Publications
Ondercin, Heather L. and Ciera Dalton. 2023. “Gender Stereotypes and Campaign Donations.” Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy. 44(1): 56-74. https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2023.2158703
We consider how gendered evaluations of candidates shape potential donors’ support of hypothetical candidates for the state legislature. Using an experimental design, we test two pathways by which candidate gender can influence the support and donations received by candidates. Potential Democratic donors consistently evaluate women more positively than men. These positive evaluations translate into a slight fundraising advantage for women. There is also evidence that potential Democratic donors support women candidates more than men when candidates receive the same evaluations. Potential Republican donors consistently provide poorer evaluations to women candidates compared to men. However, these weaker evaluations do not translate into a net advantage or disadvantage for Republican women. Potential Republican donors provide Republican women with higher levels of support and donations than they would to Republican men who receive similar evaluations.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2022. “Why Women Win When They Run: The Strategic Calculations of Female Candidates.” The British Journal of Politics. 52(4): 1523-1542.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123421000508
Despite evidence that women win when they run for office, the number of women in the U.S. House of Representatives has not increased substantially. I argue that women win when they run because women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in locations where they are most likely to win. While strategic behavior is a necessary condition for increasing women's representation in office, it is not a sufficient condition. Analyzing regularly scheduled elections between 1992 and 2014, I demonstrate that women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in elections where they are most likely to win. However, the electoral opportunities for women are far from ``gender neutral'' and are shaped by the parties. Democratic and Republican women are most likely to emerge as candidates in districts where they are likely to win the primary and general elections; however, Republican women face even more constrained electoral opportunities.
Ondercin, Heather L. and Mary-Kate Lizotte. 2021. “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling: How Gender Shapes Affective Polarization” American Politics Research 49(3):282-292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X20972103
We examine variation in levels of affective polarization for men and women. Using the 1980 to 2016 American National Election Studies, we find that women are more affectively polarized than men. The effect of sex partially works indirectly through political identities and issue positions. Moreover, sex acts as a moderator, with political identities and issues positions have different effects on men’s and women’s level of affective polarization. Three factors create women’s higher levels of affective polarization: women are more likely to be partisans, strength in abortion attitudes, and partisanship has a more substantial influence on women’s attitudes compared to men’s attitudes. Breaking the analysis apart into three time periods: (1) gender gap emergence 1980 to 1988, (2) elite polarization 1990 to 1998, and (3) hyper-partisanship 2000 to 2016 reinforces that partisan strength is central to understanding affective polarization. Additionally, during the 1990s when elite polarization is intensifying the strength of issue attitudes and ideology.
Carter, Jeff, Heather L. Ondercin, and Glenn Palmer. 2021. “Guns, Butter, and Growth: The Consequences of Military Spending Reconsidered.” Accepted Political Research Quarterly. 74(1):148-165. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919890417
How does increasing military spending affect social spending and economic growth? We argue leaders vary in their preferences over how to pay for military spending and failing to account for interdependence among methods of government finance, government spending, and economic performance limits scholars’ ability to identify the consequences of military spending. We use vector autoregressive models to estimate the relationships among military spending, social spending, economic growth, tax revenue, debt, and the money supply in the United States between 1947 and 2007. We find that increasing military spending has a nonlinear effect on economic growth that varies over time and the existence of a guns-versus-butter trade-off is conditional on the relative importance leaders place on protecting the social welfare state, borrowing money, and keeping taxes low when increasing military spending.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2020. “Marching to the Ballot Box: Sex and Voting in the 2020 Election Cycle” The Forum 18(4): 559-580 (non-peer-reviewed).
With the 2020 election marking the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, our attention has been keenly focused on women voters. Media coverage of women voters portrayed them as swing voters and focused on a small subgroup of women (white, married, mothers). I argue that women’s and men’s voting behavior in 2020 was highly similar to past elections and does not support the claims that women or a subgroup of women are swing voters. I illustrate the diversity of women’s voting behavior through analyzing the intersection of gender with race, ethnicity, education, marital status, and parental status. Even though women were not swing voters, women still play an important role in electoral politics, representing the majority of members in both the Democratic and Republican Parties and holding stronger attachments to these parties than men.
Ondercin Heather L. and Ellen M. Key. 2020, “Introduction to Women’s Political Involvement in the 100 Years since the Nineteenth Amendment” PS: Politics and Political Science. 53(3): 465-469. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096520000347
August 19, 2020, marks the centennial of ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied on the basis of sex. The Nineteenth Amendment did not radically transform women’s political activism; rather, it was a product of women’s political activism. Women won the franchise in a 72-year battle fought at both the state and national levels. By the time the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, women had been voting for almost 50 years in localities where they already had secured the right to vote.1 The 100th anniversary is an opportune time to reflect on women’s continued involvement in politics.
Ondercin, Heather L. and Sarah A. Fulton. 2020. “Bargain Shopping: How Candidate Sex Lowers the Cost of Voting” Politics & Gender 16(3): 711-737
Previous research shows that candidate sex serves as a heuristic that lessens the informational burden of political decision making. Building upon this research, we investigate the heuristic effects of candidate sex on the decision to turnout to vote in an election. We posit that by providing ideological and nonideological information about the candidates, candidate sex serves as an informational shortcut that reduces the costs associated with voting and enhances the likelihood of voting in elections when a female candidate is present. Our expectations are supported, even after controlling for a variety of individual-, candidate- and district-level characteristics that are correlated with turnout. Individuals are more likely to turnout in elections featuring a woman candidate, and consistent with our expectations, these effects are especially strong for female Democrats, whose sex and party heuristics convey a consistent “liberal” cue. Our research offers theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on gender, candidate heuristics, and voter turnout.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2018. "Who is Responsible for the Gender Gap?: The Dynamics of Men's and Women's Democratic Macropartisanship, 1950-2012" Accepted Political Research Quarterly 70(4): 749-761.
Drawing on research that views partisan attachments as driven by social identities, I argue the gender gap is a function of men and women changing their partisanship as they seek the best representation of their gendered social identity from the political parties. Specifically, shifts in the parties due to party realignments and shifts in the composition of their congressional delegations have provided individuals with a clearer signal on which to base their partisan attachments. Men and women have responded differently to these signals and developed different political identities over the past 70 years, resulting in the gender gap in partisanship. To test this theory, I have constructed an innovative macro-level dataset of men's and women's partisan attachments on a quarterly basis between 1950 and 2012. I use a Seemingly Unrelated Regression framework to estimate patterns of men's and women's Democratic macropartisanship and whether particular factors contribute to the gender gap by having different effects on men's and women's partisanship. The results are consistent with my theoretical expectations, highlight how symbolic images shape partisan attachments, and demonstrate the gender gap is a function of changes in both men's and women's macropartisanship.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2018. “Is it a Chasm? Is it a Canyon? No, it is the Gender Gap” The Forum. 16(4): 611-629. https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2018-0040 (non-peer-reviewed)
Many speculated that we would observe a gender gap in vote choice of historic proportions in the 2018 midterm elections. However, the 2018 gender gap was similar to gender gaps in previous elections. I argue that the gender gap is not about a specific candidate or election but is driven by gender differences in partisan attachments. Variation in the gender gap in Senate and gubernatorial elections highlight that the gender gap does not advantage a particular candidate or party and that women candidates do not increase the size of the gender gap. Race and class intersect with gender to shape the partisan attachments and vote choice of men and women. Finally, while the candidates and events surrounding the 2018 election likely did not impact the gender gap in 2018, I discuss how the 2018 election will shape the gender gap in future elections.
Dickerson, Bradley T. and Heather L. Ondercin. 2017. "Conditional Motivated Reasoning: How the Local Economy Moderates Partisan Motivations in Economic Perceptions" Political Research Quarterly 70(1): 194-208.
Using motivated reasoning, voters rely on partisanship as a heuristic for evaluating the economy in belief-preserving ways. Yet recent findings show that these motivations may be restricted by a range of contextual factors. We argue that partisan motivations in economic perceptions are moderated by the local economic context. As conditions worsen, a negative information environment leads in-partisans to political ambivalence which reduces confidence in party cues when evaluating the economy. As conditions improve, the motivation for in-partisans to rely on party cues is restored. Since positive information has been shown to be less influential for opinion formation than negative information, and since out-group members tend to be most prone to motivated reasoning, the economic context should moderate the political motivations of out-partisans to a lesser extent than in-partisans. A multilevel analysis of the 1980-2012 American National Election Studies supplemented with state-level data on unemployment and per capita disposable income supports this argument. The effects of in-party attachments on economic perceptions are diminished as economic conditions deteriorate and grow stronger as conditions improve. Moreover, the conditional effects of economic performance on subjective perceptions are stronger for in-partisans than for out-partisans
Banaszak, Lee Ann and Heather L. Ondercin. 2016. “Explaining Movement and Countermovement Events in the Contemporary U.S. Women's Movement.” Social Forces 95 (1): 381-410.
We examine the causes of movement and countermovement mobilization, focusing specifically on the effect that national movements have on each other by responding directly to mobilization and indirectly to policy successes. We discuss the mechanisms by which national movements might be expected to act across time and large geographic distances. We analyze these relationships using a Poisson Autoregressive estimator, which is uniquely designed to model both the time dependence and the count distributions, on quarterly time series of feminist, anti-feminist, pro-choice, and anti-abortion events. Results show that movements and countermovements respond to each other, even after controlling for political opportunities and other factors. In particular, we find that anti-feminist movements mobilize in response to national policy change and societal change. The results suggest that those quantitative analyses of women's movements that exclude measures of anti-feminist movements may be mis-specified and that countermovement mobilization influences waves or cycles of protest in unexpected ways.
Lee Ann Banaszak and Heather L. Ondercin. 2016. "Public Opinion as a Movement Outcome: The Case of the U.S. Women’s Movement" Mobilization 21(3): 361-378.
We demonstrate that an important outcome of social movements is public opinion change, particularly in the case of the U.S. women’s movement. We argue that contentious events associated with the women’s movement provide informational cues that prime the public. This process then leads to changes in attitudes regarding gender. We use quarterly time series data on contentious events of the U.S. women’s movement ranging from 1960 to 1992 and public opinion about gender attitudes in the United States to examine whether public opinion moves in response to social movement events. Using an error correction model, we demonstrate that social movement events have a significant effect on gender attitudes. Citizens adopt more liberal gender attitudes as the U.S. women’s movement increases its activity. These results suggest that social movement scholars should be paying more attention to public opinion when assessing the outcomes of social movements.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2013. "What Scarlett O'Hara Thinks: Political Attitudes of Southern Women." Political Science Quarterly 128(2): 233-259.
Significant and persistent differences have been recorded in the political attitudes of men and women for several decades. At the same time, women and men are not cohesive groups and other factors interact with gender to shape their political attitudes. The intersections of gender, race, and region are examined by exploring differences in the political attitudes of Southern White women, Southern White men, and White men and White women outside the South. Comparisons are made across 33 questions covering 5 topic areas: political orientations, size and scope of government, defense and foreign policy, social issues, and equal roles and race. The analysis was conducted by pooling the National Election Studies from 1990-2004. This analysis demonstrates that women in the South speak with a political voice distinct from non-Southern women and both Southern and non-Southern men.
Fulton, Sarah A. and Heather L. Ondercin. 2013. "Does Sex Encourage Commitment? The Impact of Candidate Choices on the Time-to Decision" Political Behavior 34(4): 665-686.
We examine how candidate sex influences the timing of vote decisions. We argue that voters use sex stereotypes about women candidates to extract information that allows them to more readily discriminate between their alternatives. Using a national survey from the 2006 election, along with a unique dataset of political informants, we find that the sex of the candidate conveys ideological information that permits voters to make swifter judgments. Even among those who are innocent of ideology, the sex of the candidate continues to supply information helpful to the voting decision, thereby reducing the probability of a delayed decision. Consistent with the literature on sex stereotypes, we find a stronger influence for Democratic than Republican women candidates. The substantive impact of candidate sex on the time-to-decision rivals other variables that feature prominently in the literature on late decisions, highlighting the importance of this previously neglected variable.
Ondercin, Heather L., James G. Garand and Lauren Crapanzano 2011. "Political Learning During the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election: The Impact of the Campaign on the Gender Gap in Political Knowledge" Electoral Studies 30(4):727–737.
We examine how political campaigns influence individuals’ levels of correct, incorrect, and don’t know responses and the gender gap in political knowledge during the 2000 American presidential campaign. Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), we demonstrate that as the campaign progresses the electorate provides more correct answers and fewer incorrect answers. Moreover, the political campaign significantly reduces (and possibly eliminates) the direct effect of sex on political knowledge. While the political campaign decreases the number of incorrect answers provided by both men and women, the number of correct answers provided by women increases. Our findings highlight the importance of the political campaign in determining relative levels of political knowledge for men and women.
Ondercin, Heather L. and Daniel Jones-White “Gender Jeopardy: Do Women Really Know Less Than Men?” Social Science Quarterly 92(3):675-694.
We explore the impact of the sex differences in political knowledge on the participatory acts of voting, influencing someone’s vote, attending a meeting, working on a campaign, wearing a button, and making a financial contribution. Our analysis from 1984 to 2000 reveals that sex differences in political knowledge translate into significant differences in political participation for both men and women. Women’s lower political knowledge depresses their political participation in politics. The participation gap disappears at higher levels of political knowledge for three participatory acts: attempting to influence a vote, attending a political meeting, and donating to a political campaign. Furthermore, at higher levels of political knowledge women are more likely than men to vote, wear a political button, or work for political campaigns. These findings complement the work done at the elite level, which finds that women hold themselves to a higher standard before running for elected office.
Ondercin, Heather L. and Susan Welch. 2009. “Comparing Predictors of Women’s Congressional Election Success Candidates, Primaries, and the General Election” American Politics Research. 37(4): 593-613.
Examining all Congressional races from 1992 through 2000, we explore why, over time, some districts are more likely to have women candidates and to elect women than are others. We focus on the obvious, but rarely explored, fact that women’s election success is a product of three key stages of the election process: women running, women’s successes in the primaries, and finally, women’s general election successes. We find that different factors predict success at each stage and that the predictors of women’s candidacies and success in open seat races are different than in others
Ondercin, Heather L. and Jeffery Bernstein. 2007. “Gender Gaps in Senate Elections, 1988-2000: The Impact of Campaign Level and State-Level Factors” Politics and Gender. 3(1): 33-53.
Since the 1980s, we have witnessed how the gender gap grows and shrinks in various elections; we address how the context in which the election takes place influences the size of the divide. Studying the gender gap in Senate elections allows us to look at multiple elections across time and space to determine when significant electoral gender gaps arise and when they do not. This contrasts with more traditional approaches that focus either on a single presidential election or on a single year's House or Senate elections. We demonstrate that electoral gender gaps arise from campaign-level factors (such as candidate sex, the presence of an incumbent, and the issues raised in the campaign), state-level factors (demographics and politics of the states), and the complex interaction of these factors
We consider how gendered evaluations of candidates shape potential donors’ support of hypothetical candidates for the state legislature. Using an experimental design, we test two pathways by which candidate gender can influence the support and donations received by candidates. Potential Democratic donors consistently evaluate women more positively than men. These positive evaluations translate into a slight fundraising advantage for women. There is also evidence that potential Democratic donors support women candidates more than men when candidates receive the same evaluations. Potential Republican donors consistently provide poorer evaluations to women candidates compared to men. However, these weaker evaluations do not translate into a net advantage or disadvantage for Republican women. Potential Republican donors provide Republican women with higher levels of support and donations than they would to Republican men who receive similar evaluations.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2022. “Why Women Win When They Run: The Strategic Calculations of Female Candidates.” The British Journal of Politics. 52(4): 1523-1542.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123421000508
Despite evidence that women win when they run for office, the number of women in the U.S. House of Representatives has not increased substantially. I argue that women win when they run because women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in locations where they are most likely to win. While strategic behavior is a necessary condition for increasing women's representation in office, it is not a sufficient condition. Analyzing regularly scheduled elections between 1992 and 2014, I demonstrate that women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in elections where they are most likely to win. However, the electoral opportunities for women are far from ``gender neutral'' and are shaped by the parties. Democratic and Republican women are most likely to emerge as candidates in districts where they are likely to win the primary and general elections; however, Republican women face even more constrained electoral opportunities.
Ondercin, Heather L. and Mary-Kate Lizotte. 2021. “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling: How Gender Shapes Affective Polarization” American Politics Research 49(3):282-292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X20972103
We examine variation in levels of affective polarization for men and women. Using the 1980 to 2016 American National Election Studies, we find that women are more affectively polarized than men. The effect of sex partially works indirectly through political identities and issue positions. Moreover, sex acts as a moderator, with political identities and issues positions have different effects on men’s and women’s level of affective polarization. Three factors create women’s higher levels of affective polarization: women are more likely to be partisans, strength in abortion attitudes, and partisanship has a more substantial influence on women’s attitudes compared to men’s attitudes. Breaking the analysis apart into three time periods: (1) gender gap emergence 1980 to 1988, (2) elite polarization 1990 to 1998, and (3) hyper-partisanship 2000 to 2016 reinforces that partisan strength is central to understanding affective polarization. Additionally, during the 1990s when elite polarization is intensifying the strength of issue attitudes and ideology.
Carter, Jeff, Heather L. Ondercin, and Glenn Palmer. 2021. “Guns, Butter, and Growth: The Consequences of Military Spending Reconsidered.” Accepted Political Research Quarterly. 74(1):148-165. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919890417
How does increasing military spending affect social spending and economic growth? We argue leaders vary in their preferences over how to pay for military spending and failing to account for interdependence among methods of government finance, government spending, and economic performance limits scholars’ ability to identify the consequences of military spending. We use vector autoregressive models to estimate the relationships among military spending, social spending, economic growth, tax revenue, debt, and the money supply in the United States between 1947 and 2007. We find that increasing military spending has a nonlinear effect on economic growth that varies over time and the existence of a guns-versus-butter trade-off is conditional on the relative importance leaders place on protecting the social welfare state, borrowing money, and keeping taxes low when increasing military spending.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2020. “Marching to the Ballot Box: Sex and Voting in the 2020 Election Cycle” The Forum 18(4): 559-580 (non-peer-reviewed).
With the 2020 election marking the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, our attention has been keenly focused on women voters. Media coverage of women voters portrayed them as swing voters and focused on a small subgroup of women (white, married, mothers). I argue that women’s and men’s voting behavior in 2020 was highly similar to past elections and does not support the claims that women or a subgroup of women are swing voters. I illustrate the diversity of women’s voting behavior through analyzing the intersection of gender with race, ethnicity, education, marital status, and parental status. Even though women were not swing voters, women still play an important role in electoral politics, representing the majority of members in both the Democratic and Republican Parties and holding stronger attachments to these parties than men.
Ondercin Heather L. and Ellen M. Key. 2020, “Introduction to Women’s Political Involvement in the 100 Years since the Nineteenth Amendment” PS: Politics and Political Science. 53(3): 465-469. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096520000347
August 19, 2020, marks the centennial of ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied on the basis of sex. The Nineteenth Amendment did not radically transform women’s political activism; rather, it was a product of women’s political activism. Women won the franchise in a 72-year battle fought at both the state and national levels. By the time the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, women had been voting for almost 50 years in localities where they already had secured the right to vote.1 The 100th anniversary is an opportune time to reflect on women’s continued involvement in politics.
- Featured on The Cengage Blog “It’s a Historic Year for the 19th Amendment: Here’s How to Discuss It in Your Course”
Ondercin, Heather L. and Sarah A. Fulton. 2020. “Bargain Shopping: How Candidate Sex Lowers the Cost of Voting” Politics & Gender 16(3): 711-737
Previous research shows that candidate sex serves as a heuristic that lessens the informational burden of political decision making. Building upon this research, we investigate the heuristic effects of candidate sex on the decision to turnout to vote in an election. We posit that by providing ideological and nonideological information about the candidates, candidate sex serves as an informational shortcut that reduces the costs associated with voting and enhances the likelihood of voting in elections when a female candidate is present. Our expectations are supported, even after controlling for a variety of individual-, candidate- and district-level characteristics that are correlated with turnout. Individuals are more likely to turnout in elections featuring a woman candidate, and consistent with our expectations, these effects are especially strong for female Democrats, whose sex and party heuristics convey a consistent “liberal” cue. Our research offers theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on gender, candidate heuristics, and voter turnout.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2018. "Who is Responsible for the Gender Gap?: The Dynamics of Men's and Women's Democratic Macropartisanship, 1950-2012" Accepted Political Research Quarterly 70(4): 749-761.
Drawing on research that views partisan attachments as driven by social identities, I argue the gender gap is a function of men and women changing their partisanship as they seek the best representation of their gendered social identity from the political parties. Specifically, shifts in the parties due to party realignments and shifts in the composition of their congressional delegations have provided individuals with a clearer signal on which to base their partisan attachments. Men and women have responded differently to these signals and developed different political identities over the past 70 years, resulting in the gender gap in partisanship. To test this theory, I have constructed an innovative macro-level dataset of men's and women's partisan attachments on a quarterly basis between 1950 and 2012. I use a Seemingly Unrelated Regression framework to estimate patterns of men's and women's Democratic macropartisanship and whether particular factors contribute to the gender gap by having different effects on men's and women's partisanship. The results are consistent with my theoretical expectations, highlight how symbolic images shape partisan attachments, and demonstrate the gender gap is a function of changes in both men's and women's macropartisanship.
- Political Research Podcast, by Niskanen Center. Episode 2: Why Republican Women Don’t Run for Office and Why It Matters for the Gender Gap in Voting.
- Scholar Strategy Network Brief: Exploring the Trends that have Shaped American's Growing Partisan Gender Gap.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2018. “Is it a Chasm? Is it a Canyon? No, it is the Gender Gap” The Forum. 16(4): 611-629. https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2018-0040 (non-peer-reviewed)
Many speculated that we would observe a gender gap in vote choice of historic proportions in the 2018 midterm elections. However, the 2018 gender gap was similar to gender gaps in previous elections. I argue that the gender gap is not about a specific candidate or election but is driven by gender differences in partisan attachments. Variation in the gender gap in Senate and gubernatorial elections highlight that the gender gap does not advantage a particular candidate or party and that women candidates do not increase the size of the gender gap. Race and class intersect with gender to shape the partisan attachments and vote choice of men and women. Finally, while the candidates and events surrounding the 2018 election likely did not impact the gender gap in 2018, I discuss how the 2018 election will shape the gender gap in future elections.
Dickerson, Bradley T. and Heather L. Ondercin. 2017. "Conditional Motivated Reasoning: How the Local Economy Moderates Partisan Motivations in Economic Perceptions" Political Research Quarterly 70(1): 194-208.
Using motivated reasoning, voters rely on partisanship as a heuristic for evaluating the economy in belief-preserving ways. Yet recent findings show that these motivations may be restricted by a range of contextual factors. We argue that partisan motivations in economic perceptions are moderated by the local economic context. As conditions worsen, a negative information environment leads in-partisans to political ambivalence which reduces confidence in party cues when evaluating the economy. As conditions improve, the motivation for in-partisans to rely on party cues is restored. Since positive information has been shown to be less influential for opinion formation than negative information, and since out-group members tend to be most prone to motivated reasoning, the economic context should moderate the political motivations of out-partisans to a lesser extent than in-partisans. A multilevel analysis of the 1980-2012 American National Election Studies supplemented with state-level data on unemployment and per capita disposable income supports this argument. The effects of in-party attachments on economic perceptions are diminished as economic conditions deteriorate and grow stronger as conditions improve. Moreover, the conditional effects of economic performance on subjective perceptions are stronger for in-partisans than for out-partisans
Banaszak, Lee Ann and Heather L. Ondercin. 2016. “Explaining Movement and Countermovement Events in the Contemporary U.S. Women's Movement.” Social Forces 95 (1): 381-410.
We examine the causes of movement and countermovement mobilization, focusing specifically on the effect that national movements have on each other by responding directly to mobilization and indirectly to policy successes. We discuss the mechanisms by which national movements might be expected to act across time and large geographic distances. We analyze these relationships using a Poisson Autoregressive estimator, which is uniquely designed to model both the time dependence and the count distributions, on quarterly time series of feminist, anti-feminist, pro-choice, and anti-abortion events. Results show that movements and countermovements respond to each other, even after controlling for political opportunities and other factors. In particular, we find that anti-feminist movements mobilize in response to national policy change and societal change. The results suggest that those quantitative analyses of women's movements that exclude measures of anti-feminist movements may be mis-specified and that countermovement mobilization influences waves or cycles of protest in unexpected ways.
Lee Ann Banaszak and Heather L. Ondercin. 2016. "Public Opinion as a Movement Outcome: The Case of the U.S. Women’s Movement" Mobilization 21(3): 361-378.
We demonstrate that an important outcome of social movements is public opinion change, particularly in the case of the U.S. women’s movement. We argue that contentious events associated with the women’s movement provide informational cues that prime the public. This process then leads to changes in attitudes regarding gender. We use quarterly time series data on contentious events of the U.S. women’s movement ranging from 1960 to 1992 and public opinion about gender attitudes in the United States to examine whether public opinion moves in response to social movement events. Using an error correction model, we demonstrate that social movement events have a significant effect on gender attitudes. Citizens adopt more liberal gender attitudes as the U.S. women’s movement increases its activity. These results suggest that social movement scholars should be paying more attention to public opinion when assessing the outcomes of social movements.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2013. "What Scarlett O'Hara Thinks: Political Attitudes of Southern Women." Political Science Quarterly 128(2): 233-259.
Significant and persistent differences have been recorded in the political attitudes of men and women for several decades. At the same time, women and men are not cohesive groups and other factors interact with gender to shape their political attitudes. The intersections of gender, race, and region are examined by exploring differences in the political attitudes of Southern White women, Southern White men, and White men and White women outside the South. Comparisons are made across 33 questions covering 5 topic areas: political orientations, size and scope of government, defense and foreign policy, social issues, and equal roles and race. The analysis was conducted by pooling the National Election Studies from 1990-2004. This analysis demonstrates that women in the South speak with a political voice distinct from non-Southern women and both Southern and non-Southern men.
Fulton, Sarah A. and Heather L. Ondercin. 2013. "Does Sex Encourage Commitment? The Impact of Candidate Choices on the Time-to Decision" Political Behavior 34(4): 665-686.
We examine how candidate sex influences the timing of vote decisions. We argue that voters use sex stereotypes about women candidates to extract information that allows them to more readily discriminate between their alternatives. Using a national survey from the 2006 election, along with a unique dataset of political informants, we find that the sex of the candidate conveys ideological information that permits voters to make swifter judgments. Even among those who are innocent of ideology, the sex of the candidate continues to supply information helpful to the voting decision, thereby reducing the probability of a delayed decision. Consistent with the literature on sex stereotypes, we find a stronger influence for Democratic than Republican women candidates. The substantive impact of candidate sex on the time-to-decision rivals other variables that feature prominently in the literature on late decisions, highlighting the importance of this previously neglected variable.
Ondercin, Heather L., James G. Garand and Lauren Crapanzano 2011. "Political Learning During the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election: The Impact of the Campaign on the Gender Gap in Political Knowledge" Electoral Studies 30(4):727–737.
We examine how political campaigns influence individuals’ levels of correct, incorrect, and don’t know responses and the gender gap in political knowledge during the 2000 American presidential campaign. Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), we demonstrate that as the campaign progresses the electorate provides more correct answers and fewer incorrect answers. Moreover, the political campaign significantly reduces (and possibly eliminates) the direct effect of sex on political knowledge. While the political campaign decreases the number of incorrect answers provided by both men and women, the number of correct answers provided by women increases. Our findings highlight the importance of the political campaign in determining relative levels of political knowledge for men and women.
Ondercin, Heather L. and Daniel Jones-White “Gender Jeopardy: Do Women Really Know Less Than Men?” Social Science Quarterly 92(3):675-694.
We explore the impact of the sex differences in political knowledge on the participatory acts of voting, influencing someone’s vote, attending a meeting, working on a campaign, wearing a button, and making a financial contribution. Our analysis from 1984 to 2000 reveals that sex differences in political knowledge translate into significant differences in political participation for both men and women. Women’s lower political knowledge depresses their political participation in politics. The participation gap disappears at higher levels of political knowledge for three participatory acts: attempting to influence a vote, attending a political meeting, and donating to a political campaign. Furthermore, at higher levels of political knowledge women are more likely than men to vote, wear a political button, or work for political campaigns. These findings complement the work done at the elite level, which finds that women hold themselves to a higher standard before running for elected office.
Ondercin, Heather L. and Susan Welch. 2009. “Comparing Predictors of Women’s Congressional Election Success Candidates, Primaries, and the General Election” American Politics Research. 37(4): 593-613.
Examining all Congressional races from 1992 through 2000, we explore why, over time, some districts are more likely to have women candidates and to elect women than are others. We focus on the obvious, but rarely explored, fact that women’s election success is a product of three key stages of the election process: women running, women’s successes in the primaries, and finally, women’s general election successes. We find that different factors predict success at each stage and that the predictors of women’s candidacies and success in open seat races are different than in others
Ondercin, Heather L. and Jeffery Bernstein. 2007. “Gender Gaps in Senate Elections, 1988-2000: The Impact of Campaign Level and State-Level Factors” Politics and Gender. 3(1): 33-53.
Since the 1980s, we have witnessed how the gender gap grows and shrinks in various elections; we address how the context in which the election takes place influences the size of the divide. Studying the gender gap in Senate elections allows us to look at multiple elections across time and space to determine when significant electoral gender gaps arise and when they do not. This contrasts with more traditional approaches that focus either on a single presidential election or on a single year's House or Senate elections. We demonstrate that electoral gender gaps arise from campaign-level factors (such as candidate sex, the presence of an incumbent, and the issues raised in the campaign), state-level factors (demographics and politics of the states), and the complex interaction of these factors
Book Chapters and Encyclopedia Entries
Ondercin, Heather L., 2024 "Gender, Sex, and Methodological Pluralism", in Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Dino P. Christenson, and Valeria Sinclair-Chapman (eds), Oxford Handbook of Engaged Methodological Pluralism in Political Science (Vol 1) (2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Oct. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192868282.013.63
Ondercin, Heather L. 2020. “The Uneven Geography of Candidate Emergence: How the Expectation of Winning Influences Candidate Emergence.” In Good Reason to Run. Ed. Shames, Shauna, Rachel Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Teele. Temple University Press.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2018. “The Evolution of Women’s (and Men’s) Partisan Attachments.” in 100 years of the Nineteenth Amendment: An Appraisal of Women's Political Activism. ed. Lee Ann Banaszak and Holly McCammon, Oxford University Press. (peer reviewed)
Ondercin, Heather L. and Susan Wlech. 2005. “Women Candidates” In Women and Elective Office: Past, Present and Future 2nd Ed. Edited by Sue Thomas and Clyde Wilcox. Oxford University Press.
Contributing author to the Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. 2003. Michael Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman, and Tim Futing Liao, eds. Sage Publications. Article Titles: “External Validity,” “Efficiency,” “Residual,” “Unbiased.”
Ondercin, Heather L. 2020. “The Uneven Geography of Candidate Emergence: How the Expectation of Winning Influences Candidate Emergence.” In Good Reason to Run. Ed. Shames, Shauna, Rachel Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Teele. Temple University Press.
Ondercin, Heather L. 2018. “The Evolution of Women’s (and Men’s) Partisan Attachments.” in 100 years of the Nineteenth Amendment: An Appraisal of Women's Political Activism. ed. Lee Ann Banaszak and Holly McCammon, Oxford University Press. (peer reviewed)
Ondercin, Heather L. and Susan Wlech. 2005. “Women Candidates” In Women and Elective Office: Past, Present and Future 2nd Ed. Edited by Sue Thomas and Clyde Wilcox. Oxford University Press.
Contributing author to the Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. 2003. Michael Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman, and Tim Futing Liao, eds. Sage Publications. Article Titles: “External Validity,” “Efficiency,” “Residual,” “Unbiased.”