Gender, Race, and Nascent Political Ambition

Many studies document variation in citizens’ nascent political ambition. Some scholars link ambition to social backgrounds (Moore, Reference Moore2005; Bos et al., Reference Bos, Greenlee, Holman, Oxley and Lay2022) and personality traits (Peterson and Palmer, Reference Peterson and Palmer2022). Others note that political ambition is dynamic over the course of a person’s life. Changes in levels of political efficacy, as well as shifts in patterns of political recruitment, personal circumstances, and professional experiences, can all affect the extent to which individuals consider entering the electoral arena (Fox and Lawless, Reference Fox and Lawless2011). Political attitudes and experiences also influence nascent political ambition. Individuals who perceive themselves as ideologically distant from their party are more likely to develop ambition (Kirkland et al., Reference Kirkland, Simas and Clifford2024), and anger with the status quo can motivate individuals to consider running for office (Dittmar, Reference Dittmar2020; Scott and Collins, Reference Scott and Collins2020).

Across studies, gender is a key predictor of nascent ambition. Among ‘ordinary’ Americans, the factors determining women’s political ambition differ markedly from those shaping men’s ambition (Crowder-Meyer, Reference Crowder-Meyer2020). Importantly, from a young age, girls show less interest in holding political office than boys (Bos et al., Reference Bos, Greenlee, Holman, Oxley and Lay2022), and this gap persists even among women and men with educational and professional experiences that tend to be pathways into politics (Fox and Lawless, Reference Fox and Lawless2023). Scholars have identified numerous explanations for this gap, including gendered political socialization (Bos et al., Reference Bos, Greenlee, Holman, Oxley and Lay2022) and women’s doubts about their own qualifications and abilities (Crowder-Meyer, Reference Crowder-Meyer2020; Lawless and Fox, Reference Lawless and Fox2010).

Related research highlights structural barriers that deter ambitious women from running, including women’s greater family obligations (Bernhard et al., Reference Bernhard, Shames and Teele2021); gender bias in candidate recruitment, training, and perceived electoral viability (Butler and Preece, Reference Butler and Preece2016; Crowder-Meyer, Reference Crowder-Meyer2013; Doherty et al., Reference Doherty, Dowling and Miller2019); and differences in psychological traits such as risk aversion or political efficacy (Preece and Stoddard, Reference Preece and Stoddard2015; Preece, Reference Preece2016). Even when women exhibit high nascent ambition, these barriers limit their emergence as candidates. For those who do run, their decision-making is more socially and politically embedded, with women more likely to report that someone suggested they pursue elected office, while men are more likely to self-initiate (Carroll and Sanbonmatsu, Reference Carroll and Sanbonmatsu2013).

A growing body of literature also explores the role that race plays in shaping political ambition. Scott and Collins (Reference Scott and Collins2020) find that negative emotion, particularly anger, is strongly associated with African-American nascent political ambition, and Lee (Reference Lee2024) shows that emphasizing racial group consciousness increases ambition among minority respondents. Others note that the link between nascent political ambition and candidate emergence may be attenuated for some members of marginalized groups. Ocampo and Ray (Reference Ocampo and Ray2019) argue, for example, that many potential Latino candidates opt not to run due to high-quality prospective challengers and perceived lack of support from party elites. However, once in office, evidence suggests that minoritized politicians show levels of both static and dynamic ambition that are equal to their white counterparts (Shah, Reference Shah2015).

It is also clear that the gender gap in ambition is shaped by race. Shames (Reference Shames2018) shows that while women of color were the most ‘community minded’ subgroup in her analysis, they demonstrate lower political ambition than other groups because of concerns about racial and gender bias coupled with skepticism that problems important to them could be solved via politics. Qualitative scholarship also documents the differences in white, black, and Latina women candidates’ narratives about their decisions to run for office (Frederick, Reference Frederick2013). Alongside this work, quantitative studies identify the factors that shape where and when women candidates of color emerge and win (Shah, Reference Shah2015; Shah et al., Reference Shah, Scott and Gonzalez Juenke2019; Silva and Skulley, Reference Silva and Skulley2019).

Scholarship on black women, in particular, shows that their experiences of discrimination and exclusion can serve as a motivation to run for office as a means of resisting group-based marginalization (Dowe, Reference Dowe2020). This motivation likely emerges from black women’s unique socialization experiences (Dowe, Reference Dowe2022) and civic skills developed in young adulthood (Brown and Lemi, Reference Brown and Lemi2021). It is also consistent with broader African American norms around civic participation as a means to promote group interests (Anoll, Reference Anoll2022). Indeed, Scott and Collins (Reference Scott, Brown, Frasure and Pinderhughes2021) use survey data to demonstrate that for black women, political participation significantly predicts both considering running for office and being asked by others to run. Survey experiments likewise demonstrate that for black women, reminders of political exclusion reaffirm the importance of running for office (Holman and Schneider, Reference Holman and Schneider2018).

Both race and gender shape individuals’ motivations for pursuing elected office. Yet, we have not systematically documented differences in nascent ambition across race, ethnicity, and gender. Existing research offers mixed expectations. Some studies suggest a persistent gender gap across racial and ethnic groups. For example, among participants in the Citizen Political Ambition Panel Study, Fox and Lawless (Reference Fox and Lawless2023) find that the gender gap in political ambition holds across racial/ethnic groups. Similarly, Scott and Collins (Reference Scott and Collins2020) show that black women remain less likely to consider running for office – even when emotional responses would predict heightened ambition. In a survey of graduate students at elite universities, Shames (Reference Shames2017) identifies a gendered ambition gap among white and Hispanic respondents, but not among black men and women. However, Crowder-Meyer (Reference Crowder-Meyer2020), in a study of ‘ordinary Americans’, finds that race is a weaker predictor of ambition. In her sample, black men report lower ambition than white men, but this difference does not appear among women or other racial and ethnic groups.

Our work advances this literature in two key ways. First, national surveys that reflect US population demographics often include relatively few black and Hispanic respondents, limiting researchers’ statistical power to examine gender gaps within racial groups. Second, many surveys measure general ambition for ‘political office’ but lack specificity about different types of offices. Addressing these limitations requires a survey designed to capture variation in ambition across racial and ethnic groups and levels of office, ensuring both sufficient representation of non-white respondents and greater clarity about which offices they are considering. To contribute to this literature – and help to reconcile these mixed findings – we now turn to mapping the combined influence of gender and race/ethnicity on Americans’ political ambition.

Data

We commissioned our survey through the NORC AmeriSpeak Panel, a general population sample of individuals aged eighteen and above in the United States. We specified that we required relatively large oversamples of Hispanic and black respondents. The survey was available in both English and Spanish and was conducted online and over the phone.Footnote ¹ Participants were offered a $5 cash incentive for completing the survey.Footnote ² We surveyed 2,030 individuals, with 1,966 responding online and 64 via phone. Our analyses focus on the 1,816 men and women citizens who identified as either white, black, or Hispanic.Footnote ³

We asked respondents, ‘Have you ever thought about running for office?’ across eight different office-types. Response options included ‘Yes, I have seriously considered’, ‘Yes, it crossed my mind’, and ‘No, I have not thought about it’. We did not offer an ‘I don’t know’ option, but respondents could skip the question.Footnote ⁴

In our first analysis, the dependent variable is a binary indicator coded as 1 if the respondent had at least contemplated running for any political office and 0 otherwise. The unit of analysis is the respondent, and we estimate a logistic regression with robust standard errors.

In our second analysis, we consider the possibility of heterogeneous effects of race and gender depending on office-type: school board, city council, mayoral, state legislature, gubernatorial, House of Representatives, Senate, and the presidency. The dependent variable is a binary measure of whether the respondent thought about running for office for each of the eight different office-types. The unit of analysis is respondent-jurisdiction, with each respondent appearing in the dataset once for each office for which they provided a response. Here we explore the interaction of gender, race, and office-type.Footnote ⁵ Since this second analysis allows each respondent to appear more than once in the data, we employ a logistic regression with respondent-level clustered standard errors.Footnote ⁶

Our third analysis investigates the role of encouragement in reducing race–gender gaps in political ambition. We measure encouragement by asking whether respondents reported being encouraged to run for office by a political source (for example a party or elected official), a non-political source (for example coworkers or relatives), both types of sources, or none at all. As in our first analysis, we employ logistic regression with robust standard errors.

Finally, in addition to respondents’ race (Hispanic, black, or white) and gender (woman or man), as well as their interaction, all models include controls for respondents’ interest in politics, whether they feel qualified for elected office, party identification, age, educational level, income, and marital status.Footnote ⁷ SI Section F.4 includes models excluding these control variables and finds similar results to those presented below.

The Race–Gender Gap in Political Ambition

Figure 1 presents the results of our analysis focusing on the combined effect of gender and race on whether respondents considered running for (any) political office.Footnote ⁸ We find that the average marginal effect of all race and gender combinations is negative relative to ‘white men’, our reference category. That is, when it comes to nascent political ambition, white men are more likely to have considered running for office than any other group, even after controlling for their interest in politics and whether they feel they are qualified for the job. White men’s higher propensity to consider running for office is particularly pronounced relative to Hispanic and black women (15.4 per cent and 12.5 per cent more likely, respectively), and black men (11.5 per cent more likely). SI Table F.11 shows similar results for the number of offices that respondents considered running for, and SI Section F.7 presents similar overall patterns across respondent partisanship. In SI Section F.5, we replicate our analyses with the subset of respondents who are more likely to pursue a political career.

Figure 1.

Effect of race–gender on nascent political ambition, as compared to white men respondents.

Note: The top panel plots the average marginal effects, with ‘white men’ as the reference category. The bottom panel plots the predicted probabilities. Predictions were generated by setting all remaining variables to their means (for continuous variables) or their modes (for categorical variables). Estimates were constructed using ninety-five per cent confidence intervals and robust standard errors.

White men exhibit significantly higher levels of nascent ambition than all other groups. In SI Section F.8, we assess whether this disparity is driven by differences in self-perceived qualifications. Consistent with previous research, white and Hispanic women are less likely to see themselves as qualified to run for office (Fox and Lawless, Reference Fox and Lawless2005,Reference Fox and Lawless2014). However, black women, Hispanic men, and black men generally perceive themselves as equally qualified as white men. While self-perceived qualifications increase the likelihood that traditionally excluded groups consider running, this effect is not strong enough to surpass the ambition levels of unqualified white men. With few exceptions, white men who report being unqualified exhibit as much political ambition as qualified white women, Hispanic men and women, and black men and women.

Interestingly, while there is variation across groups other than white men, the coefficients displayed in Figure 1 are generally not statistically different from each other.Footnote ⁹ Among Hispanic respondents, men are more likely to consider running for office than women, but this result is less robust than the ‘white men’ effect. Indeed, the gender gap among Hispanics is only weakly significant when replicating the analysis with survey weights (p-value 0.06).

We further explore Hispanic men’s ambition in SI Section F.6. We find that those with stronger ties to the Spanish language and recent immigration histories exhibit lower political ambition, similar to other underrepresented groups. In contrast, Hispanic men with weaker ties to the Spanish language and greater generational distance from immigrants display ambition levels similar to white men, reflecting the important role acculturation plays in shaping political behaviors within the Hispanic community (see, for example, Branton, Reference Branton2007; Fraga et al., Reference Fraga, Velez and West2024; Pérez, Reference Pérez2015).

The Race–Gender Ambition Gap Across Offices

Figure 2 presents the results of our analysis of potential heterogeneous effects across office type.Footnote ¹⁰ The top panel shows the average marginal effect of race and gender on whether respondents had considered running for each of the eight offices, with ‘white men’ as the reference category. The bottom panel displays the predicted probabilities that respondents from each group considered running for a given office.

Figure 2.

Effect of gender and race on nascent political ambition by office type, as compared to white men respondents.

Note: The top plot presents the average marginal effects, with ‘white men’ as the reference category. The bottom panel plots the predicted probabilities that respondents from each group will report having considered running for a given office. Predictions were generated by setting all remaining variables to their means (for continuous variables) or their modes (for categorical variables). Estimates were constructed using ninety-five per cent confidence intervals and standard errors clustered by the respondent.

Across all offices, white men are never less likely to have considered running for a position than members of other groups, and are often more likely to express ambition for a given post. Of the forty estimated marginal effects coefficients, thirty-seven are negative, with twenty-one reaching statistical significance at the 0.05 level.Footnote ¹¹ White men are especially more likely to have considered running for office than white women, Hispanic women, and black men. SI Table E.9 presents coefficient comparisons across demographic groups by office type. Nearly all statistically significant differences reflect white men’s greater ambition. There are few notable differences among other groups, though the results do shed further light on the gender ambition gap among Hispanic Americans. This gap stems from Hispanic men’s greater interest in running for the US House. For all other offices, no gender difference emerges among Hispanic respondents.

The analysis also reveals significant differences across offices. The gap between white men and other groups is least pronounced for the nation’s higher offices, largely due to floor effects. As shown in Table C.3 in the SI, only two per cent of respondents had considered running for governor, US Senate, and the presidency, and only three per cent had considered running for the US House. Larger differences emerge for lower-level offices, particularly city council and mayor. This is especially notable given that local offices are thought to present unique political opportunities for women (Crowder-Meyer and Smith, Reference Crowder-Meyer and Smith2015; Krebs and Wagner, Reference Krebs and Wagner2023). For instance, Anzia and Bernhard (Reference Anzia and Bernhard2022) find that women have an advantage over men in city council and school board races. However, white men still exhibit more ambition than all other groups for city council posts, and women do not display an ambition surplus for school board races. We believe it is especially important that these disparities exist for local level offices, which both constitute the majority of elected positions and also serve as launching points for state and national posts. Ambition gaps at this level matter both in their own right and for their effect on the pipeline of women and racial minorities seeking higher office.

The Role of Encouragement

Figure 3 underscores the link between encouragement and nascent political ambition.Footnote ¹² First, we consider respondents who report receiving no encouragement to run. Among these respondents, the average marginal effects plot shows that white men are more likely than all but one group (Hispanic men) to have considered running for office.

Figure 3.

Effect of encouragement by gender and race.

Note: The top panel displays the average marginal effects with ‘white men’ as the reference category. The bottom panel plots the predicted probabilities. Predictions were generated by setting all remaining variables to their means (for continuous variables) or their modes (for categorical variables). Due to the small number of black women who reported receiving encouragement exclusively from a political source, our prediction approaches zero with narrow standard errors. Estimates were constructed using ninety-five per cent confidence intervals and robust standard errors.

Larger differences emerge among respondents who report having received encouragement to run from a non-political source.Footnote ¹³ Non-political encouragement boosts ambition for all groups, but it also exacerbates the disparity in political ambition between white men and others. For those having received encouragement from non-political sources, the predicted probability of expressing an interest in holding office increases to 0.72 (ninety-five per cent confidence interval: 0.57–0.83) for white men. This widens the gap between white men and Hispanic men (the next most ambitious group) from 0.03 to 0.24.Footnote ¹⁴

Figure 3 also highlights significant differences in the impact of non-political and political encouragement on the race–gender ambition gap. Though non-political encouragement widens the gap between white men and others, encouragement from political sources (elected and political party officials) significantly reduces this gap. Among respondents who report having received encouragement from political sources, the distinction between white men and other groups largely disappears (with the exception of black women). Political encouragement is particularly effective in motivating white women and black men.Footnote ¹⁵ Relative to receiving no encouragement, the probability of considering a run for office after having received encouragement from a political source increases from 0.07 to 0.79 among white women and from 0.06 to 0.57 among black men.Footnote ¹⁶

Our results suggest that party elites could play a significant role in narrowing white men’s political ambition advantage. Of course, the observational nature of our data prevents us from making causal claims. Political encouragement may be endogenous, for example, with those who are more ambitious and politically active being more likely to receive or recall receiving encouragement. Although we cannot rule out this possibility, in SI Section F.5, we explore whether the effect of encouragement persists among those we would expect to be more politically active – respondents who are interested in politics and feel qualified for office. SI Figure F.10 and Table F.22 provide suggestive evidence that the white-male ambition gap continues to be smaller among respondents who report having received encouragement from political sources compared to those who have not.