In Good Reasons to Run, editors Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele, along with their impressive list of contributors, offer a comprehensive overview of the state of women’s ambition and candidacies for political office. The book asks a variety of questions related to the significant, albeit one-sided, rise in the number of women running for office and any potential support structures and remaining challenges for women who want to run. An edited volume comprising 18 substantive chapters, the book is noteworthy in its efforts to draw on a variety of interrelated questions, approaches, and cases to provide an extensive set of contributions to the literature. Although most of the book’s contributors focus on the United States, interspersed through the book are also several comparative chapters offering a glimpse of the social, structural, and institutional variation affecting women’s political candidacy globally.
As the editors note, this volume is something of a contrast to earlier literature on women’s political candidacy. In the past, studies relied on political ambition as an explanatory factor, rather than engaging with this variable to understand how and when women’s ambition is activated and which women are encouraged to run for office. In other words, political ambition is not only a characteristic descriptor of potential candidates as ambitious or not, but also may be subject to external effects. In seeking to understand these questions, there is a normative commitment underlying the project; namely, the notion that women should run for office. The editors capitalize on this foundation by including both academics and advocates to provide not only a rigorous but also more relevant view of the state of women’s candidacies. As a result, the chapters are written in a very accessible format that can be read by academics, students, and advocates alike. The chapters are somewhat shorter than those of other academic books (also allowing for a greater number of them). Collectively, they focus on the arguments, evidence, and implications for both academics and advocates. Importantly, the volume’s accessibility is not to be mistaken for a lack of methodological rigor. The approaches are varied and creative, including descriptive studies, interview-based research, multi-methods research, qualitative content analysis, as well as surveys and observational data of interesting samples, including Electoral College electors, Emerge & Ready to Run trainees, candidate-to-candidate donations, and Teach for America applicants. The book is centered around five main themes: engaging directly with questions of ambition, the first three parts ask who runs, why run, and why not run. The last two parts deal with structural elements: how nonprofits help women run for office and the special role of money.
Part I asks “who runs” and offers four well-connected chapters exploring a variety of characteristics and backgrounds of candidates and likely candidates. Using Och’s (chapter 3) language, by identifying these characteristics, they suggest that we may be better able to “activate” potential candidates. Taken together, the chapters indicate that there is not a one-size-fits-all model to identifying potential candidates. We learn that even among the most likely candidates, such as electors and women who have attended campaign training, there are gender gaps in ambition (Yanus, chapter 1) and an “accumulation effect” of challenges, including self-perception of campaign skills (Bernhard et al., chapter 2). Notably, Republican women have their own challenges; Och identifies three major obstacles: infrastructure, inattention, and ideology. Examining an already successful woman officeholder, Scott and coauthors (chapter 4) reveal important intersectional resources and obstacles that Stacey Abrams faced as a Black woman candidate.
In part II, the editors assembled chapters discussing reasons why women run for office. The old adage that men run to be someone, but women run to do something, seems very much at play in these studies. The authors’ contributions suggest that messaging matters in encouraging women to run, and also that experiences and reasons for running do not operate the same way even among women. In answering the question of why women run, Thomas and Wineinger (chapter 5) argue that women run to make policy change, whereas Deen and Shelton (chapter 6) show a multiplier effect of civic engagement and volunteerism leading to political engagement. The notion of civic capital is brought out again with Mo and Anderson-Nilsson’s chapter 7, together with the notion that women of color are especially activated by civic experiences. It appears, broadly speaking, that women are shaped by a variety of experiences and are motivated by policy change and civic capital.
Turning to the flip side of motivations, part III asks the question, Why not run? The editors point out the key to understanding this question, stating that “what makes the office unappealing, in itself, may be gendered” (p. 125). Even rational cost-benefit analyses may reveal that women and men weigh those costs and benefits differently. Contextual and systematic challenges—including political geography and to what degree districts are women-friendly (Ondercin, chapter 8), the gatekeeping roles of political party chairs (Gimenez Aldridge et al., chapter 9), and the unwillingness of the established two parties to situate and recruit Black women (Brown and Dowe, chapter 10)—all affect women’s decisions not to run. Bonneau and Kathak (chapter 11) also present evidence of a chilling effect on women’s political ambition of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. These authors argue, as have other gender scholars, that leaning in is insufficient in a context of systematic challenges.
Part IV, discussing the role of nonprofits, notes both institutional and individual effects. Institutionally, the chapters point to the proliferation of training programs, while noting that policy and partisan barriers exist (Kreitzer and Osborn, chapter 12) and that, in the comparative context, varied funding sources for programs may lead to varied goals, either as supportive structures or for agenda setting (Piscopo, chapter 15). At the program level, evaluation surveys reveal that supportive features, such as networking receptions, may have a stronger effect for women of color (Sanbonmatsu and Dittmar, chapter 13), but that even a one-day training might help women see themselves as candidates (Schneider and Sweet-Cushman, chapter 14). Nonprofits seemingly provide both motivating opportunities and necessary resources.
Given the central role of financial resources, particularly in American candidate-centered campaigns, those associated challenges are given special consideration in part V. The authors in this section reveal an interactive effect between gender and party in campaign donations (Swers and Thomsen, chapter 16), that training programs in Benin help women gain access to necessary fundraising networks (Johnson, chapter 17), and that women candidates donate to other women, but that this effect is much stronger among Democrats and in open races (Kettler, chapter 18). It is evident that financial challenges still abound in women’s campaigns, but that a key to women’s success is the support of other women.
The volume offers a vast amount of new knowledge, in five key areas, for advancing the literature on women’s political ambition, and it points to specific implications for advocates to implement. This book is commendable for several reasons, in addition to the high-quality chapters, not least of which is that the editors’ expert interweaving of chapters and their section introductions make Good Reasons to Run an excellent contemporary handbook on women’s political ambition.
