It Takes a Motive: Communal and Agentic Articulated Interest and Candidate Emergence

• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912920933668
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Subject Matter: Mini-Symposium: The Role of Gender in the 2018 Midterm Elections

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920933668

Political Research Quarterly

2020, Vol. 73(4) 942 –956

© 2020 University of Utah

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1065912920933668

journals.sagepub.com/home/prq

Mini-Symposium: The Role of Gender in the 2018 Midterm Elections

Introduction

Women won a record number of seats in Congress and in

state legislatures in the 2018 midterm elections, driven

primarily by more Democratic women running for office.

Prior to 2018, 24 percent of state legislators and 19 per-

cent of members of Congress were women; following the

2018 midterms, those percentages are 29 and 24 percent,

respectively (Center for American Women in Politics

[CAWP] 2019). These gains represent progress toward

sex-parity, but it remains unclear whether this success by

women signals an easing of the candidate emergence

path, which has typically favored men. Scholarship on

candidate emergence finds that women’s success in navi-

gating the process is closely tied to their capacity to

mimic the experiences, attitudes, and behaviors of men

who are successful in doing so (Crowder-Meyer 2020;

Oliver and Conroy 2018; Schneider and Bos 2019;

Schneider et al. 2016). We theorize that these patterns

should extend to articulated interest, or what those with

nascent political ambition say when asked why they are

interested in running for office. While we expect men and

women to articulate their interest in running for office in

ways that reflect gendered social roles, we also anticipate

differences between those who run and those who do not.

Specifically, we expect that the women who emerge as

candidates will express interest more similar to the men

who emerge, and that interest will be expressed in more

“agentic” and less “communal” terms. Agency and com-

munion are conceptual labels from social psychology that

organize “two broad aspects of human values, motives,

traits, and behavior” (Trapnell and Paulhus 2012, 39). For

instance, agentic values include “status,” “power,” and

“recognition”; communal values include “compassion,”

“civility,” and “honesty” (Trapnell and Paulhus 2012).

Agentic traits include “competitive” and “outgoing”;

communal traits include “caring” and “patient” (Gebauer

et al. 2013). Agentic values and traits are more congruent

with what Lawless and Fox (2010, 12) dub the “mascu-

linized ethos” of politics, where the “organs of gover-

nance were designed by men, are operated by men, and

continue to be controlled by men.” Indeed, running for

933668PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920933668Political Research QuarterlyConroy and Green

research-article2020

1California State University, San Bernardino, USA

2The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA

Corresponding Author:

Meredith Conroy, Department of Political Science, California State

University, San Bernardino, 5500 University Parkway, San Bernardino,

CA 92407, USA.

Email: mconroy@csusb.edu

It Takes a Motive: Communal and

Agentic Articulated Interest and

Candidate Emergence

Meredith Conroy1 and Jon Green2

Abstract

More women ran for office in 2018 than any previous election year. This represents progress toward parity, but it

remains unclear whether this surge in women’s political ambition signals an easing of the candidate emergence path,

which has typically favored men. We leverage over ten thousand intake forms of prospective candidates provided by

Run for Something, a candidate recruitment nonprofit founded in 2017, to examine patterns in candidate emergence

based on articulated interest through the lens of “communion” and “agency,” two basic behavioral orientations with

gendered significance. We find that differences in articulated interest along the dimensions of communion and agency

are greater between candidates and noncandidates than they are between men and women, supporting previous

findings of similarities in men and women who emerge as candidates. Our results suggest the candidate emergence

path is still easier for women (and men) whose motives are congruent with agency, and therefore the “masculine

ethos” of politics.

Keywords

political ambition, political behavior, gender, agency, communion, descriptive representation