Gender Quotas, Women’s Representation, and Legislative Diversity

Diversity in the characteristics of political leaders increases the quality of policy, perceptions of legitimacy, and accountability to constituents. Yet, increasing leaders’ diversity proves one of the most difficult challenges facing modern democracy. Efforts like gender quotas shift descriptive representation on the targeted characteristic, but critics argue that women selected via quotas are as homogenous as those selected via traditional methods. In this article, we theorize that quotas (re)conceptualize views of potential political leaders and transform party recruitment networks. In doing so, quotas increase the diversity of all leaders in office. We evaluate these claims with a new measure of diversity and a data set of over 1,700 legislators in Argentinian subnational government. We show that quotas increase the professional and personal diversity of women and men in office over time, suggesting that electoral gender quotas transform parties, political networks, and how women (and men) perceive political office

Political candidates can successfully use targeted appeals to increase support from female voters

Recent presidential and congressional elections have featured growing appeals to specific groups, including women. But are these marketing techniques actually effective at persuading women voters? In new research using experiments which test how voters respond to such appeals, Mirya R Holman, Monica C Schneider and Kristin Pondel find that such identity-based targeting makes it more likely that both men and women will vote for a certain candidate. Appeals by women candidates, they write, are also more likely to be effective with women voters, as they activate group identity among women

Evaluating Political and Environmental Behavior in the Face of a Green Crisis: An Experimental Analysis

Abstract History suggests that environmental crises can motivate change in environmental attitudes and policies. However, recent disasters such as the British Petroleum oil spill and scientific consensus on the dangers associated with climate change have failed to produce significant policy changes in the United States. We use a lab experiment and survey data to evaluate the role of environmental threats in producing changes in attitudes and actions. Our experimental results suggest a causal link between environmental crises and voting, with some evidence of an increase in the willingness to engage in other environmental actions. The survey results generally support the experimental findings regarding the link between perceived threat and action. However, the results prove to be sensitive to omitted variables. Overall, the results suggest that while environmental threats can stimulate action in some settings, they may fail to motivate the robust policy changes needed to meet future environmental challenges

Race, ethnicity, and support for climate policy

Addressing the increasing temperatures of the globe requires society-wide adaptation and mitigation efforts. One central challenge to these efforts is the resistance of groups to support broad policy efforts to reduce global temperatures, with particular resistance in the United States. While scholars have established that partisanship, ideology, demographic, and socio-economic characteristics shape support for climate policy, we do not yet understand how these factors might vary within and across racial and ethnic groups. In this paper, we use pooled data from the Cooperative Election Study (N total = 241 800) to examine differences in attitudes about climate policy between Asian, Black, Hispanic, and white Americans. Comparing across groups, we demonstrate that the many core findings of scholarship on support for climate policy apply nearly exclusively to white Americans, with varying correlational relationships for Asian, Black, and Hispanic Americans. Our efforts provide a much-needed examination of how racial identity shapes views on climate change and show that central, replicated results in scholarship on climate change apply largely to the views and behaviors of white Americans

sj-docx-1-uar-10.1177_10780874231203681 - Supplemental material for Local Gun Safety Enforcement, Sheriffs, and Right-Wing Political Extremism

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-uar-10.1177_10780874231203681 for Local Gun Safety Enforcement, Sheriffs, and Right-Wing Political Extremism by Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman in Urban Affairs Review</p