The Ties That Double Bind: Social Roles and Women's Underrepresentation in Politics

Dawn Langan Teele is a Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 208 S. 37th St., Room 217, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6215, [phone] ([email protected]). Joshua Kalla is a Ph.D. Student, University of California, Berkeley, 210 Barrows Hall #1950, Berkeley, CA 94720-1950, [phone] ([email protected]). Frances Rosenbluth is a Damon Wells Professor of Political Science, Yale University, [email protected], 115 Prospect St., 3rd floor, New Haven, CT 06511, [phone] ([email protected]).

For thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts we would like to thank Diana O'Brien, Dan Hopkins, Dominik Hangartner, Jas Sekhon, Jake Bowers, Simon Chauchard, Øyvind Skorge, Timothy Besley, Kira Sanbonmatsu, Teppei Yamamoto, participants at the PSPE research lunch at the London School of Economics, conference attendees at the University of Zurich and 2015 APSA, and Columbia University. For research assistance we thank Casey Libonate and Alex Dadgar. Supplementary material for this paper is available in the Appendix in the online edition. This research was approved by the Yale University Human Subjects Committee (IRB Protocol #1405013934) and University of California, Berkeley Committee for Protection of Human Subjects (CPHS Protocol #2014-09-6668). Support for this research was provided by the Yale University Institution for Social and Policy Studies, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Women in Parliaments Global Forum, and Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS). Some of the data were collected by Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, NSF Grant 0818839, Jeremy Freese and James Druckman, Principal Investigators.

Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FVCGHC.

The defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign has revivified public debate about the role of gender bias in politics. Did Clinton make strategic errors? Or did she fail to connect to many voters, and a majority of white women, because of continuing negative associations of women in powerful roles? These questions have been of perennial concern to gender scholars, but there is a growing consensus that the majority of American voters are willing to support women's bids for high political office (Dolan 2014; Sanbonmatsu 2002; Carroll and Sanbonmatsu 2013; cf. Streb et al. 2008; Brooks 2013). Once partisanship and incumbency are taken into account, research shows that there is no systematic bias against female candidates (Lawless and Person...