The 2008 presidential election has been widely touted as historic because a woman and an African American became viable candidates for a major party, thereby thrusting gender and race into the spotlight. Of course, gender and race have always been present as informal criteria for U.S. presidential candidates. At the constitutional founding, only white propertied men with sufficient affluence to be gentlemen of leisure were deemed suitable for national office (Wood Reference Wood1991). Following the traditions of kings and military leaders, the executive was assumed to be an elite man and the institution itself became associated with men and fashioned in the preferences of its founders (March and Olsen Reference March and Olsen1989). For the presidency, founding fathers sought a heroic man, capable of leading in the extra-legal realm that they recognized could not be fully anticipated in law (Kann Reference Kann1998). Since then, presidential campaigns have always been about what kind of man should hold an office predicated upon masculinity. While certainly presidential candidates' characters have been most discussed, the quality of each candidate's masculinity has been embedded in the sizing up of presidential timber, character, and the person.

Largely these questions about masculinity remain outside of conscious awareness, even though they often are right in front of us. During the election of 2004, adequate or desirable masculinity became integral to the campaign as Republicans systematically sought to “Frenchify” or feminize John Kerry (Duerst-Lahti Reference Duerst-Lahti, Carroll and Fox2006). Attention to windsurfing and duck hunting, stock-car racing, and the guy you'd want a beer with was attention to masculinity. Perhaps less central to campaign strategy during the 2000 election, the campaign nonetheless evoked the two major modes of U.S. masculinity, dominance masculinity and technical expertise masculinity (Connell Reference Connell1995). Overall, a study of news accounts found twice as many mentions of dominance masculinity than technical expertise masculinity, suggesting the importance of dominance to winning presidential elections. A good proportion of these mentions were dedicated to Gore's shortcomings in projecting alpha-male dominance (Duerst-Lahti Reference Duerst-Lahti, Carroll and Fox2006). This embedded masculinity presents challenges for women to become candidates and to attain viability.

In contrast, as Sinclair-Chapman and Price in this volume demonstrate, race is simultaneously visible and invisible; front and center as a crucial political division and yet cued by other references that are blatantly obvious to the black community but not necessarily to whites. Race generally comes into mainstream (white) awareness only when a nonwhite candidate has entered the two-party fray. Except for the 1992 election, a candidate of color has entered the primaries for at least one of the major parties every cycle since 1980. Yet until Barak Obama, no non-white candidate achieved viability, in large part because too few believed a person of color could win in a racist culture.Footnote ¹ The unspoken and sometimes non-conscious assumption has been that to win, a candidate must be white.

Rendered largely invisible until the late twentieth century, the raced and sexed control of political and social power and institutions by white men has rested upon naturalized hegemonic gender and race ideologies that make disparate and denigrating treatment seem ordinary and acceptable to those with entrenched power advantages (Hawkesworth Reference Hawkesworth2003). Feminalism and masculinism,Footnote ² proto-ideologies for gender, have been integral throughout, as have various race ideologies (Dawson Reference Dawson2001). Given the success of hegemonic ideologies—gender, race, and the usual foundational ideologies underpinning the U.S. political system—relatively few Americans have questioned the fiction that anyone could grow up to be president. Those who do recognize this as myth may continue to work toward this signifier of genuine equality, but if they participate, they choose either to “throw away their vote” by voting for a candidate unlikely to win or rationally cast their lot with the best white male candidate for them. Such choices depend upon perception, and perception derives from individual belief systems and lived experience, which in turn are constituted by physical characteristics, group identifications, and the like. The world looks—and is experienced differently—if one is black, Latino, or white; female or male. These informal criteria for presidential candidates have held firm despite a growing number of presidential candidates who were either not white or not male.

Indisputably, historic candidates such as Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton grew out of gender and race transformations in social and political power and belief systems that hold them in place (Walby Reference Walby1997). These changes also reflect and interact with longstanding battles for universal and genuine enfranchisement of voters. Because political parties must respect the importance of all voters, women, blacks, and Latinos have gained clout since 1984 when the newly recognized gender gap helped propel the selection of Geraldine Ferraro as Walter Mondale's running mate and Jessie Jackson's Rainbow Coalition emerged. Latino voters gained stature beginning in 1988. Since then, parties and campaigns have increasingly sliced voters into segments that recognize individual physical, cultural, and economic demographic characteristics as well as particular life experiences such as being a veteran. Said another way, citizens' relationships to the 2008 election is determined by their individuality and political locations vis-à-vis presidential politics. This trend to recognize mutually constitutive political categories of individual voters in order to target them effectively has magnified and solidified in 2008.

For the study of presidency, arguably this election's most enduring bequest will be its capacity to illuminate what has always been: the presidency and its selection processes as deeply raced and gendered. Precisely because Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Richardson became viable, we can now readily see how white and male the informal criteria for office have been. Similarly, attention to this cycle's racialized and gendered voting patterns illuminates past disregard for particular segments of the voting population. Black women became the pivotal voters in South Carolina and in key states thereafter. Latino/a voters became the prize in California and Texas and arguably hold the pivotal political location in the 2008 general election. Older white women persisted as Clinton's base, in part because of their experience with sexism, which they witnessed her facing, and their strong desire to see a woman as president before they die. As a counterpoint, Republicans fielded a slate of what has previously prevailed for the presidency, and they fight to hold onto the historical gender-race norm even though, as Patricia Sykes shows us, the historical time of institutional development is clashing with the politics of this moment. The general election presents a generational contest, as well as a clash of the political moment and sticky historical institution evolution.

This symposium looks at gender and race in the 2008 presidential election to see better what has always been and to mark the transformations underway. It deploys approaches and concepts honed through critical race and feminist theories and empirical studies of gender, race, and ethnicity. Through the foil of the 2008 presidential election, it endeavors to open the discipline to the centrality of gender and race to all political phenomena, as well as to illuminate dynamics of this election.

To Open the Study Presidential Elections: Person, Position, and Political Location

Adding the intersectionality paradigm to presidential elections represents and important step in opening and improving their study (Hancock Reference Hancock2007). Intersectionality is a way of describing the interaction between systems of oppression and/or domination. The concept grew out of efforts to specify how race and gender relations shaped social and political life. In particular, it grew out of the writing of black feminists who argued that the current thinking about the interaction of race and gender systems was unsatisfactory since it tended to obscure those problems uniquely faced by black women. Today, scholars use the concept of intersectionality to theorize and research a wide variety of social groups and contexts, including questions of sexuality, class, religion, ethnicity, and region in a variety of contexts from the United States to Europe to Latin America and Africa, and in local and international contexts.Footnote ³

In an attempt to weave elements of intersectionality paradigm with the study of presidential elections, I suggest a framework that accords with the public sector leadership environment. It focuses on persons involved as leaders and followers (candidates and supporters), the position and elements of its institutional domain (presidency, its election processes, media, parties, voters, etc.), and the political location of the leadership context as it is situated in space and time. These three domains create a “topography of intersection” (Garcia Bedolla Reference Garcia Bedolla2007, 248) for public sector leadership. It also accords well with the multi-method and interpretive approach of a well-chosen organizational case that enables investigation of the complexity of oppression (Hawkesworth Reference Hawkesworth2006). Employing an intersectionality(-plus) approach to leadership fits readily with some aspects of historical institutionalism and the demand that research call into question the neutrality of institutions, interrogate the norms of public institutions that have been rooted in masculinism and whiteness, and explore the power relations in play (Duerst-Lahti Reference Duerst-Lahti2002a; Chappell Reference Chappell2006; Weldon Reference Weldon2006; Junn Reference Junn2007).

While doubtful that any one study can attend to all of these features, as this symposium shows, even with limited space, elements can be explored simultaneously and each study can remain vigilant about its own assumptions and its location within the mutually constitutive elements of an intersectional political environment. Accurate knowledge demands all domains receive at least some attention. Certainly also, research can be undertaken with sufficient authenticity, fittingness, auditability, objective confirmability, and applicability so as to satisfy the evaluative criteria of epistemic communities for high quality empirical research (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea Reference Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2006, 94–6). Figure 1 provides a heuristic to explore aspects of political leadership important to presidential elections through the intersectionality paradigm.

Figure 1.

Intersectionality Paradigm Applied to the Mutually Constitutive Public Sector Leadership Environment of Presidential Elections

Although the domains of person, position, and political location accord generally with the common political science units of analysis—individual, institution, and context—the epistemic roots make them quite distinct in orientation. The former derives from critical theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory while the latter draws from positivism and behavioralism. As a result, the object of the gaze—the unit of analysis—may be the same human being(s), part of government, and/or situational aspects surrounding them, but starting assumptions differ greatly in terms of approach to categories, assumptions of equal human agency, and neutral institutions.

Person: Body, Experience, Perception

Within the proposed framework, it is assumed that a person inhabits a body and that the characteristics of that body matter for what each person knows and how that person relates to other aspects of public sector leadership, and the converse (Jaggar and Bordo Reference Jaggar and Bordo1989; Butler Reference Butler1993). It also presupposes that despite overlaps in bodily characteristics, those characteristics cannot guarantee either the same experiences or the same interpretation of them. Instead the lived body and lived experience become critically important.Footnote ⁴ This vantage point provides a means to understand the subjectivity surrounding public sector leadership situated in presidential elections from various personal and political locations: conservatives viewing John McCain or Hillary Clinton, the courting of Latino/a voters, Hillary Clinton constructed and perceived by polls, and black compared to whites as they react and interpret Barak Obama. Of course an individual's beliefs shape what is perceived as perceptual filtering processes pass bits of data through cognitive stores of the mind to produce meaning. But because only unusual circumstances jar the mind out of ordinary filtering processes, the adage “seeing is believing” turns on its head and instead “believing is seeing” usually sets meaning (Lorber Reference Lorber1993). This perceptual dynamic is particularly true in establishing meaning in politically charged areas such as gender, race, class, and sexuality, as has been evident in responses to the candidates. Stereotypes and expectations shape perceptions of events according to what is believed about a candidate's attributes, including a combination of race and partisanship of both the leaders and the perceivers (Nelson, Sanbonmatsu, McClerking Reference Nelson, Sanbonmatsu and McClerking2007, 416). To understand presidential elections through an intersectionality paradigm, the persons' lived bodies, lived experiences, and beliefs matter and must be considered. Each mutually constitutes other aspects of persons. Meaning forms through persons' perceptual processes. That meaning becomes central to interpretations of public sector leadership. Importantly, individuals who share a category or two are not simply interchangeable.

Position: Institutional History, Demographics, Norms, Construction

Position is a comfortable concept in political science. We all grasp formal positions and formal authority derived from institutions. Through methodologies such as organization culture ethnographies and “soak and poke,” we even are quite willing to acknowledge informal organizational power, structures, and practices. The discipline has been less willing to acknowledge that U.S. institutions are not neutral for gender, race, class, and other salient categories, despite approaches to analyze the gendering of an organization based upon its function, history, social demography, formal and informal structures, and rules and practices (Kenney Reference Kenney1996; Duerst-Lahti Reference Duerst-Lahti and Rosenthal2002b; Dodson Reference Dodson2006). These same factors shape race and other intersectional stigmas also. Public institutions, as Hawkesworth has so well argued, should be studied for their race-ing and gendering. Anything less produces bad scholarship (Hawkesworth Reference Hawkesworth2005).

Political Location: Time, Space, and Reifications

The final domain of Figure 1, political location, insists that candidates be situated in space and time and that contextual elements be incorporated. Political location is not meant to identify a concrete place, although it could, such as propinquity in office space near a governor (Rose Reference Rose1993). Instead it suggests a metaphorical spot in place and time, and even a positioning vis-à-vis different kinds of time: historical circumstances (e.g., the evolution of the presidency), or a more immediate political place such as an election cycle at the end of partisan regime change, or even a breaking news story.

Hillary Clinton's location as the first woman to be deemed a frontrunner for president interacts with her location as a former first lady, seat as the junior senator from New York, stance on the war, and earlier work on behalf of women and children. Her frontrunner status occurred after societal changes wrought by the women's movement and a series of women, beginning at least with Shirley Chisholm in 1972, who have accustomed voters to female candidates. Similarly, Barak Obama is located ambiguously between phenotypic and cultural blackness, Christian upbringing and identity and a Muslim father, hope for a better political system and experience within it. John McCain is positioned as the familiar image of a white male president and dissatisfaction with the way things are going, a maverick image and a 95% Bush voting record, chronological and physiological age, comfort with experience and desire for generational change. In other words, political location suggests circumstances that take on prominence or evoke strong emotion through processes of reification. These circumstances can be exceptionally volatile, waxing and waning quickly. Yet, candidates as leaders must respond to these reified elements and their own political locations constrain how they do so because followers react accordingly.