Gendering Party Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel focuses on the intersection of gender and party politics in advanced industrial democracies. While there has been an increase in the number of women voters and women elected officials across these party systems over time, significant questions still remain about the impact of gender on the preferences of candidates, the conditions under which women are likely to be elected, and the impact those elected women have on a party’s image and electoral support. In other words, has there been a gendering of party politics and what does it look like? These are the questions that the papers on this panel seek to address.

The four papers on the panel marshal original and innovative datasets to answer these important questions. This includes data from twitter, survey experiments, surveys and manifestos as well as new data on the gender composition of parties’ parliamentary delegations and party leadership and men/women voter ratios by parties. The comparative research includes cases from across advanced industrial democracies.

And the panel will benefit from the expertise of a chair and discussants who are leading scholars of parties, voters and gender politics.

Sub Unit

• Division 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Cosponsor

• Division 31: Women and Politics Research

Individual Presentations

• Impact of Women’s Representation on Gender Differences in Party Voter Support - Miki Caul Kittilson, Arizona State University; Ana Catalano Weeks, University of Bath; Bonnie M. Meguid, University of Rochester; Hilde Roza Coffe, University of Bath

• Do Woman MPs Influence Parties’ Policy Images? - James Adams, University of California, Davis; David Bracken, UC Davis; Noam Gidron, Hebrew University; Will Horne, Georgia State University; Diana Z. O'Brien, Rice University; Kaitlin Senk, Rice University

• Are Female MPs More Leftist Than Their Male Colleagues? - Jonathan Homola, Rice University

• Effects of Ballot Order Randomization on Gender- & Ethnicity-Based Voter Biases. - Sean Freeder, University of North Florida; Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Harvard University; Rachel Bernhard, Nuffield College

Chair

• Debra Lynn Leiter University of Missouri-Kansas City

Discussants

• Karen Beckwith Case Western Reserve University

• Dawn L. Teele Johns Hopkins University