See G.I. Jane Run: The Rise of Female Military Veteran Candidates for Congress

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X231157388
• Author: Theresa Schroeder,Rebecca Best,Jeremy M. Teigen
• Date: 01 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(4) 467–479

© The Author(s) 2023

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1532673X231157388

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See G.I. Jane Run: The Rise of Female Military

Veteran Candidates for Congress

Theresa Schroeder

1

, Rebecca Best

2

, and Jeremy M. Teigen

3



Abstract

Veteran women are better represented in Congress than non-veteran women, but the reasons for this are unclear. Veteran

women may be better represented because they run at higher rates and in more winnable races or because their military service

leaves them uniquely qualif‌ied to overcome gender and partisan stereotypes. Voters often perceive women aslacking leadership

ability and ill-suited to handling national security. However, female veterans have experience that may help them overcome

gendered beliefs about their abilities. Using election data from the 2012–2020 U.S. congressional elect ions, we test whether

veteran women gain greater voter support compared to non-veteran candidates and whether veteran women running as

Democrats outperform male veteran Democrats. We f‌ind only limited evidence that military service wins more votes for

candidates of either gender. Among Democrats, prior military service levels the playing f‌ield between male and female

candidates, but veteran women only outperform veteran men in 2018.

Keywords

military veterans, female veterans, elections, gender, partisanship

Introduction

Observers declared the 2018 midterm elections a second

“Year of the Woman”after the historic 1992 election cycle.

The 2018 midterm elections brought forth a record number of

female candidates, leading to a record-breaking level of fe-

male representation. A growing share of women running for

Congress each cycle are military veterans, and despite the

lagging progress toward gender equality, women military

veterans’share of seats in Congress is proportional to their

share of the population (Best, 2019). Why are veteran women

better represented in Congress than other women? One

possibility is that positive stereotypes about veterans’char-

acteristics interact with perceptions of women candidates in

ways that allow Democratic women to overcome the inter-

action of gender and partisanship that Holman et al. (2016)

have shown to be an electoral disadvantage in times of se-

curity threats. Another possibility is that veteran women may

be more willing to run for off‌ice, even in harder to win

districts. Parties may also specif‌ically recruit women veterans

to run in some hard-to-win districts as attention grabbing

candidates. While survey experiments are a common means

of testing theories regarding voter behavior, following Dolan

and Lynch (2014), whose f‌indings indicate that survey ex-

periments signif‌icantly inf‌late the importance of gender

stereotypes on voter decision-making, we test our theory of a

voter preference for veteran women using an original dataset

capturing veteran status, gender, and district effects of

candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives between

2012–2020. Notably, while our analysis allows us to test

whether voters exhibit a preference for veteran women, it

does not allow us to directly test hypotheses about why voters

might prefer these candidates.

If veteran women do have an electoral advantage, a route

to increasing the political power of women and shifting public

perceptions of women’s leadership ability may exist. As more

women win election to Congress running campaigns that

explicitly highlight their military service, they help alter ideas

about the military, women’s roles in the military,and who can

be an expert in defense and security. Their success may also

inspire more women to run for off‌ice and contribute to

shifting ideas about what a member of Congress looks like

(Beaman et al., 2009;Bhavnani, 2009;Shair-Rosenf‌ield,

2012). However, it is not clear that these women behave

in off‌ice similarly to nonveteran women. Members of Con-

gress who are veterans differ from nonveteran peers on

certain foreign policy roll call votes (Lupton, 2017) and at the

1

Ohio Northern University, Ada, OH, USA

2

University of Missouri Kansas City, Kansas City, MO, USA

3

Ramapo College, Mahwah, NJ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Rebecca Best, University of Missouri Kansas City, 5100 Rockhill Rd,

Kansas City, MO 64110-2446, USA.

Email: bestrh@umkc.edu