Women as a Force in Electoral Politics

This chapter examines the study of gender and electoral behavior. Early gender scholars took on the challenge of countering the literature’s portrait of women’s passivity and minority status. They provided analyses and data that could speak to the possibility that women were in fact participating, clear-eyed, and political. We begin with an overview of this early work, and outline the trajectory of research on gender and electoral politics through the present day, where women are now seen as a political force in American politics. Scholars have built on these groundbreaking efforts, re-centering attention more squarely on both women and men, gaining access to data they themselves shaped, and drawing on theoretical tools with a wider array of observable implications to shift understandings of sameness, difference, and the processes that give rise to these outcomes.