Voting for Women: How the Public Evaluates Women Candidates.

By Kathleen A. Dolan. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003. 184p. $65.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

With her book, Kathleen A. Dolan has delivered a well-written, important text that offers the reader an insightful explanation of how voters evaluate women candidates and the conditions under which candidate sex has an impact on the outcome of elections.

Dolan observes: “Electing women to office takes two things: women who will stand as candidates, and voters who will vote for them” (p. 3). The book focuses on the second aspect of this observation by examining who votes for women, why they do so, and how the public evaluates these women. While there is already sizable literature on women as candidates, her work focuses on whether, when, and why people support women candidates with their vote.

By combining data from the National Election Study with historical information about elections and women, as well as case studies and vignettes drawn from the experiences of contemporary women candidates, Dolan educates the reader well beyond the statistical findings. Her study is especially important methodologically because it is among the few to base its results on the outcomes of actual elections, rather than experiments or hypothetical situations. Drawing upon the NES conducted by the University of Michigan, the author analyzes results from congressional and senatorial elections from a 10-year period (1990–2000). The chapters presenting the data analysis are clearly written, with tables and analysis accessible to those readers with limited knowledge of statistical methods, while at the same time being methodologically sophisticated in ways that confirm the nuances and complexities of her findings.

In discussing her major findings, Dolan acknowledges how complicated these questions are: “The candidate's sex, and the gendered considerations it raises, has a more complex and nuanced impact on voters than we may have imagined” (p. 154). She does not suggest that a candidate's sex is no longer relevant in elections. Instead, her findings confirm that there is no fixed pattern explaining the impact of candidate sex in congressional and senatorial races. Consistent with past literature, Dolan's study finds that political party and incumbency remain the primary predictors explaining how voters evaluate candidates: “[W]hereas candidates' sex does have some impact on voters' attitudes and behaviors in Congressional elections, that impact is small compared to more traditional political influences, such as political party and incumbency, and the impact is smaller than some research would indicate” (p. 160).

Beyond the major findings she presents, Dolan also explores the results as they relate to the research questions she poses early in the book. The discussion of these results, along with her speculation regarding the evaluation of women candidates in the future, provides the reader with new insights and is fertile ground for future research. For example, she discusses the different ways in which voters are likely to evaluate Democratic and Republican women candidates and the degree to which salience outweighs political party in voter evaluation of candidates: “Here, people were more likely to have more information about women candidates, both Democratic and Republican, than about men of either party” (p. 155). She finds that issues are limited in their impact but that they “were more important in the voting in Senate elections then in those for the House” (p. 157). This leads her to speculate that the impact of issues may depend on the level of office sought. She also finds that women and minorities “were more likely to vote for women candidates for the House of Representatives, but neither of these considerations was related to voting for women Senate candidates” (p. 156).

The book concludes with a restatement of the findings and thoughtful speculation about the future of women candidates. Many of Dolan's findings challenge or modify the conventional wisdom regarding the impact of candidate sex on voting behavior. These findings should form the basis for future research and scholarly investigation.

Voting for Women will be useful for a number of political science courses. The focus on how the public evaluates women candidates sets it apart from other studies examining the election of women to public office and makes it an important contribution to the literature in the fields of women in politics and voting behavior.