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The fifth edition of Gender and Elections offers a lively, multi-faceted account of the role of gender in the electoral process through the 2020 elections. This timely yet enduring volume strikes a balance between highlighting the most important developments for women as voters and candidates in the 2020 elections and providing an in-depth analysis of the ways that gender has helped shape the contours and outcomes of electoral politics in the United States. Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding presidential, congressional, and state elections; voter participation, turnout, and choices; participation of African American women and Latinas; support of political parties and women's organizations; and candidate communication. New chapters explore the role of social movements in elections and introduce concepts of gendered and raced institutions, intersectionality, and identity politics applied to presidential elections from past to present. The resulting volume is the most comprehensive and reliable resource on the role of gender in electoral politics.
President Joe Biden gave his first address to Congress on April 28, 2021. He stood at the center of the US House rostrum, with two women seated behind him: Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Biden began his speech by recognizing the historic moment of which he was part: “Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President. No president has ever said those words from this podium.” He added, “And it’s about time.” Biden was right. Never before 2021 had a woman served as vice president (and thus president of the Senate), nor had the first and only woman Speaker of the House – Nancy Pelosi – sat next to another woman during a presidential address to Congress. But it is the full picture of that moment, including Biden’s position at the podium as yet another white, male president of the United States, that captures the complexities of gender in the US elections in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
Women voters have received special attention from the presidential candidates in recent elections primarily because of differences between women and men in their political preferences, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the gender gap. Statistically, a gender gap can be defined as the difference between the proportion of women and the proportion of men who support a particular politician, party, or policy position. In the 2020 presidential election, the winning candidate, Democrat Joe Biden, received 57 percent of women’s votes, compared with 45 percent of men’s, resulting in a gender gap of twelve percentage points.
The fourth edition of Gender and Elections offers a systematic, lively, multi-faceted account of the role of gender in the electoral process through the 2016 elections. This timely, yet enduring, volume strikes a balance between highlighting the most important development for women as voters and candidates in the 2016 elections and providing a more long-term, in-depth analysis of the ways in which gender has helped shape the contours and outcomes of electoral politics in the United States. Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding and interpreting presidential elections, presidential and vice-presidential candidacies, voter participation and turnout, voting choices, congressional elections, the political involvement of Latinas, the participation of African American women, the support of political parties and women's organizations, candidate communications with voters, and state elections. Without question, Gender and Elections is the most comprehensive, reliable, and trustworthy resource on the role of gender in electoral politics.