Do women candidate's parental status, whether childfree, pregnant, or a mother, influence how U.S. voters evaluate their leadership, commitment, and policy expertise at the state executive and legislative levels? Using data from a nationally representative survey experiment, I assess how voters rate these candidates' competencies. Regardless of partisanship, I find voters reduce support for pregnant candidates, particularly at the executive level, due to concerns about time availability. I also discover a parenthood timing gap effect - while pregnancy is perceived as a limitation to do the job as an elected official, having young children as a mother enhances leadership evaluations, at least among Democrats. A partisan divide emerges, with Democrats rating maternal-cuing candidates higher on leadership competencies compared to Republicans. This research has important implications for how candidates need to strategize their presentation as we see more women and (expecting) mothers run for all types of office.
Abstract Black women have long anchored Black political cohesion, yet little explains why a gender gap persists within a group marked by strong Democratic loyalty. Drawing on historical and sociological work, we argue that Black women’s collective-first orientation—shaped by gendered social roles across enslavement, Jim Crow, and modern civic life—heightens the political significance of the antecedents of Black Democratic partisanship: racial identity salience, perceived discrimination, and racially homogenous social networks. Using an original national survey of 4,200 Black Americans, we find that the partisan gender gap widens because the composition of their social networks more strongly shapes Black women’s political preferences. Accounting for racial identity salience and perceived discrimination substantially reduces the gender gap. These findings illuminate how racialized gender roles structure the pathways through which group-based norms translate into partisan behavior, providing a mechanism for intragroup variation and guiding more nuanced strategies for political engagement and mobilization.
Voters’ perceptions of election candidates are known to be shaped by stereotypes about candidates’ characteristics and social identities, including gender and disability. More recently, scholars have started paying attention to how the intersection of politicians’ identities shapes citizens’ perceptions of them, recognizing that identities do not simply “add up” but give rise to distinct stereotypes and expectations. This paper explores how candidate gender and disability affect voter perceptions through a survey experiment with a conjoint design in the UK and the US. The findings reveal a complex picture in which candidate gender and disability interact in shaping some, but not the majority, of voters’ perceptions of candidates’ traits, competences, beliefs, as well as voter support. The study underlines that intersectional approaches are fundamental to advancing our understanding of voter attitudes and behavior, candidate competition, and the representation of social groups.
Abstract Political violence against women is often analyzed primarily through gender, leaving underexplored how other systems of domination shape its production and enforcement. This article develops an intersectional feminist institutionalist framework to explain how patriarchal and sectarian formal and informal rules co-produce political violence against women in deeply divided societies. Drawing on Lebanon as a theory-building case study and applying an abductive approach to our empirical data, we argue that such violence is not simply a backlash against women’s political presence, but is core to preserving the sectarian order. We identify three overlapping mechanisms through which political violence against women candidates is enforced by multiple actors, namely family coercion, party- and militia-linked enforcement, and sectarian boundary policing, with all of them mobilizing scripts of honor, purity, loyalty, and communal stability to constrain women’s political agency. Our framework offers broader insights into intersectional political violence across ethnically and religiously divided societies.
Uganda's adoption of the Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2023 reveals significant contestation among domestic and external actors regarding LGBTIQ+ human rights norms. This article argues that opposition to LGBTIQ+ rights has become central to contemporary challenges to the liberal international order by contesting the authority of liberal human rights norms as universal benchmarks of state legitimacy. Drawing on critical IR theories of norm violation, it analyzes how external actors responded to the Act and how Ugandan state actors defended the legislation. The article concludes that political opposition against LGBTIQ+ human rights in Uganda, akin to anti-LGBTIQ+ politics observed elsewhere in the world, has become central to political critique of "the West" and the existing international order.
