Research and Scholarship

Do men and women take similar or different paths to public office? This paper examines the occupational and educational backgrounds, family situations, and prior political experiences of women state legislators and their male counterparts. 

 This paper explores the variation among and between campaign consultant perspectives, highlighting areas where gender matters more or less and recognizing the influence of consultants’ identities on their perceptions of gender and campaigns. As political actors with a growing presence and influence on campaigns, political consultants provide important insight to the campaign process and the gender dynamics therein. This insight contributes to a deeper understanding of campaigns as gendered institutions, whereby gender norms and expectations are embedded in the culture, structure, and processes of electoral politics.

Sanbonmatsu evaluates the role of political parties in electing women to office. She argues that the history of U.S. parties indicates that women’s organizations and movements, women leaders, and women voters are the keys to making political parties a help rather than a hindrance to women’s representation.

This paper investigates the routes that women take to the mayor’s office in big cities (with populations of 30,000 and above) using the 2008 CAWP Mayoral Recruitment Study. The authors investigate the backgrounds of women mayors and their decisions to seek municipal office for the first time.

This edited volume contains chapters by leading experts in the field of American elections and political behavior. Sanbonmatsu's chapter reviews research on gender differences in mass behavior and candidacy. She argues that future scholarship should focus on understanding the conditions under which gender structures political behavior and elections. In addition to calling for research on when gender as a social category is cued in politics, she argues that elections can create gender as a category: political behavior and elections themselves can shape beliefs about gender, instructing society about what men and women are like.