To be inspired by others: A panel study into the effect of implicit and explicit encouragement on girls' political ambition

The ongoing gender gap in political ambition has encouraged scholars to take on a different perspective on the determining aspects of political ambition development. As women’s political resources increased, scholars moved from explanations that emphasized costs and benefits to explanations that emphasize sociocultural traits such as norms, role models, and socialization. Lawless and Fox (2005, 2010) found that women often need more encouragement from the people around them to consider running for political office. Other studies focused on the gendered political socialization process of adolescents, showing differential effects of sociocultural traits on boys’ and girls’ ambition development (Bos et al., 2022). This study takes the next step by linking both approaches. We investigate to what extent direct and indirect encouragement during adolescence counters inequalities in political ambition. Through discussions about politics with, for instance, their parents, teachers, or peers, adolescents learn about the different possibilities of political participation and might be directly influenced and inspired to take on a political position. Furthermore, as the political socialization process is a gendered process, girls receive less encouragement to take on a political position, whereas boys are more actively socialized into a political position. Environments that are more conducive – e.g. schools with stronger views on equal gender norms or schools with higher shares of female students – then could counter the gendered processes and positively promote girls’ political ambition development. To test these effects, we employ panel data from 1104 adolescents who participated in the Dutch Adolescent Panel on Democratic Values. Political ambition was measured in the second year (Grade 8) and the fourth year (Grade 10). We split the analyses into two parts: the direct encouragement through discussions with their parents, teachers, and peers and indirect encouragement through being in a more supportive school environment. The results indicate that, overall, discussing politics with parents, teachers, and peers leads to more political ambition. However, when we split this effect to gender, we find that girls’ ambition decreases when they discuss politics with their parents, but we find no gender effect for the discussions with teachers and peers. When we look at indirect encouragement, the results show that in schools with a higher average support of equal gender norms, overall political ambition actually is lower. There is no different effect for girls. Being in a school with more female students does not have a significant effect on girls’ political ambition, except when we control for political interest and political efficacy. In that case, being in a school with more female peers leads to a reversed gender gap in political ambition. Even though adolescents are in their impressionable years (Russo & Stattin, 2017), it seems that the gender gap in political ambition cannot be explained by direct encouragement of political discussions with others, or indirect encouragement – being in a stimulating environment – during this period.