Katelyn Stauffer

• Professor (Assistant) at University of South Carolina

Federal law clerks play a vital role in the development and implementation of the law. Yet, women remain underrepresented in these positions. We suggest that one reason for this underrepresentation may be differences in hiring practices among judges in the federal judiciary. Specifically, we hypothesize that male judges and conservative judges may...

Governments rely on citizen compliance to implement policies. Yet, in the current climate where citizens express low levels of trust in government, gaining compliance can prove challenging. Scholarship suggests other factors that might promote compliance even in the absence of trust. We examine two: expertise and descriptive representation across r...

Law clerks hold immense responsibilities and exert influence over the judges they work with. However, women remain underrepresented in these positions. We argue that one reason for this underrepresentation is that – like potential political candidates – female law students may have lower levels of ambition compared to men. Using a survey of student...

While widespread agreement that policing in the United States needs to be reformed arose in the summer of 2020, little consensus about specific reforms was reached. A common theme that arose, however, is a general lack of trust in the police. One response has been to increase agency diversity in terms of both officer race and officer gender. Howeve...

There is an optimism that a growing number of women in political office will reorient the focus of international politics towards more social and humanitarian issues. One basis for this optimism are arguments that women legislators hold distinct foreign policy preferences and act on them to affect changes in policy. However, we know little about ge...

Some narratives claim that American presidents can increase their approval ratings by nominating members of underrepresented groups to positions within the judiciary. Indeed, public opinion polls frequently show that members of the public think presidents should consider individuals from underrepresented groups when making judicial appointments. De...

This article discusses two interview assignments used in a class on political representation. Instructor observations, as well as student-provided survey data, indicate the assignment was a successful learning tool. Students who provided feedback on the assignment reported high levels of enjoyment and learning. Moreover, students reported higher le...

Theoretical work argues that citizens gain important symbolic benefits when they are represented by gender-inclusive institutions. Despite the centrality of this claim in the literature, empirical evidence is mixed. In this article, I argue that these mixed findings are—in part—because many Americans hold beliefs about women’s inclusion that are ou...

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...

Political scientists have increasingly begun to study how citizen characteristics shape whether—and how—they interact with the police. Less is known about how officer characteristics shape these interactions. In this article, we examine how one officer characteristic—officer sex—shapes the nature of police-initiated contact with citizens. Drawing o...

Despite a growing body of literature examining the consequences of women’s inclusion among lobbyists, our understanding of the factors that lead to women’s initial emergence in the profession is limited. In this study, we propose that gender diversity among legislative targets incentivizes organized interests to hire women lobbyists, and thus helps...

Overall women turn out to vote at a higher rate than men, yet few studies have examined the consistency of this finding across American electoral contexts. We use voter file data to compare turnout for men and women at the national-, state-, and district-level from 2008 to 2018, focusing on variation in the gender turnout gap by electoral competiti...

Popular commentary surrounding Michelle Obama focuses on the symbolic importance of her tenure as the nation's first African American first lady. Despite these assertions, relatively few studies have examined public opinion toward Michelle Obama and the extent to which race and gender influenced public evaluations of her. Even fewer studies have ex...

Evidence on whether there is a gender affinity effect in US elections is mixed. In this article, we develop a theory of when gender affinity effects will be present and when they will be absent. Crucial to our theory is electoral context. In nonpartisan contexts, we argue that candidate sex serves as a representational cue and will lead to gender a...

Extant research on public support for judicial nominees finds that ideological congruence with the nominee is the most important factor in an individual’s decision to support a nominee. The research presented in this article develops the theory that for individuals from underrepresented groups, a shared descriptive identity with the nominee will mo...