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5 Women Voters, Women Candidates Is There a Gender Gap in Support for Women Candidates? kathleen a. dolan Over the past twenty-five years or so, gender gaps have been visible in many different aspects of American politics—for example, party identification , vote choice for president, and public opinion on policy issues. These gaps have been present for a good period of time and, although the size of the gap between women and men on any particular political concern can ebb and flow, their direction is fairly stable. Since the 1980s, women in the United States tend to be more likely to identify themselves as Democrats than men, vote for Democratic presidential candidates in higher proportions than men, and take particular positions on social, economic, and moral issues. There is another area, however, in which people assume a gender gap exists—support for women candidates. Conventional wisdom and intuition could cause even the most casual observer of American politics to assume that women voters would more naturally support women candidates more often than men voters would. Although there is often anecdotal evidence of the presence of this “affinity effect,” and some empirical support for the claim, there is little to support a conclusion that there is a stable, permanent gender gap in support for women candidates. Instead, the degree to which women voters support women candidates is shaped by several important factors beyond a shared sex/gender identity. The goal of this article, then, is to more closely examine the evidence for a gender gap in support for women candidates to determine whether any gender gap is a long-term, stable part of our political life or a more limited short-term occurrence that is shaped by the context of a particular election. i-xii_1-220_Whit.indd 91 1/10/08 9:17:50 AM 92 . women voters, women candidates Why Should We Expect a Gender Gap in Support for Women Candidates? The notion that women voters should be an automatic base of support for women candidates has been an implicit, and sometimes explicit, assumption of much of the work done on women candidates. This work suggests that there are several reasons we should expect this gender gap to emerge. First, women may vote for women candidates because they seek descriptive representation. Here we mean that women voters who are mindful of the underrepresentation of women in elected office may choose women candidates because they want to change the status quo. That women would be more likely to act on an interest in descriptive representation than would men is obvious from the current figures on women’s presence in elected office in the United States. In 2006, women held 15 percent of the seats in Congress, 25 percent of statewide elected offices, and 23 percent of the seats in state legislatures.1 Indeed, Rosenthal found that women have a stronger preference for samesex representation than do men.2 Other recent studies have confirmed the idea that women are more likely to desire same-sex representation than are men. Posing questions about a hypothetical election race between a woman and a man, Sanbonmatsu demonstrated that women were more likely to prefer candidates of a particular sex than were men and were more likely to prefer women, while men had less of an identifiable sense of gender affinity at work when choosing candidates.3 This may well be because men in the United States are not in a position of feeling underrepresented in governing bodies and, as a result, do not need to seek out male representation for this reason. Women, on the other hand, have a quite different experience and may use their vote to address the situation. Women voters may well seek to increase the presence of women in office by voting for women candidates, but it is probably a bit simplistic to assume that women voters will vote for someone simply because of her sex. Instead, other research suggests that a sense of shared gender identity may motivate women voters to select women candidates. Here these positive feelings toward women candidates “as women” are shaped, perhaps, by a sense that women’s political fortunes are bound up with other women.4 Beyond feelings of gender affinity, issues can play an important role in the relationship between women voters and women candidates. Past work demonstrates that there are “group-salient” issues that draw women voters to women candidates. Issues like sexual harassment, abortion, or child care tend to be of...

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