Two’s a Crowd: Women Candidates in Concurrent Elections

Most research on evaluations of women candidates considers single elections in isolation. Using two Dynamic Process Tracing experiments, this article examines whether voters alter their evaluations of women candidates, as well as their willingness to learn about and vote for them, based on the presence of other women running simultaneously in concurrent contests. We find a consistent pattern in which female candidates are not adversely affected when they are the only woman on a voter’s ballot, but they are disadvantaged when other women appear on the same party’s ballot in other races. This effect is more prominent for women in lower offices: women running for the House of Representatives are more disadvantaged than women running for higher offices are.