Seek and Ye Shall Find

Ezra Klein has an interesting TAP article looking at some of the social science on why there are relatively few women holding elected office in the United States. It turns out that women who run for office do just as well as male candidates, but women are much less likely to run. There are various sources of this, but the most easily fixable one is that women are much less likely to be recruited.

This is a particular problem for liberals, since most liberals in America are women, meaning that sexist biases in candidate recruitment are going to deprive liberalism of a lot of possible recruits.

Comments

There's also a bias in favor of recruiting rich candidates who can self-finance. I'd be unsurprised if that pool skewed male.

Posted by phil | July 16, 2008 12:38 PM

"sexist biases in candidate recruitment"

While the survey found women were far less likely to be recruited as candidates, it found those same potential candidates had far greater reservations about running for office than their male counterparts. Is it sexist to focus candidate recruitment on the people who actually want to run?

Mike

Posted by MBunge | July 16, 2008 12:40 PM

Mike, I was thinking the same type of thing. Anybody who had co-ed gym class in high school has seen that guys just tend to be more competitive. I think our current political system and voter pool hugely reward competitive over cooperative.

Posted by LFC | July 16, 2008 12:50 PM

Actually they are recruited. It's just when they ask for directions to meet their local campaign chair they're told "Head north on......." and it all goes downhill from there.

Posted by steve duncan | July 16, 2008 12:51 PM

Mike,

Well, Lawless also reported:

"Potential candidates who receive the suggestion to run for office are more than four times as likely as those who receive no such support to think seriously about a candidacy."

So it does seem reasonable to start asking more women even if the interest apparently isn't there yet, in the hope those efforts will actually help more women eventually get interested.

Posted by DTM | July 16, 2008 12:56 PM

It could also be that women are much less likely to run if they don't believe they can win. Running a campaign seems to be a fairly stressful thing that is rather disruptive to one's life, and given that domestic responsibilities are already not well divided between the sexes, probably even more so for female candidates. Thus, female candidates may only run when they see a fairly probable chance at victory, unlike us "competition-driven" males.

Posted by kartik | July 16, 2008 12:57 PM

I suspect the real question here is how many women participate in their local political party. As I understand it, it's awfully difficult to even get on the ballot if you aren't a relatively active participant in at least one significant level of your local party. On the other hand, I also understand that getting involved in your local party is pretty easy. I'd be curious to find out what percentage of local party members are women; if it's a greater percentage than the percentage of female candidates, then that's evidence of sexism. But I honestly have no idea what the relative involvement in local parties looks like.

Posted by Mark | July 16, 2008 1:03 PM

I suspect the real question here is how many women participate in their local political party. As I understand it, it's awfully difficult to even get on the ballot if you aren't a relatively active participant in at least one significant level of your local party. On the other hand, I also understand that getting involved in your local party is pretty easy. I'd be curious to find out what percentage of local party members are women; if it's a greater percentage than the percentage of female candidates, then that's evidence of sexism. But I honestly have no idea what the relative involvement in local parties looks like.

Posted by Mark | July 16, 2008 1:06 PM

Thus, female candidates may only run when they see a fairly probable chance at victory, unlike us "competition-driven" males.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Especially considering that women will almost always face a much uglier campaign than men will. As we saw with the Clinton campaign, the bounds of "tasteful" behavior are apparently much, much lower when dealing with female candidates than they are for male ones. We still have some huge double standards in this country, and I could totally understand a woman choosing not to go up against those.

On top of that, the fact that most women ARE liberals may paradoxically hurt them among Democratic recruiters, who have been defining "not too liberal" as a necessary prerequisite for "able to win" for a while now. I think this also has the distressing effect of forcing women (and minorities) who advance in politics to actually be more conservative than their male counterparts on issues like defense. Over time this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the majority of women who are liberal on these issues adopt the "I could never win" attitude because of it.

Posted by NS | July 16, 2008 1:10 PM

"This is a particular problem for liberals, since most liberals in America are women, meaning that sexist biases in candidate recruitment are going to deprive liberalism of a lot of possible recruits."

So even if it liberals or at least people who want to see liberals elected to office who are doing the candidate recruitment, are you saying that they would be unable to overcome these "sexual biases" to find more women candidates?

If they can't overcome these biases, then I guess you would have no choice but to adopt a quota system that requires political parties to make X% of their candidates women. Just like they have in the more enlightened countries of Europe, right Matt.

Wow, if the morally pure and sanctimonious among us can't defeat their "sexual biases", what hope is there for us, downright evil and scary conservatives? LOL

Posted by Chicounsel | July 16, 2008 1:30 PM

I think people often get locked into rather rigid thinking whereby any discrepancy in　numbers must be evidence of discrimination.

Not to suggest that discrimination doesn't exist, but recognizing it as one variable -like money, or motivation as mentioned above- among many is important.

Scandinavian style quotas are no good, and I certainly hope we don't see anything like them here.

Posted by Hlem | July 16, 2008 2:16 PM

A related factor is the (un)willingness of potential candidates' male spouses to put their lives on hold and cope with the massive disruptions a campaign can wreak. There's a general assumption that a candidate's wife will just go along; husbands, less so.

Posted by phil | July 16, 2008 2:26 PM

"This is a particular problem for liberals, since most liberals in America are women, meaning that sexist biases in candidate recruitment are going to deprive liberalism of a lot of possible recruits. "

Isn't it also a problem for liberals because liberals, being liberal, might hope not to be sosexist in recruiting candidates? Wouldn't that be thought to be part of being liberal?

Reality bites.

Posted by Mike | July 16, 2008 2:30 PM

Mark, I don't have any statistics on hand, but my inclination is to say that there actually may be more women involved in party organization (at least within the Democratic party) at the local level than men these days. Of course, many of these may be older women who are already retired and unlikely to want to start a new career in political office.

Also, steve duncan, your attempt at politically incorrect, edgy humor, if that's what it is, is pretty weak.

Posted by former deaniac | July 16, 2008 2:46 PM

former deaniac, I certanly hope you weren't reading between the lines or searching for more in my remark than was intended. Humor? Nah, I was serious.

Posted by steve duncan | July 16, 2008 3:19 PM

On top of that, the fact that most women ARE liberals may paradoxically hurt them among Democratic recruiters, who have been defining "not too liberal" as a necessary prerequisite for "able to win" for a while now. I think this also has the distressing effect of forcing women (and minorities) who advance in politics to actually be more conservative than their male counterparts on issues like defense.

I'm not so sure about that. Hillary Clinton has been a hawkish-leaning middle-of-the-road Democrat, and I suppose Diane Feinstein is also something of a centrist. Would it be fair to say that if Nancy Pelosi were a man, she'd feel free to be more lefty, though? Barbara Boxer? Barbara Mikulski? Kathleen Sebelius? One might also find plenty of men who are also rightish Democrats, of course (Nelson, Bayh, Baucus... well, we could go on all night, without even getting into the proudly pro-Republican Dems like Zell Miller or Joe Lieberman).

I think that I'd need to see more data before accepting the view that women have to run to the right of where a male Democrat would run to be acceptable. One can tell anecdotes of female Democratic candidates leaning to the right to try to make themselves more presentable -- but of course, male Democratic candidates often do the same thing.

Posted by Julian Elson | July 17, 2008 1:50 AM

If women do equally well even though fewer are selected, isn't there a presumption that deliberately recruiting more might erase this parity? Basically, I would think that there is still a handicap or penalty for women who try to get elected, but that both recruiters and female candidates themselves kind of compensate for this by only running female candidates who are, in fact, substantially stronger than the average male candidate. Casting a wider net might be fair in some sense, and it would probably reveal the actual bias of the electorate, but it doesn't seem like a winning political strategy. Unless you think that the extra candidates you would recruit would actually be *just as good* as the ones who have already chosen to run, which seems a strange assumption to me.

Posted by bbartlog | July 17, 2008 9:32 AM

A political career is a very demanding job, both in terms of time and money. For mothers, it´s difficult to have a family and be an elected official.

That´s why so much of these woman politicians are either single(Linda Lingle, Janet Napolitano) or married to/millionaires by themselves(Claire McCaskill, Dianne Feinstein).

Posted by André Kenji | July 17, 2008 10:36 AM