To Emerge? Breadwinning, Motherhood, and Women’s Decisions to Run for Office
TLDR
The authors examined the role of household income, bread-winning responsibilities, and household composition in women's political ambition and found that bread-consuming mothers are more likely to run for office.Abstract:
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—negatively affects 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.read more
Citations
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It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office
TL;DR: It takes a candidate: Why women don't run for office as mentioned in this paper is the major conclusion to emerge from the innovative research conducted by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox, which is bound to make It Takes a Candidate a must read, must-cite book for all scholars studying gender and politics.
Replication Data for: How to Elect More Women: Gender and Candidate Success in a Field Experiment
TL;DR: It is found that party leaders’ efforts to stoke both supply and demand increase the number of women elected as delegates to the statewide nominating convention and this finding is replicated in a survey experiment with a national sample of validated Republican primary election voters.
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The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation. By Nancy Burns, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Sidney Verba. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 453p. $55.00 cloth, $27.95 paper
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Born to Run
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Dittmar, Kelly. Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns
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References
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Book
Congress: The Electoral Connection
TL;DR: Mayhew argues that the principal motivation of legislators is reelection and that the pursuit of this goal affects the way they behave and the way that they make public policy as mentioned in this paper, and he argues that this is the case in many cases.
Book
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home
TL;DR: Hochschild as mentioned in this paper found that men share housework equally with their wives in only twenty percent of dual-career families, and that women tend to suffer from chronic exhaustion, low sex drive, and more frequent illness as a result.
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Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent "Yes"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that in contexts of historical political subordination and low de facto legitimacy, descriptive representation helps create a social meaning of "ability to rule" and increases the attachment to the polity of members of the group.
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Women Empowerment and Economic Development
TL;DR: The authors argued that the interrelationships between empowerment and economic development are probably too weak to be self-sustaining, and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women.