Politicking while Female: The Political Lives of Women

Abstract

Politicking while Female: The Political Lives of Women is one of those rare academic volumes that you devour in one sitting. Each chapter author frames their research around one central question: ‘‘how does existing knowledge about gender and politics map onto the political landscape after the 2016 presidential election?’’ Reevaluating the gender and politics literature from this vantage point allowed me to see existing research in a new light and prompted me to reexamine my own assumptions about gender and politics research. In short, this volume is everything a scholarly volume should be: engaging, thought-provoking, and innovative. The volume follows women through the political life cycle, assessing the chances and hurdles women face as voters, candidates, and representatives and drawing on social psychology, social movements, and intersectionality. Unfortunately, the table of contents does not follow the same political life cycle, which makes it a bit difficult if you want to read essays relating to a specific political life cycle stage. Mary-Kate Lizotte takes on the common assumption that women are ‘‘unified in their political views and behavior’’ (p. 15). While the vote choice gender gap certainly exists, she finds that women, like men, are influenced in their vote choice by other identities such as race and ethnicity, education, economic status, religiosity, and family status, affecting the presence and size of the gender gap. For example, women who attend church frequently and are married are least likely to vote for Democrats. Most notably, Lizotte finds that the vote choice race and ethnicity gap is comparable or larger than the vote choice gender gap. For example, Black men are more likely to vote for Democrats than are white women and Latinas. Monica C. Schneider and Mirya Holman ask the age-old question whether the presence of women representatives increases women’s willingness to run for office. They introduce a gendered description of political office as either communal or power-based to determine whether this changes women’s political ambition. Even by introducing a gendered approach, their analysis does not find positive effects on women’s willingness to run for office. They conclude that it might be necessary to have repeated or more detailed interactions with women officeholders to shape political ambition. Danielle Casarez Lemi investigates the willingness of female voters to vote for multiracial female candidates. She finds that being a multiracial candidate generally has no effect on female voters. Instead, partisanship, nativity, and political experience were more important. Women of color do prefer to vote for a multiracial female candidate who shares part of their race over an outgroup monoracial female candidate. In contrast, Asian American women prefer a monoracial Asian candidate and are less likely to vote for a multiracial Asian female candidate. Taken together, these findings are important because they will have implications for the chances and campaign strategies of future multiracial candidates as the United States electorate becomes more diverse. Rosalyn Cooperman looks more closely at the impact of partisanship and campaign financing. Building on existing knowledge that Republican women have a harder time fundraising than Democratic women, she argues that Carol Miller (R-WV) provides insights on how to overcome the partisan campaign finance gap. First, conservative women Political Action Committees (PACs) should support viable female candidates in seats that Republicans are likely to win or hold on to. Second, PACs need to endorse women candidates in the primary stage and give the allowable direct PAC contribution