Roundtable: Shifting standards? The new pro-women bias in politics and its implications for gender and politics research

Abstract

That voters and parties are biased against women politicians is among the most enduring stylized facts in gender and politics. While women may enjoy certain advantages in specific electoral contexts, the overall ‘truth’ of women’s role incongruity with political office still shapes how scholars develop their research questions and their methodologies. Yet, recent experimental and observational evidence points to a fairly consistent pro-women bias. For example, experimentalists routinely find that respondents prefer women politicians to men. This roundtable interrogates this shift towards a positive bias. Does this change emerge from using quantitative methods? Or does this change reflect a substantive shift in voters’ and parties’ preferences, perhaps even the fundamental severing of the cognitive link between conceiving a ‘good’ politician as a man? Empirically, surveys and experiments may reveal different patterns in voters’ and parties’ preferences than qualitative studies. Substantively, voters’ restive, anti-system mood may be fuelling a demand for outsiders and thus women. If the pro-women demand is shaped by the political moment, then this shift is not permanent, but an artifact of democratic discontent. It may interact with race and ethnicity, perhaps even advantaging women of colour, who are often called upon to ‘save democracy’. Alternatively, researchers may be just now capturing the cumulative, positive effects of women’s increased representation. Misogyny still governs politics, but sexist attitudes can coexist with broader preferences for an (often idealized) woman politician. This roundtable brings together scholars of gender, intersectionality, and representation to consider the mounting evidence of a pro-women bias and its implications for normative and empirical research. Participants specialize in quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods, allowing the discussion to explore (1) how varied methodological traditions may conceptualize and thus detect women politicians’ advantage and disadvantage in different ways and (2) how these methodological differences affect the field’s well-known ‘truths’.

Title	Details
Roundtable Participant: Jennifer Piscopo	View Paper Details
Roundtable Participant: Jessica Smith	View Paper Details
Roundtable participant: Rosie Campbell	View Paper Details
Roundtable Participant: Malliga Och	View Paper Details
Roundtable Participant: Lotte Hargrave	View Paper Details
Roundtable participant: Hannah Bunting	View Paper Details