When a party selects an out lesbian as its leader, do women and LGBT people evaluate that leader more positively? And do they become more likely to vote for that party? We answer these questions using the case of Kathleen Wynne, premier of Ontario, Canada, from 2013 to 2018. We draw on four large-sample surveys conducted by Ipsos before and after the 2011 and 2014 Ontario elections. We compare shifts in best premier choice and vote choice among non-LGBT men, non-LGBT women, LGBT men, and LGBT women from 2011 to 2014. We find gender and LGBT affinity in leader evaluations. However, we find that only non-LGBT women and LGBT men were more likely to vote Liberal after Wynne became leader. This article contributes to research on affinity by examining LGBT affinity in a real-world election and the intersection of gender and LGBT affinity.

Despite evidence that women win when they run for office, the number of women in the US 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.

Partisanship is the dominant force that dictates American electoral behavior. Yet Americans often participate in elections in which either the partisanship of candidates is unknown or candidates from the same party compete, rendering the partisan cue meaningless. In this research, we examine how candidate demographics—specifically gender—relate to voter behavior and candidate selection in these contexts. Leveraging survey data from same-party matchups in congressional elections (resulting from “top-two primaries”), we examine the relationship between candidate gender and undervoting and vote choice. We find that in same-party matchups, women candidates are associated with lower levels of undervoting among women voters. Furthermore, we find that in mixed-gender contests, women voters from both parties and Democratic men are more likely to favor female candidates. The findings presented here have important implications for the literatures on gender and politics, electoral politics, partisanship, and the design of electoral institutions.

In a recent article published in Politics & Gender, Michael Jankowski and Kamil Marcinkiewicz (2019) study the effects of gender quotas on the electoral performance of female candidates in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) systems. On the empirical side, their study is a critical reanalysis of the Polish case, in particular the regularities demonstrated in a 2014 study that I coauthored. We argued there that at the micro level (candidate level), the effects of quotas were somewhat “paradoxical”: following the installation of quotas, women candidates tend to perform worse relative to their male counterparts than they did during the pre-quota period. Jankowski and Marcinkiewicz claim to demonstrate that those “paradoxical” effects are minor and thus practically negligible. In this note, I argue that their conclusion is largely a result of the particular methodological choices made by these authors. These choices seem unobvious, debatable, and potentially controversial. The note concludes that we need more reflection and debate on the methodological aspects of analyzing candidates’ electoral success in complex electoral systems, such as multidistrict OLPR. This would greatly facilitate future efforts aimed at an unequivocal examination of the contentious concepts such as the notion of “paradox of gender quotas.”

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.