The Effect of the Political Environment on White Women’s Political Ambition
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231186572 |
| Author | Stephanie L. DeMora,Christian Lindke,Sean Long,Jennifer L. Merolla,Maricruz A. Osorio |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Political Research Quarterly
2023, Vol. 76(4) 1987–2003
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231186572
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The Effect of the Political Environment on
White Women’s Political Ambition
Stephanie L. DeMora
1
, Christian Lindke
2
, Sean Long
2
,
Jennifer L. Merolla
2
, and Maricruz A. Osorio
3
Abstract
The year 2018 has been dubbed the Year of the Woman because of the increased number of women who ran for office.
What helps explain the dramatic increase in the number of women running for office? This paper examines how the
political environment shapes white women’s emotional reactions to politics and in turn their political ambition. We focus
on major aspects of the 2016 election: Trump’s treatment of women, Clinton’s historic run for offic e, the Women’s
March, and the #MeToo movement. We argue that each of these factors leads to distinct emotional reactions, and that
some of these reactions can increase political ambition. We explore support for these arguments with an experiment
conducted with a sample of highly educated white women, an experiment fielded on the 2019 CCES, and with in-dept h
interviews conducted with first-time women candidates in 2018. We find that Trump’s treatment of women and
Clinton’s historic run for office inspired political ambition, but through different emotional pathways. Trump’s treatment
of women increased anger and in turn political ambition, while Clinton’s historic run increased ambition through
enthusiasm. We find more muted effects for the Women’s Marches and the #MeToo movement.
Keywords
women, political ambition, Clinton, Trump, #MeToo, emotions
2018 has been dubbed the Year of the Woman because of
the dramatic increase in the number of women who ran for
office.
1
For the first time in U.S. history, over 100 women
were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and the
freshmen class was among the most diverse in U.S.
history. While national level elections have received the
lion’s share of attention in the media, similar trends
happened at the state and local level.
2
In this paper, we ask
how features of the political environment from the 2016
election and its aftermath influence women’s political
ambition, and through which mechanisms. We tackle this
question for one group of women, white women, for both
theoretical and practical reasons. Existing research shows
that underrepresented individuals react to politics in
distinct ways (Phillips and Lee 2018;Phoenix and Arora
2018), and the drivers of political ambition are different
for women of color and white women (Brown and Lemi
2020;Junn 2017;Phillips 2021). While it is important to
explore the broader question for both groups, we begin by
theorizing about white women, for whom we have more
representative data.
We argue that features of the political environment
linked to gender and emotional reactions to that
environment played a role in spurring more white women
to consider running for political office in 2018, especially
Democratic women. One factor, mentioned by pundits
and practitioners,
3
was the election of Donald Trump,
whose misogyny was on full display throughout the
campaign. We theorize that Trump’s treatment of women
increased anger, and in turn increased political ambition
among white women (Lawless and Fox 2018). Another
salient feature of the political environment was the historic
candidacy of Hillary Clinton. We hypothesize that seeing
an experienced woman run for the highest office of the
land should also increase political ambition, but through a
different emotional pathway: increased enthusiasm
1
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
2
University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA
3
Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Jennifer L. Merolla, University of California Riverside, 900 University
Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521, USA.
Email: merolla@ucr.edu
Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article
(Bonneau and Kanthak 2020). Finally, we contend that
movements on the ground in the aftermath of the election,
such as the Women’s Marches, and movements online,
such as the #MeToo movement should also increase
enthusiasm and in turn encourage more white women to
consider running for political office.
4
We test our arguments using three sources of data.
First, to examine the role of the political environment as a
causal factor, we turn to a survey experiment conducted
with a sample of highly educated white women. This
experiment randomly assigned respondents to read vi-
gnettes that highlighted either Trump’s treatment of
women, Clinton’s historic run, the Women’s Marches, or
the #MeToo movement. Here, we examine how these
factors influenced emotional reactions and in turn political
ambition. That is, we examine how emotions mediate the
relationship between these features of the political envi-
ronment and political ambition. Second, we ran an ex-
periment in which we directly manipulate anger, one of
our mediators, in response to Trump’streatment of women
and examine effects on political ambition. Finally, to
contextualize some of the experimental findings and il-
lustrate the causal mechanisms, we draw from in-depth
interviews of women who ran for office, almost all for the
first time, in local level elections.
Each of these methodological approaches develop and layer
on nuance to our overall investigation. The first survey ex-
periment enables us to test all of our hypotheses, while the
second experiment focuses more specifically on one mecha-
nism. In both cases, we are looking at expressed political
ambition. The experiments also provide a causal test of our
arguments. The interviews help us unpack the causal mecha-
nisms detected experimentally and provide some illustration of
how multiple features of the political environment impacted
women who actually ran for political office. The findings across
all three sets of data suggest that gendered features of the
political environment led to distinct emotional reactions, which
in turn increase the motivation of white women to consider
running for political office, particularly Democrats.
Our study makes several important contributions. First,
we focus on how gendered features of the political en-
vironment shape political ambition, an area that has re-
ceived much less attention in the existing literature on
political ambition, compared to more structural and stable
factors which are less likely to explain dramatic shifts in
the number of women seeking office (but see Fox and
Lawless 2010;Broockman 2014;Bernick and Heidbreder
2018;Bauer 2020;Dittmar 2020). Second, while some
work has considered the role of Trump in impacting
women’s political ambition (Dittmar 2020;Lawless and
Fox 2018) and others have considered Clinton’s candi-
dacy (Bonneau and Kanthak 2020), few have put these in
conversation with each other, and most do not also
consider social movements in the aftermath of the
election. Third, very few studies have considered emo-
tions as a mechanism through which the political envi-
ronment might influence women’s political ambition
(Brooks and Hayes 2019;Campbell and Wolbrecht 2020;
Cassese and Holman 2016;Dittmar 2020). Some work
has considered how anger among individuals with sexist
views led to greater political engagement in support of
Trump (Valentino, Wayne, and Oceno 2018), but our work
flips this on its head by looking at how anger at Trump’s
treatment of women leads to greater political ambition
among white women, especially Democrats.
Existing Understandings of the Forces
that Shape Women’s Presence in
Elections
Since the 1970s, a robust line of scholarship has examined
the factors that help explain the under-representation of
women in political office. Given the focus of our inquiry,we
narrow our discussion to political ambition but also briefly
discuss recruitment and voter biases. Repeated studies by
Richard Fox and Jennifer Lawless have demonstrated a long
lasting and significant difference between men and women
when it comes to political ambition, or the desire to seek
elected office (2010,2011). Women are less likely to say that
they want to run for office some day and qualified women
are less likely to run than their male counterparts.
There are many forces that contribute to lower levels of
political ambition. One set of explanations focuses on so-
cialization: girls are less likely to be encouraged to run for
office by their teachers, parents, and other socializing agents
(Fox and Lawless 2014). Studies have also shown that
children in the United States are socialized into the political
environment as a gendered and masculine construct (Bos
et al. 2022), which dampens political ambition among girls.
Women’s status in society also deters some from
running for office (Bernhard, Shames, and Teele 2021).
Women are less likely to run when they have young
children (Deason, Greenlee, and Langner 2015;Fulton
et al. 2006), given that they tend to shoulder the demands
of caregiving. Women’s decisions are also linked to those
of their partners. For example, Bernhard, Shames, and
Teele (2021) find that the ability of women to rely on the
support of a partner’s second income is paramount in their
decision to run, while Carroll and Sanbonmatsu (2013)
argue that women base these decisions on the reactions of
the people whose lives will be impacted by their decision
like their children, partners, and parents among others
with whom they have close relationships. Finally, women
make up a smaller proportion of those in the feeder
professions for political office, in lower-level office, and
they are less likely to receive coverage in the media about
being potential candidates (Thomsen and King 2020).
1988 Political Research Quarterly 76(4)
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