This week we're asking what it will take for a woman to become President of the United States.
No woman has ever served as President of the United States. Only two women have ever been nominated as candidates for that office by one of the two main parties. So what is causing this persistent barrier, and how might it be overcome?
These questions are taken up in a new article in The Political Quarterly, which examines the structural, cultural and political factors that have kept women from reaching the highest office in American politics. Is the United States an outlier in global terms when it comes to women's representation at the top of political life? And what would need to change — in parties, in media, in public attitudes — for that to shift?
Joining host Alan Renwick to explore these questions are the article's authors: Rosie Campbell, Professor of Politics at King's College London, and Joni Lovenduski, Professor Emerita at Birkbeck College and Visiting Professor at the Policy Institute at King's College London.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:04] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we ask what will it take for a woman to become President of the United States?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick, and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
No woman has ever been President of the United States. Indeed, only two women have ever been nominated as candidates for that office by one of the two main parties. So what's causing this problem and how might it be overcome?
A new article in our partner journal, the Political Quarterly explores exactly these questions. It's by Rosie Campbell, who is Professor of Politics at King's College London and Joni Lovenduski, who is Professor Emerita at Birkbeck College and visiting professor at the Policy Institute at King's College London, and I'm delighted that Rosie and Joni both join me now. Welcome both of you to UCL Uncovering Politics. It's wonderful to have you on. And could we maybe start by putting the United States in context a little bit? And we know that underrepresentation of women is a problem everywhere. So Joni is the US an outlier in this respect?
[00:01:36] Joni Lovenduski: I think the US always thinks it's an outlier, and in fact, it is on the elder edge of what we used to think of as established democracies, in terms of its women's representation in a variety of ways. Not only in the failure to have a head of state who is a woman, but also in terms of its representation in various congresses, state houses, governorships, and equivalent elected officers. I think women are, I think just under 30% of members of Congress.
[00:02:09] Alan Renwick: Which compares, for example, with 40% in the UK.
[00:02:12] Joni Lovenduski: Yeah.
[00:02:12] Alan Renwick: So there's at least a bit of a difference there.
[00:02:14] Joni Lovenduski: Yeah, well there's a bigger difference because it took them a lot longer to get there, it's only very recently been that high.
[00:02:19] Rosie Campbell: 10 percentage points. Quite a big gap.
[00:02:21] Joni Lovenduski: Yeah. And then there are around 30% of statewide executives, around 34% of state legislatures. So it's not wildly different, but it's behind, it's slower than most of the equivalent countries. If we go to the Inter-Parliamentary Union data on women's representation we'll find that there are a few other countries at this level and a few below, but basically it's not got anything to be proud of women's representation-wise.
[00:02:51] Alan Renwick: And Rosie, in terms of executive offices, I guess many countries have now had women as heads of government, but it's far from being a majority. It's still very much a minority of countries that have had.
[00:03:04] Rosie Campbell: Indeed. But then you can look at countries that in many ways have a lot in common with the US, the UK, at least historically, a two party majoritarian system. And we've had three women prime ministers. So I, I think the outlier argument still holds.
[00:03:21] Alan Renwick: Okay. So at least in part we're looking at a phenomenon that is particular to the United States, that, presumably there are also kind of general cross-national patterns underpinning this as well. Let me put a really big and broad question to you. Rosie, maybe we can start with you on this and, see where you go with it. So what barriers do women face as candidates for President in the United States?
[00:03:46] Rosie Campbell: Well, it's such a unique office. I mean, I think if you think that Joni's just listed the representation of women in politics at different levels, often talking about the third and yet, the route to becoming President is not the same route as becoming Prime Minister. It's, you know, unique office in terms of the fact that you don't necessarily have to climb through the party hierarchy to get there and the buckets of money that's involved to get the opportunity to stand for election as President of the United States is another huge factor that makes it different from a lot of other established democracies.
[00:04:20] Alan Renwick: Joni?
[00:04:21] Joni Lovenduski: Well, the sums of money involved are actually grotesque. It's not just large. It's off the scale in terms of being able to comprehend it. As it happens, I think women are able to raise money for their candidacies, but they rely more on small donors. Women are not even a large minority of the actual donors and so forth and so on. So it's a pathway that has got quite a male dominance at almost every stage of the way.
[00:04:53] Alan Renwick: So at least one institutional factor that's involved here is the, just the role of money and as you say, huge amounts of money in US politics. I guess another sort of unusual feature of US politics is the primary system through which candidates are selected for candidacy in the first place. Is that also a factor in shaping what's going on here?
[00:05:15] Joni Lovenduski: Well, we think it is. It is a real marathon. It takes a couple of years to build yourself up, to get through the primary system and in a position to be nominated by your party. And the primaries consist of a lot of different, a lot of different systems of selection, which in turn attract differential levels of media reporting and produce different notions of whether or not somebody's electable. So essentially 12 people riding around in a pickup truck in Iowa can blow somebody's chances right out of the water.
[00:05:49] Alan Renwick: Rosie, do you wanna add to that?
[00:05:51] Rosie Campbell: I think it matters enormously, but I also think there is some nuances to how it matters, depending on which party and which. I guess suppose the big difference is that supporters of parties are acting as gatekeepers and they can be a little bit different from voters and how they're different from voters differs across the parties in terms of the way they respond to women candidates.
[00:06:13] Alan Renwick: Do you want, Do you want to just develop that thought?
[00:06:14] Rosie Campbell: Yes.
[00:06:15] Alan Renwick: What is that difference?
[00:06:16] Rosie Campbell: So, there actually surprisingly, isn't a huge amount of hostility to women candidates in the US now. Maybe, the President is a slightly unique office, but more generally for elected office. So it's not necessarily that there's this sort of ingrained bias against women candidates, but there are subtle stereotypes and biases that apply and Republican supporters are slightly more likely to prefer a male candidate, but also it's about whether, women candidates are perceived as being more left or more right-wing, or in US terms more liberal or more conservative. And across the board, women candidates are considered to be slightly more liberal. So that means that, on the Democrat side, you would think that a woman candidate's more likely to be to the left of the party, whereas on the Republican side, a woman candidate's more likely to be towards the centre. Now that really makes a difference to which cohorts of voters are going to prefer or be biased against women candidates and it's this interaction with their presumed politics, with their gender.
[00:07:18] Alan Renwick: So if I understand correctly, you're suggesting there are two factors there that might make it particularly hard for a woman to get the Republican nomination? So one factor there is just potentially that Republicans are more likely to be hostile to women as candidates?
[00:07:31] Rosie Campbell: Slightly, yes.
[00:07:31] Alan Renwick: As holders of political office. And then secondly, if women are generally perceived as being more left-wing and Republicans who are choosing a candidate are likely to want to choose a candidate who is clearly on their side and is going to kind of fly the flag for their side of the political contest, then for that reason as well, they're going to be less likely to choose
[00:07:51] Rosie Campbell: Yes
[00:07:51] Alan Renwick: A woman candidate
[00:07:52] Rosie Campbell: For reasons of political expediency the more centrist candidate is probably more attractive to voters. And yet the voters in primaries are not looking necessarily for the most attractive candidate for swing voters, they're looking for the champion of their cause as you describe. And so that might well push the slate to the right and disadvantage women candidates.
[00:08:13] Joni Lovenduski: No, and in some sense, I suppose the electors and the organizers in primaries play the role of party activists. Because they're probably not representative of the beliefs that are obtained in the country as a whole. They're probably somewhere to whatever direction it is from the centre, and it's a functional equivalency because they don't look anything alike but there is that, I suppose slight radicalism that you get on the ground.
[00:08:44] Alan Renwick: So a primary voters potentially face a couple of options in terms of how they think about the choice that is before them. Either they're thinking about who is the flag bearer for my ideological position, or they're thinking about who is going to win this election for my side? And this could actually take them in different directions, these two different considerations in terms of the kind of candidate they would vote for in a primary.
[00:09:07] Joni Lovenduski: Yeah. And I don't actually know what, any research on the mind of the primary voter tells us. Do you?
[00:09:14] Rosie Campbell: Actually, I have to admit that I don't know the distinction there. We can only look at who they vote for.
[00:09:19] Alan Renwick: And that's a really interesting comment because I was wondering when you said that we know that Republican voters are less likely to favour women candidates? Is the evidence for that based simply on who they in fact vote for? Or are we doing kind of experimental evidence here to see what candidates they in fact vote for if you do a more kind of controlled comparison of candidates?
[00:09:38] Rosie Campbell: The evidence is a mixture of both sort of experimental, hypothetical situations and observational data about real world elections. And as I said, it fairly small these days, there used to be huge hostility to women candidates, now there's a residual small disadvantage amongst Republican voters and not amongst Democrat voters and the evidence is that it's still there, but it's diminished massively in size.
[00:10:01] Alan Renwick: So we have these kind of interactions between institutional factors and attitudinal stuff going on, and it's the way these two play relative to each other that shapes the outcomes. Another kind of institutional factor that you mention in the article is the core of the electoral system itself. And it's certainly long been argued that first pass the post electoral systems, which basically we can say the Presidential election system is, are hostile to women they make it harder for women to gain office. Is that a kind of relevant factor here as well?
[00:10:39] Joni Lovenduski: I'm not sure, and I'm not sure I still believe that first past the post does necessarily make it harder for women. I think it used to make it harder for women to make careers in the first place and get into the pool of entry. But over time, as women have marched through the political parties, this has, I think, shifted. There's only a few examples globally, so it's very, very difficult to get very far with that, I suppose.
[00:11:01] Rosie Campbell: I suppose one of the things that makes a huge difference in terms of that cohort of women politicians, at other levels of elected office, is that in many countries around the world, parties on the left, the centre-left have used quotas in order to increase the representation of women and of course, that hasn't happened in the US. So even though there are high representation of women among Democrat elected officials and Republicans, that's still considerably lower than the equivalent representation in, say, the UK Labour Party or the Australian Labor Party.
[00:11:36] Alan Renwick: So the pool of potential applicants or candidates for the role of President is more male skewed?
[00:11:43] Rosie Campbell: Well, I don't know that that's quite the way it works in that recent Presidents aren't always people who have previously held elected office. So
[00:11:52] Alan Renwick: Yes
[00:11:52] Rosie Campbell: There are other ways in, but I do think in terms of having the mobilisation of women normalised and mainstream within the party, that is an issue.
[00:12:03] Joni Lovenduski: There's also sequencing of once one party does it it puts pressure on the other parties to come up with some mechanism or other to compete in that way if they think it's important. Not all parties will do it, but most of them do.
[00:12:17] Alan Renwick: Okay. So, so far we're exploring underlying theory and general patterns about the sorts of barriers that women face in getting elected as President in the United States. How could women overcome these various barriers? You talk in the article about various scenarios in which we can imagine a woman potentially getting through and getting elected. One of these scenarios is simply a woman becomes the candidate for President for one of the main parties and that woman is elected, but there are other potential routes as well.
[00:12:48] Joni Lovenduski: Yes. I think we can rule out that scenario for now.
[00:12:51] Alan Renwick: Do you want to just pursue that a little bit further? Because some people might say Hillary Clinton, she did win the popular vote in 2016.
[00:12:57] Joni Lovenduski: Yes. We
[00:12:57] Alan Renwick: and Kamala Harris
[00:12:58] Joni Lovenduski: Yes. Haven't mentioned, we haven't mentioned the electoral college actually, in terms of the distortions of electoral systems.
[00:13:03] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Why is the electoral college relevant?
[00:13:05] Joni Lovenduski: Well, as far as I know, there's no, nothing in particular about the electoral college that's anti-women. It's just pretty anti-democracy, I suppose, is what is, what's wrong with it.
[00:13:14] Alan Renwick: I suppose some people would argue that it, because it favours small states and the small states on average, are a bit more conservative than
[00:13:22] Joni Lovenduski: Well, yeah. I think what they really mean is it favours Republicans.
[00:13:25] Alan Renwick: Why?
[00:13:26] Joni Lovenduski: Because small states, which happened to be largely or were until a few months ago, largely Republican leaning. By small, I mean small in population.
[00:13:35] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:13:36] Joni Lovenduski: Largely Republican leaning are overrepresented in the Senate in particular as a result of this electoral college. Yeah. And there were also some other things about it so that the way in which the electoral college vote is determined actually varies quite a bit by state, and I would hazard a guess that the overwhelmingly Republican small population states have rather less open and democratic ways of making those determinations.
[00:14:05] Alan Renwick: Okay. I've allowed us to get very slightly sidetracked. So you made a very interesting statement there that you think is very unlikely that we're going to see a woman elected through that kind of first route anytime soon. Why do you think that?
[00:14:20] Joni Lovenduski: Because it's never happened.
[00:14:21] Rosie Campbell: Well, also because the example that you give in 2016, a lot has happened since then.
[00:14:28] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:14:28] Rosie Campbell: You know the environment has got so much worse. If we look at indicators about online hostility towards politicians, harassment, how that moves into real world harassment, intimidation, abuse, and all of these things have grown in many countries, including the US and they have a particular gendered nature. Women are more likely to receive rape threats, sexualized threats. And then of course the rise of the manosphere of the kind of really anti-gender equality rhetoric that was not the mainstream 10 years ago. All of these things make us think that a woman being successful at the next Presidential election would probably take a miracle. But, you know, really strange, unusual events do happen. So we don't want to rule it out completely, but we are not jumping around with optimism that we're about to see more progress towards better representation of women in politics as part of that a women President of the US.
[00:15:26] Joni Lovenduski: Well, steering back to the original question, the rise of the manosphere, the increased anti-gender rhetoric and actually high level, well-funded organisation, often funded from the United States is now a factor in the democratic politics of a very large number of countries, certainly in Europe.
[00:15:47] Alan Renwick: Scenario one then you think very unlikely to happen that a woman simply gets elected through the direct route. Scenario two, which you called the dead body route is the route by which a woman is elected as Vice President but then the President either dies in office or resigns or is forced out. I guess you see that as potentially more likely?
[00:16:11] Joni Lovenduski: Well, it's slightly more likely if only because a few more women have been nominated as Vice President and it's a fantastically important trope in some popular political films and film series about the United States, but it still isn't very likely. The closest that we've ever seen is Harris taking over from Biden's nomination without going through the primary route in 2024. It's theoretically possible, but historically we can't find examples.
[00:16:45] Rosie Campbell: I think the difficulty is that you are much more likely to have a woman Vice President on the Democrat side, and yet we've already described this issue that women Democrats are going to be considered to be more liberal than a male Democrat candidate. And so that might make it difficult with swing voters and especially in this toxic environment we've described where they are going to be the target for absolutely vociferous attacks if they're considered to be too feminist or too woke or whatever the rhetoric is. That's very difficult for a women candidate to rebut.
[00:17:20] Alan Renwick: Have we got to a stage where it's hard for the Democrats to put forward an all-male ticket. I mean, the last three Democratic tickets have both had a woman and a man. Is that a reason for at least a degree of hope?
[00:17:35] Rosie Campbell: I think that's a really good point that the scenario two might happen rather than from obviously if Democrats are being motivated by electoral success I think it's unlikely they will choose a woman candidate for President next time, but I think in terms of their base, not having a woman as the Vice Presidential candidate would be unacceptable. So I think you're right that increases the probability of scenario two. Although of course we don't wish or hope for any dead bodies in politics.
[00:18:07] Alan Renwick: You have an actual dead body scenario, which is the one that we've just been discussing there, scenario two, but you also have what you call the political dead body scenario, which is essentially that one of the parties is squabbling between different male candidates and a woman manages to sneak through. It's maybe the Theresa May scenario for becoming President. Is that fair?
[00:18:30] Joni Lovenduski: Yeah. Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, and even dear old, Liz Truss.
[00:18:33] Rosie Campbell: None of them were considered to be the main contenders they all basically snuck through over the bodies of fighting men. Margaret Thatcher was considered at the time having a woman, Prime Minister, was widely ridiculed, let alone one who was the daughter of a grocer and she was underestimated, and she was highly organised, and she managed to climb over all the men much to their horror. And I think we all know the story of Theresa May and David Cameron stepping down over Brexit. She played her cards very close to her chest. She was remain supporting, but very quietly so, and was able to step into the fractious party at that very difficult moment when Michael Gove had stabbed Boris Johnson violently in the back. So she was very much able to navigate through the melee that she was surrounded by and then, Joni, maybe you would like to tell us about the inspirational story of Liz Truss's ascendency to Prime Minister.
[00:19:30] Joni Lovenduski: I can't remember it.
[00:19:33] Rosie Campbell: Well, she was, Liz Truss was behind. It was only when they got to the members that Liz Truss was the favourite candidate.
[00:19:41] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:19:41] Rosie Campbell: Amongst the party elite she was never the preferred candidate, and it was the party members that chose Liz Truss and at the time there was some speculation and there was certainly media coverage talking about Rishi Sunak not being really British or not being really English, which I found quite disgusting to be honest. But I do wonder whether the third woman Prime Minister, was more acceptable to some members than perhaps somebody whose commitment to the country was being questioned. I hope that's not the case, but she certainly wasn't the preferred candidate until we got to that moment. So all three of them, it's not something you'd have put money on, which is why I suppose we can't rule out there some metaphorical dead body scenario will happen in the US.
[00:20:24] Alan Renwick: And what is the kind of equivalent process that leads to that outcome in the United States? Because of course, there's not that kind of establishment lock that the MPs have in the UK in the initial process of selecting a Prime Minister.
[00:20:35] Joni Lovenduski: Well, it would have to be after an election or maybe even as we saw in 2024 during an electoral campaign when something happens to the male Presidential candidate, or something happens to the male President. And then my understanding of the American Constitution, which is far from perfect, as I understand it, under almost all circumstances, the Vice President takes over.
[00:21:00] Rosie Campbell: But that's scenario one. How could scenario two.
[00:21:03] Joni Lovenduski: Sorry.
[00:21:05] Rosie Campbell: So that's literal dead body. What about metaphorical dead body?
[00:21:09] Joni Lovenduski: Good question.
[00:21:11] Rosie Campbell: I think what you're saying, it still applies. There has to be some big cock-up on a catastrophic scale.
[00:21:17] Alan Renwick: I guess the Kamala Harris process by which she became the candidate is kind of a version of scenario three in that after the primary process was over she was brought in at the last stage.
[00:21:30] Joni Lovenduski: Yes.
[00:21:30] Alan Renwick: And potentially you have a contested convention scenario as well where you could get a woman coming through at the last moment to be nominated because there was deadlock between different
[00:21:44] Joni Lovenduski: Yeah. But it was actually all done and dusted in that particular case.
[00:21:47] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:21:47] Joni Lovenduski: But yes, that's one way, that's one way it could work. What I was actually struggling to think about was the kind of squabbling that gets a President impeached without quite impeaching the Vice President at the same time. That would be another version of it.
[00:21:59] Rosie Campbell: Or somebody's past life coming to the fore during the primaries, and then being ousted. I think there are various ways that a woman who's considered an unlikely choice could come to the fore.
[00:22:12] Joni Lovenduski: Yeah.
[00:22:14] Rosie Campbell: And certainly some of the politicians around the world that we are all witnessing at the moment are quite capable of revealing some of their own political dead bodies in the background that could create this kind of chaos that would allow women politicians to come through I think.
[00:22:29] Joni Lovenduski: But I think what, at least my understanding of what Alan's asking us is about the difference between party government and Presidential government and the American model, and then we're back to the outlier. It's the way, the whole way that the parties work and cohere in systems of party government is different.
[00:22:49] Alan Renwick: Yeah. That's very interesting. So, through various routes, it might be possible for a woman to become President. Not, you think very likely in the way that we would really want, just through the direct woman actually being elected for this office, but potentially through some kind of other process and you also talk in the article about the kind of woman who might be elected and one interesting thing, given the conversation that we've already had is that you suggest that it's actually more likely that there would be a Republican elected as a woman rather than a Democrat.
[00:23:21] Rosie Campbell: We are not the first to say this. I mean, Bill Clinton said this recently. For all the reasons we've already outlined for a woman to be number one on the ticket for the Democrats I think is less likely in the near future, given recent history.
[00:23:37] Alan Renwick: So partly just for that recent history, but also a woman will be perceived as being more left-wing and therefore will struggle to capture centrist voters, swing voters?
[00:23:46] Rosie Campbell: Yes, realistically to take voters away from the contemporary Republicans the Democrat candidate needs to be someone who will appeal to that, to the marginal supporters of that party.
[00:23:58] Alan Renwick: So we need a woman somehow to get through the Republican nomination process and then potentially she has quite a strong chance actually, because she would do a better job than many Republicans of capturing swing voters in the centre.
[00:24:12] Rosie Campbell: I think that's the ironic thing.
[00:24:13] Joni Lovenduski: That's the, that's the essential argument. I mean, we realise it's a little thin.
[00:24:20] Alan Renwick: You describe this concept that we are talking about here as the gender heuristic hypothesis.
[00:24:25] Joni Lovenduski: Yes.
[00:24:26] Alan Renwick: This idea that voters use candidates' gender as a shortcut for working out where they might sit politically.
[00:24:33] Joni Lovenduski: Yes.
[00:24:33] Alan Renwick: You know, this is grounded in lots of evidence. This is not thin, this is serious political science that we're drawing.
[00:24:38] Rosie Campbell: Yes. But we are much more likely to use those kind of shortcuts when we don't know much about the candidate.
[00:24:45] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:24:45] Rosie Campbell: So, you know, a lot of these experiments about the gender heuristic is in a context where they might be hypothetical or they might not be well known. The more and more we find about candidates, actually the less those personal characteristics come to the fore. But of course, to make a difference in a close election, you only need a small number of individuals to have that kind of bias, really, assuming that somebody's gender reflects their politics in some way. So yeah, in the margins. It could really matter.
[00:25:12] Joni Lovenduski: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It could matter in the margins, but it could also matter in terms of what you have to do to succeed in the candidature system, in the Republican Party versus the Democrat Party. And one of the things that really struck me after the election, talking to my friends in the United States who were devastated, that one of the problems was that the voters didn't have a chance to get to know Harris. We know that she was suppressed as a politician by the Biden White House. And she didn't come to the attention of voters until quite late in the process. And for some reason that I really almost failed to understand, voters felt that they needed at least a couple more years of watching her to get to know her and that was a strong argument after the election and another strong argument was that she ran a terrible campaign. We didn't see very much of while she was running the campaign, but afterwards, oh gosh, looking back on it, she ran a bad campaign. There were all kinds of things going on about it that I'm not sure were sensible or accurate.
[00:26:19] Rosie Campbell: But there's also an aspect around how we've discussed already how gender has become so much more politicised. 10, 15 years ago, I think there was a sense that many people, many sensible people thought that gender equality was on a sort of inexorable march and we were moving beyond sort of massive tensions around gender. Well, obviously we've talked about how much that's changed and gender has become so politicised in the US that I think for a woman to be a successful Presidential candidate she's got to traverse this incredibly difficult set of different constraints, and one of them is she needs to be seen to be feminine. She probably needs to look attractive. She needs to represent herself as a mother and as a traditional woman at the same time as wielding power and military strength and might. And somehow I think that there is a model for a Republican woman to do that, that perhaps might be harder for a Democrat woman. I think Sarah Palin.
[00:27:20] Joni Lovenduski: I am thinking Sarah Palin and I think that's really important and it's really hard to nail down that the powerful woman mother warrior image, the Thatcher type of politician image has got to be an easier role to adopt in the Republican Party that has quite special ideas about power that I think can accommodate the kind of mother, woman led images of power as well.
[00:27:51] Alan Renwick: Is there any chance that Trump's current antics might lead to a change in the kind of leader that people want and that people might actually think, gosh, this chest beating, power hungry approach to leadership actually.
[00:28:08] Rosie Campbell: I mean, I think if you look at opinion polls, I think yes. Isn't there evidence that Trump is extremely unpopular? And so to what extent that will manifest itself in a change of direction and a movement away from this so-called strong man politics. We're not very good at predicting the future. I hope that our odds that we are saying it will take a miracle are wrong and the sort of green shoots of democratic renewal that could be starting to spring forth, that is happening, I suppose right at this moment.
[00:28:40] Joni Lovenduski: Well, is there evidence now that women are less likely to support Trump than men, has that evidence changed?
[00:28:48] Rosie Campbell: No, but I think the thing is that.
[00:28:50] Joni Lovenduski: Have they got, has it gotten worse?
[00:28:51] Rosie Campbell: I think the gender gap often looks slightly different between elections and actually on elections and then during elections. And we know that the gender gap was very present in the last election with more women supporting Harris and more men supporting Trump. The only thing is, it was about the same as it was in the previous few elections. But I think what's happened with the politics of division and polarisation is that people will vote for a candidate they really don't like and hold their nose because they so loath the other side. And I think the, perhaps moderation that you are describing, Alan, requires more individuals to think, well, actually, what are the characteristics of the individual office holder that I would like to support? And maybe I'm willing to support someone from an alternative party if they will uphold democratic principles and so on.
[00:29:40] Joni Lovenduski: There, there is a case that this government is corrupt. It is anti-democratic. It is helping itself to the public purse in extraordinary ways. It is defying Congress and overcoming checks and balances that we thought had been in place for a long time. That might very well affect how people will want to vote next time. My understanding, however, of the way opinion is working is that it's not so much that people are not horrified by the possibility that the things that the President has been accused of, he's actually done. It's that his hardcore supporters just don't believe it.
[00:30:22] Alan Renwick: Final question then we must wrap up. People who would like the United States to join all those countries that have managed to elect a woman as head of government. Is there anything they can do? Is there anything they can push for that would change the system, that would change the institutional structures that would change public attitudes that, that would make it more likely?
[00:30:45] Rosie Campbell: Well, we talked about the role of party finance and it is out of control. Not only is it out of control in the US, it's affecting all the other democracies in the world. You know, the influence of a small number of extremely wealthy individuals on politics. Democracy is supposed to be about the majority, not about a small number of extremely wealthy influences, completely corrupting the democratic process and I think that is the number one priority that would make a difference, both to this question and a number of other really enormously important questions facing us.
[00:31:21] Joni Lovenduski: I think I agree with that. It's not just the role of money in politics and the way it's become more and more distorted, it's also the way in which money is transcending political systems, transcending national borders, being concentrated in fewer and fewer and fewer and less and less reliable hands. And, as far as I can see, and particularly from looking at the at the anti-gender movements and their financing, this is money that actually is not being used to promote women. And it may very well be used to attack women.
[00:31:55] Alan Renwick: Well, thank you so much Rosie and Joni, you have given us a lot of depressing, uh, thoughts here, but also maybe some sources of hope. And also you have illustrated the ways in which proper political science research can be applied to a real world and very important questions so thank you.
[00:32:13] Rosie Campbell: All the hope came from you.
[00:32:16] Alan Renwick: Uh, is that true?
[00:32:18] Joni Lovenduski: I thought you were sounding pretty. Oh.
[00:32:20] Rosie Campbell: It's only because he, he cheered me up a bit and it's gone now.
[00:32:26] Alan Renwick: We've been discussing the article, what will it take for a woman to become President of the United States, published in the Political Quarterly and currently available free of charge on Early View on the Political Quarterly website. We will, as ever, put the details in the show notes for this episode, and let me just remind you that the political quarterly, like this podcast, seeks to make the best research in political science accessible to wider audience. Do go to its website to explore recent articles on issues as diverse as local government reform in England, the nature of power in Turkey, and the politics and policy of housing.
And do also check out our own recent episode with Daniel Hind on his recent PQ article on the nature of the UK Constitution. This is our final episode in the current series. We're off for our little Easter break over the next few weeks, but we will be back at the end of April with more cutting edge research on politics and policy.
We have episodes cooking on topics such as justice in dementia care, LGBT activism in Zimbabwe and government and transparency in China. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts or whatever podcast provider you use, and while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too.
I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham, our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.