Abstract
In Good Reasons to Run, Shauna Shames, Rachel Bernhard, Mirya Holman, and Dawn Teele, together with their outstanding lineup of contributors, investigate the causes of women’s underrepresentation in politics in the United States. Motivated by the large cohort of women who emerged to compete for political office after the election of President Trump in 2016, this volume asks why women are less likely to run for office than men, which women ultimately decide to compete, and what is the role of opportunities, policies, structures, and nonprofits in ultimately determining when women choose to run? To tackle these questions, the editors assemble a lineup of eighteen substantive chapters. The empirical focus of the book largely draws on evidence from the United States, but a few strategically selected contributions from comparative politics help place the volume in a broader context while also leveraging knowledge from other regions to inform our understanding of women’s political representation.
Whereas previous work shows a political ambition gap between men and women, the editors contend that ambition itself is not an explanation for women’s underrepresentation in politics. Instead, as they put it, “ambition is an outcome in search of a theory” (p. 6). In moving the conversation about women’s descriptive representation beyond the ambition gap, they argue it is not enough to simply understand the factors that explain women’s political ambition. We also need to know why ambitious women ultimately choose to—or not to—compete. Previous research stops short of explaining why women are less ambitious than men and which ambitious women ultimately throw their hats into the ring. Consequently, by focusing on the explanations for women’s ambition and the factors that tip the scales for ambitious women, this book charts a new path for research on women’s political representation.
Empirically, the breadth of the book is unparalleled. The authors assemble an excellent team of scholars to investigate this multifaceted research program from a number of different perspectives and approaches. Contributors consider how political ambition and candidate emergence varies across regions, for women of color, and even among women outside the United States. For example, in Chapter 10, Brown and Dowe show that Black women candidates typically enjoy little support from the Democratic Party, and instead must leverage their own personal networks and resources to compensate for the lack of party support in their campaigns. The arguments and evidence in the volume are motivated by an in-depth knowledge of politics in practice, owing in part to insights from conversations, interviews, and a workshop with nonprofits. Though rigorous, the technical aspects of the analyses are displayed in a methodological appendix—and the empirical evidence in the book is presented in an accessible narrative style. This design renders the book particularly attractive to more general audiences such as practitioners and undergraduates.
Another compelling contribution of this volume is that it confronts the role of nonprofits, campaign contributions, and candidate training programs in advancing women’s access to elected office. Electoral institutions—which are central to understanding women’s numeric representation across the globe—are largely static in the United States, and contextual factors known to make the electoral arena more hospitable to women are extremely slow changing. Consequently, it is critical to understand whether and how interventions (such as candidate training and campaign contributions) can alter political opportunities for women. For instance, in Chapter 13, Sanbonmatsu and Dittmar find that attending Ready to Run® is generally associated with increased interest in running for office: 25–30 percent of women who had no plans to run for office before attending the program reported they had run or were planning to run for office after attending the program. In Chapter 14, Schneider and Sweet-Cushman, likewise, show that campaign training for women increases their confidence and cultivates more positive attitudes toward careers in politics. Although organizations aimed at electing more women to office have been emerging across the U.S. political landscape for decades, until now, few scholars have systematically considered the benefits, challenges, and limitations of such programs within a comprehensive framework aimed at understanding the reasons women run for office.
Good Reasons to Run—a must read for scholars in the field—is an agenda setting volume that has already inspired multiple publications and conversations around the central themes developed in the book. The authors provide keen insights into how we can cultivate more diverse pools of candidates for future U.S. elections. To this end, the discussion of the role money, candidate training, and nonprofits play in closing the gender gap in representation will be of interest to a wide range of stakeholders beyond the academy. The practical motivations of the volume, combined with the theoretically grounded arguments and rigorous empirical evidence presented across short, digestible chapters, make this volume idea for undergraduate classes on elections, representation, U.S. politics, and gender and politics.