American Politics Research

Issues and policies pertaining to children and families are often labeled “women’s issues” and assumed to be on the radar of all women, but we argue that they are more salient for mothers, particularly working mothers, than for other women. This study examines the role of motherhood as an identity for women in Congress by looking at the introduction of bills that affect children and families from 1973 through 2013. We define working mothers as women who have children below 18 years of age at home while they are in office, as opposed to those who have adult children or no children. Our findings show that Congressional working mothers are more likely to introduce legislation that address issues specific to parents and children. We also find that legislation specifically dealing with children’s health and welfare is more likely to be introduced by members with children than those without.

Scholars have long suggested that familial life can affect political behavior and, more recently, have found that fathering daughters leads men to adopt more liberal positions on gender equality policies. However, few have focused on the impact of fathering a daughter on congressional behavior, particularly in an era of heightened partisan polarization. Using an original data set of familial information, we examine whether fathering a daughter influences male legislators’ (a) roll call and cosponsorship support for women’s issues in the 110th to 114th Congresses and (b) cosponsorship of bills introduced by female legislators in the 110th Congress. We find that once party affiliation is taken into account, having a daughter neither predicts support for women’s issues nor cosponsorship of bills sponsored by women. Our findings suggest there are limits to the direct effects of parenting daughters on men’s political behavior, and that scholars should remain attentive to institutional and partisan contexts.

Although still a minority, the growing number of women on both the Bench and at the Bar of the U.S. Supreme Court has important implications for judicial decision-making and successful advocacy at the Court. Research in judicial behavior generally focuses on vote direction and the presence of female attorneys in a case. We offer a more nuanced account of how gender impacts both attorney success and judicial decision-making by drawing on work in social and political psychology and utilizing quantitative textual analysis to explore the tension between masculine norms of behavior that are valued in the legal profession and feminine norms of behavior that are expected of women, but devalued in the legal profession. Based on the Court’s long-standing disdain for emotional arguments, we examine how the emotional content in 601 party briefs shapes the Court’s majority opinions. Our results indicate that male justices evaluate counsel based on their compliance with traditional gender norms—rewarding male counsel for cool, unemotional arguments and rewarding female counsel for emotionally compelling arguments. However, we find no evidence that gender norms shape the opinions of female justices. Given that the justice system is supposed to be “blind,” our results highlight the durability of gendered expectations and raise questions about the objectivity of judicial decision-making.

Political scientists have long been interested in the determinants of political knowledge. In many studies, education is the strongest predictor of political knowledge. However, some studies have found that education has no effect on knowledge once confounding variables are taken into account. In addition, some recent work suggests that education remains the strongest predictor of knowledge even after accounting for confounders like personality traits and intelligence. We provide new evidence on the effect of education on political knowledge by utilizing the co-twin control design. By looking at the relationship between education and knowledge within monozygotic twin pairs, we are able to circumvent sources of confounding of the relationship due to genetic factors and early-life family environment because monozygotic twins share both. We find that the relationship between education and political knowledge is highly confounded by genes and/or familial environment. The results from a naive model that does not take into account unobserved family factors indicate that education has a positive and statistically significant effect on political knowledge. However, in a twin fixed-effects model that accounts for confounding due to genetic factors and familial socialization, we find that the effect of education on political knowledge drops substantially and is not statistically significant at conventional levels.

When presented the choice between a male and female candidate, it is commonly assumed that women prefer a female candidate. But as more policy and ideologically diverse women run for office, this assumption may not hold true. Using an experimental design embedded in a nationally representative survey, I test how voters respond to female candidates with ideologies and abortion positions similar and contrary to their own preferences. I find that women, generally, prefer a female candidate, but support for a female candidate among women decreases significantly when she has a contrary ideology or policy position. Whether women prefer descriptive or substantive representation also is conditioned on individual-level characteristics. This study advances our understanding of voters’ responses to female candidates’ varying ideological and issue positions, which is increasingly important as more women run for office. Although women are more likely than men to give female candidates the benefit of the doubt, not just any female candidate will do—she needs to appeal to women on issue and ideological grounds too.

Although women remain underrepresented in U.S. elective office, female candidates have experienced similar or greater electoral success compared to their male counterparts. Research suggests both selection effects (the uniquely strong characteristics and qualifications of women who run for office) and selective candidacy (the decisions to run or not run for office based on the electoral context) contribute to this phenomenon. I leverage a large data set of candidate characteristics and electoral outcomes in state supreme court elections spanning 1990-2012 to clarify the causal mechanisms behind the electoral success of female candidates. I find that the success of female candidates in state supreme court elections is driven by the most capable women selectively running for open seats. I conclude that this phenomenon may be reflective of a broader gender gap in political ambition, with implications for tactics to improve gender representation in politics.

Gender bias in elections is both a source of debate in the political science literature and a prominent topic in U.S. political discourse. As a result, Americans are exposed to differing messages about the extent to which women face disadvantages in their campaigns for office. We argue that such messages can have differing effects—some of which benefit female candidates, but others that may perpetuate the gender gap in political ambition. Using a survey experiment administered on samples of the U.S. public, campaign donors, and college students, we show that messages portraying women as facing gender bias boosts female candidates’ support and young people’s willingness to engage in campaign activism on their behalf. Simultaneously, it does not affect female candidates’ fundraising ability. But paradoxically, such messages also reduce young women’s confidence in their own ability to run a political campaign. These results suggest important implications for women’s underrepresentation.

In this article, we examine the individual predictors that are responsible for accurate beliefs about the link between vaccinations and autism. We then show how these beliefs affect policy preferences about vaccines. We derive two hypotheses from motivated reasoning theory and test these on national survey data from Gallup and CBS News. Republicans were less likely to report accurate beliefs than Democrats. In addition, educational attainment modified the impact of party identification. The gap between Republicans and Democrats in likelihood of reporting accurate beliefs was largest among the most educated portion of the public. Finally, we show that accurate beliefs about vaccines, independent of statistical controls, are important predictors of policy attitudes about unvaccinated children attending public school and parental choice about the decision to vaccinate. We discuss the theoretical and practical significance of these findings.

Beginning in the 1960s, the United States experienced religious and partisan conflict over cultural issues such as abortion that was described as a “Culture War.” Recent, highly salient battles over religious liberty and transgender rights have led the media to characterize these issues as “new fronts in the culture war,” thereby giving reason to revisit the culture wars debate. In this article, I test whether the public is polarized on religious liberty and transgender rights, as well as whether these issues share the same underlying structure of public opinion as traditional culture wars issues. Using a dataset from the Pew Research Center, I find that a substantial subset of Americans hold polarized views on these issues, and that religion and party are important factors in explaining that polarization. The results suggest that the religious and partisan divides that fueled the original “culture wars” remain an important factor in American politics.