Reevaluating Strategies to Boost Women's Political Ambitions: Insights from Experiments in the Czech Republic

This paper addresses the gender based political ambition gap, a crucial factor in the underrepresentation of women in politics. It explores whether the perception of politics as overly masculine and misaligned with stereotypical female preferences for communal social interactions contributes to lower levels of political ambition among women. Drawing parallels from studies in STEM fields, this research employs experimental methods to assess whether reframing politics as a more communal-oriented activity influences women's willingness to engage in electoral politics. In an experiment, conducted with a representative sample of the Czech adult population (n = 1,000), politics was framed in three ways: emphasizing agentic goals, highlighting communal goals, or presenting a balanced view of both. Contrary to expectations, the findings reveal that portraying politics as more communal does not significantly increase women's political ambitions. Building on these insights, a follow-up experiment was conducted on a subset of the population with university degrees, recognizing their higher likelihood of political engagement. Following previous work in the US, this experiment tested different framings: the underrepresentation of women in politics due to a lack of willingness to run (supply-side factors), biases against women (demand-side factors), and a more positive framing emphasizing increased support for women in politics and voters' appreciation of female politicians. A control group received a neutral description. The results from this experiment showed that none of these framings notably affected women’s willingness to participate in politics. The study aims to understand how political culture contributes to the lack of ambition among women and whether it is possible to alter this culture to increase women's interest in running for office. The results indicate that simply refuting the tough, masculine image of politics, or shifting the responsibility from individual women, does not effectively address the underlying factors of women's political underrepresentation. Despite the null results, the paper aims to contribute to the debate about how structural factors like political culture and prevailing narratives intersect with individual-level factors such as political ambition, thereby influencing women's representation in politics.