Publications

CAWP research and research by CAWP scholars that addresses emerging questions about American women's political participation. 

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  • Book Chapter
    August 15, 2008

    Committee Assignments: Discrimination or Choice?

    This chapter examines the influence of committee assignments on women legislators' ability to achieve their policy goals. It analyzes whether or not there is discrimination in the committee assignment process that can create obstacles for women legislators to make policy influence.

  • Book Chapter
    March 24, 2008

    Representation by Gender and Parties

    Sanbonmatsu's chapter is a review essay of scholarship on gender and political parties. She argues that future research should integrate theories about descriptive representation with theories about party representation. 

  • Book Chapter
    March 6, 2008

    Security Moms and Presidential Politics: Women Voters in the 2004 Election

    This chapter examines the phenomenon of the “security mom” and the role she played in the 2004 election. Through content analysis of print media coverage and analysis of exit poll data, Carroll shows that the empirical data collected from voters offer little support for the characterization of security moms as portrayed in media accounts. She argues that the attention paid to “security moms” in the presidential race very much worked to the benefit of the Bush campaign, fitting into the campaign’s overall strategy and detracting interest away from women voters whose concerns could be represented by existing interest groups, thus weakening any accountability that the victorious candidate might

  • Article
    March 1, 2008

    Commentary on Emmy E. Werner's 1968 Article, "Women in the State Legislatures"

    This commentary examines the contributions of Emmy W. Werner's classic 1968 article to the study of women and politics and to knowledge about women in state legislatures, placing the article in the context of its time and highlighting its continuing relevance.
     

  • Book Chapter
    August 3, 2007

    She's the Candidate! A Woman for President

    Women and Leadership brings together in one comprehensive volume preeminent scholars from a range of disciplines to address the challenges involving women and leadership. The experts explore when and how women exercise power and what stands in their way, including current thinking on the perils of stereotypes, the importance of leadership style, gender differences in the decision to seek leadership roles, lessons from women leaders, “opt out” patterns and the need for flexible career paths, global inequalities and initiatives, and strategies that get women to the top. Order the book.

  • Article
    December 1, 2006

    Do Parties Know that ‘Women Win’? Party Leader Beliefs about Women’s Electoral Chances

    In an analysis of state legislative election results, the author finds few gender differences in candidates' vote share and success rates—two widely used measures of the status of women candidates. Yet many party leaders report that one gender has an electoral advantage. These party leader perceptions are related to the objective measures of women's electoral success to some extent. However, most analyses reveal a gap between elite perceptions and objective measures of women's status as candidates. This disjuncture suggests that scholars may have overestimated the extent of party leader and voter support for women. 

  • Article
    September 21, 2006

    Gender Pools and Puzzles: Charting a 'Women's Path' to the Legislature

    The “social eligibility pool” stands as one of the most common, and most powerful, explanations for women's underrepresentation in elective office. In this article, Sanbonmatsu revisits the eligibility pool account of women's representation and argues that it has significant shortcomings as a causal explanation. She proposes that scholars direct their attention to how changes occur in beliefs about the types of backgrounds that are thought to be desirable in politicians—the “informal qualifications” for public office. She suggests that scholars work to identify the conditions under which women can take a “women's path” to the legislature from female-dominated occupations.

  • Article
    September 1, 2006

    Moms Who Swing, or Why the Promise of the Gender Gap Remains Unfulfilled

    In 2004, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the voter turnout rate for women was 60.1% compared with 56.3% for men, and across the United States 8.8 million more women than men voted. Women have voted at higher rates than men in all presidential elections since 1980, with the gap between women and men growing slightly larger in each subsequent election year. Moreover, in 2004, women outvoted men (in terms of both turnout rates and actual numbers) in every racial and ethnic group—African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, and whites (Center for American Women and Politics 2005a).

  • Book
    July 10, 2006

    Where Women Run: Gender and Party in the American States

    Drawing on surveys and case studies of party leaders and legislators in six states, the author analyzes the links between parties and representation, exposing the mechanism by which parties’ informal recruitment practices shape who runs – or doesn’t run – for political office in the United States. 

  • Book
    December 26, 2005

    Gender and Elections: Shaping the Future of American Politics, 1st Edition

    Gender and Elections offers a systematic, lively, multi-faceted account of the role of gender in the electoral process through the 2004 elections. This volume strikes a balance between highlighting the most important developments for women as voters and candidates in the 2004 elections and providing a more long-term, in-depth analysis of the ways that gender has helped shape the contours and outcomes of electoral politics in the United States. Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding and interpreting presidential elections, voter participation and turnout, voting choices, congressional elections, the participation of African American women, the support of

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