Gender and Politics in the 2016 U.S. Election and Beyond

Abstract

We are delighted to introduce the Socius Gender and Politics Special Collection. The need for a special collection on gender and politics has never been timelier, evidenced both by gains in women’s political participation and leadership around the world and the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Here, we introduce the timeliness of the topic with a review of the remarkable progress women have made in political representation over the past 150 years, a reiteration of the importance of women’s political representation to democracy, and a brief discussion of the 2016 U.S. election cycle. We then introduce the eight papers that make up the special collection, emphasizing their contributions to ongoing debates in the field.

One hundred and fifty years ago, women lacked the right to participate in politics. Voters and politicians were all men. Women first gained the right to vote in Wyoming Territory in 1869 and nationally in New Zealand in 1893, and in 1907, Finland became the first country to elect women to parliament (Paxton and Hughes 2016). Today, women have the right to vote in every country that men do, and women are increasingly serving in all types of political positions, from local councilor to national legislator to president. In the legislative arena, gains have been propelled by electoral gender quotas, which have spread to more than 130 countries (Hughes, Paxton, and Krook 2017). As of 2018, women hold an average of 24 percent of seats in national legislatures worldwide, the 50 percent threshold has been crossed in Rwanda and Bolivia, and 80 percent of countries have at least 10 percent women in their national legislatures (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2018). A more modest upward trend is also apparent in the executive office. The first woman to reach a powerful executive position in the modern period was Sirimavo Bandaranaike when she became prime minister of Sri Lanka in 1960. Since then, over 50 women have become the top political executive of their country. Although women remain underrepresented in politics in most countries of the world, the growth in women’s political representation is one of the most important trends of the past 150 years and is worthy of exploration in this special collection.

Does it matter if political decision makers in a democracy are solely men? In principle, the answer could be no. But in practice, the answer is often yes. Most laws are gender neutral in principle, and elected representatives should attend to all constituents equally. In practice, however, seeming neutrality toward gender or equality between men and women in government often hides substantial gender inequality. Feminist theorists such as Carole Pateman (1988, 1989), Iris Young (1990), and Anne Phillips (1991, 1995) show that abstract terms used in political theory, such as individual or citizen, in reality signify white men. Even stronger arguments say that the state was structured from inception to benefit men, both in Western (Lerner 1986; MacKinnon 1989) and non-Western countries (Charrad 2001).

Justice arguments suggest that as about half of the population in every country, women should also be half of elected and appointed leaders. Even if women author bills, vote, lobby, negotiate, and distribute resources in exactly the same way as men, women have a right to equal representation. Other arguments take a utility perspective and propose that having women represented in politics is useful. Here, women’s presence in political decision making is expected to change politics or society. Whether it is improving the quality of deliberation, transforming the kinds of laws that are passed, or signaling to young women that politics is not solely a “man’s game,” utility arguments emphasize the difference women’s representation makes. For justice and utility reasons, therefore, understanding women’s continued underrepresentation in politics, as well as potential avenues for greater representation, suggests the need for a special collection.

The 2016 U.S. presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump also provides an opportunity for us to consider how this high-profile election confirms or contradicts what we know about gender and politics. Before 2016, we knew that the presidency is a highly masculine institution (Duerst-Lahti 1997). We knew that candidates for the highest office in the land often assert their masculinity, for example, by playing up their ties to the military, demonstrating their sex appeal, and emasculating their male competitors (Yates and Hughes 2017). And we knew that women candidates face crippling double binds: If women do not “act like men,” they are seen as poor leaders, but if they display stereotypically masculine behavior, they are criticized for not being feminine enough (Murray 2010). What we did not know is what would unfold when a major U.S. political party nominated a woman candidate to run for president for the first time.

Although we cannot enumerate all of the ways gender mattered in the 2016 election here, gender was highly visible throughout the electoral cycle. During the primaries, we saw “Bernie Bros” emerge, Trump attack Republican candidate Carly Fiorina’s looks, and Republican candidates repeatedly attempt to emasculate one another. In the run-up to November, Trump feuded with Fox journalist Megyn Kelly and called Clinton a “Nasty Woman”; the Access Hollywood tape was released, followed by a slew of allegations of sexual assault against Trump; and both Clinton and Trump were attacked widely in the media in explicitly gendered ways. After votes were cast, we also learned that the election produced the largest gender gap among voters ever in a U.S. presidential election. Given that these examples merely scratch the surface of gender’s place in and influence on the election, it is not surprising that many of the papers in this special collection focus on the 2016 U.S. election.

Overall, this timely special collection on gender and politics is broad in its scope, including a diverse selection of topics, research questions, and approaches. The collection includes global comparative research that offers a birds-eye view down to in-depth single-country studies that illuminate the mechanisms shaping our social and political worlds. Methodologically, the collection is also diverse, drawing from interviews, content analysis, survey and lab experiments, and longitudinal quantitative data. The authors understand politics in different ways: Although most of the articles center on formal politics, in particular the election of a U.S. president, others speak to politics at personal and interpersonal levels. The authors also engage with gender differently, some focusing explicitly on women’s candidacy and barriers to their inclusion, whereas others bring to bear research on masculinities and the ways in which patriarchy is embedded into culture.

The special collection opens with Farida Jalalzai’s analysis of the 2016 presidential election in light of the comparative literature on gender and national leadership. She concludes that Clinton’s loss both confirms existing knowledge but also challenges it. On the one hand, like other women around the world who have contested a presidency, Clinton sought to leverage her family ties and name recognition. On the other hand, Clinton had success at the primary stage, a method of candidate selection often seen as an obstacle to women. The article also touches on a theme addressed in other papers in this volume: the continuing strong link between the U.S. presidency and masculinity and gendered expectations of what is presidential.

Next up with a broader comparative study, John Scherpereel, Melinda Adams, and Suraj Jacob compare the global trends of women in executive cabinet positions and women in national legislatures. Both trends are overall positive but are substantially different in process. Women’s legislative representation increases without backsliding—what the authors dub a “ratchet effect”—whereas women’s representation in cabinets increases followed by periods of regression—a “see-saw effect.” The authors point out, however, that it is important to consider the power of the legislature relative to the executive. It is particularly in strong executives that see-sawing may curb women’s political influence.

The special collection next turns to a set of three articles that deconstruct the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In the first, Kaitlin Boyle and Chase Meyer use a national survey conducted just before the election to assess voter intentions. They find a link between women’s representation in state politics and a lack of disconnect between the identity of woman and the identity of president. If women were well represented in political office in a state, a woman president seemed more plausible to voters, increasing the likelihood that those voters stated they would vote for Clinton.

Yet whether voters would support Hillary Clinton was not only driven by their seeing of women as more or less plausible candidates. Political behavior is also shaped by the extent of negative feelings voters have about candidates. Drawing from interviews of white working-class men in Pennsylvania, Robert Francis demonstrates that voter preferences for candidates are not necessarily driven by who they like most but who they dislike most. Francis finds that these men, almost all of whom voted for Trump or not at all, were motivated by strong aversion to Clinton rather than their attraction to Trump.

The next article, authored by Emily Carian and Tagart Sobotka, delves deeper into the question of why some men have such a strong distaste for Hillary Clinton by focusing on a particular driver: masculinity threat. Using a survey experiment, Carian and Sobotka consider whether threats to masculinity—operationalized as a threat to men’s employment—explain candidate preference for Trump or Clinton. They find that masculinity threat operated indirectly to increase desire for a masculine president, which in turn decreased support for Clinton among men only. Interestingly, masculinity threat had no effect on whether men preferred a male president—only a masculine one.

In the sixth article in the special collection, we pivot to a broader experiment on gender differences in behavior. Terry Burnham uses a common economics experiment—the public goods game—to better understand cooperation and punishment. Although men and women cooperated and punished at similar levels in the standard game, Burnham found that when participants were striving for rank, men were more likely to punish others to get ahead. Although the article is not explicitly about electoral politics, these behavioral differences could easily be applied to political competition.

The final two articles consider the ways that we might challenge the gendered status quo. Michelle Smirnova offers us a cautionary tale. Political humor, especially mocking humor, is often an appealing way to express dissent, challenge authority, and experience a release during tense political times. However, in her analysis of social media and political cartoons from the 2016 election, Smirnova finds that political humor often played into problematic stereotypes and assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality. In these ways, then, political humor reified a patriarchal power structure.

Finally, Jennifer Cossyleon looks at still another form of political engagement: grassroots organizing. Using a combination of participant observation and interviews, Cossyleon demonstrates powerful effects of participating in family-focused community organizing on the lives of mostly Latina and African American mothers. For these “motherleaders,” community leadership helped them to combat isolation, get out of their homes, learn to speak up for themselves and their communities, and gain a sense of purpose. For women who may face among the greatest obstacles to electoral politics, community organizing provides a path to greater political empowerment.

Overall, the diverse set of articles in this collection helps us understand persistent gender inequalities in politics, illuminating barriers to women’s representation in legislative and executive office and some of the pathways to social change. We can only hope that it doesn’t take another 150 years before gender equality in politics is fully realized.

Biographies

Author Biographies

Pamela Paxton is the Linda K. George and John Wilson Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of articles and books on pro-social behavior, women in politics, and quantitative methodology. Her research has appeared in a variety of journals, including American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. With Melanie Hughes, she is the co-author of the 2016 book, Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective. She is also an author of Nonrecursive Models: Endogeneity, Reciprocal Relationships, and Feedback Loops (2011).

Melanie M. Hughes is an associate professor of sociology and Co-Director of the Gender Inequality Research Lab (GIRL) at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a foremost expert on the political representation of women worldwide. Her research on gender and politics has appeared in top-ranked international journals such as American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and American Political Science Review. She is currently working on a research monograph on the political dominance of men from majority racial, ethnic, and religious groups. She is also co-leading an interdisciplinary research group focused on gender equality in public administration globally, working in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).