Research and Scholarship

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. 

This book concentrates on the gender gap in voting--the difference in the proportion of women and men voting for the same candidate. Evident in every presidential election since 1980, this polling phenomenon reached a high of 11 percentage points in the 1996 election. Contributors discuss the history, complexity, and ways of analyzing the gender gap in voting; the gender gap in relation to partisanship; motherhood, ethnicity, and the impact of parental status on the gender gap; and the gender gap in races involving female candidates. 

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.
 

Proportions of men and women voting for Hillary Clinton in primary states on super Tuesday, February 5, 2008.