SVV games while sophisticated voting dominated the PV games. The extent of sophisticated voting ran counter to the group size, a tendency that was stronger under SVV than under PV. By demonstrating the advantages of the minority principle, when voters are small in number, we hope to encourage the development of a solution that will enable the use of SVV in general elections.     

When to Tell? : Disclosure of Concealable Group Membership,Stereotypes, and Political Evaluation

Although their group membership is normatively irrelevant to vote choice, members of politically underrepresented groups (e.g., women, nonwhites, and gays and lesbians) are often evaluated through the prism of their group memberships and related stereotypes when competing for elective office. Because membership in groups defined by gender, race, or ethnicity is easily perceptible, women and nonwhite candidates may have little control over the political effects of their group membership. Membership in groups defined by a candidate's sexual orientation is concealable, in contrast, and thus potentially gives gay and lesbian candidates some control over the impact of their homosexuality and accompanying stereotypes on voters' responses. Using an experimental design, I examine the relationships between timing of group membership disclosure, group stereotypes, candidate sex, and political responses to gay and lesbian candidates for office—taking into consideration voters' attitudes toward homosexuality and their sex.     

A British Gender Gap? Gender and Political Participation

The Electoral Commission's recently published report Gender and Political Participation captures in a clear and accessible fashion the ways in which gender determines the nature of women and men's political participation in the UK. Analysing existing academic survey research it establishes that there is an overall gender gap in political activism with men more active than women. However, it also finds that there is no gender gap in voter turnout at national, regional, or local elections and that in some political activities, such as signing petitions or boycotting products, women are more likely than men to be active. The report also raises important questions about the consequences - substantive and in terms of legitimacy - of women's lower levels of participation in party politics, and suggests that political parties should ensure that greater numbers of women are elected to our political institutions.