Monica C Schneider

Miami University | MU · Department of Political Science

This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...

This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...

The goal of this chapter is to underscore how political psychology contributes to our understandings of how gender, a social construction tied to power, influences how one understands and experiences politics. We present theoretical frameworks for understanding gender and gender socialization, key measures in the field, and review empirical tests o...

As academic mothers of children with disabilities, the authors are stretched between our roles as scholar, teacher, mentor, parent, caregiver, advocate, and partner (Good et al., 2017). In this chapter, the authors draw on personal and professional experiences to discuss the benefits and barriers to an academic career while simultaneously parenting...

Elected women can inspire other women to emerge as candidates, but little research has explored how individual women respond to political role models. Psychology scholarship suggests two factors important to role model influence on career decisions (like candidate emergence). First, role models affect behavior when they seem attainable. Second, mot...

The COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to examine public opinion regarding the allocation of scarce medical resources. In this conjoint experiment on a nationally representative sample of US adults, we examined how a range of patient characteristics affect respondents' willingness to allocate a ventilator between two patients with equal likeli...

Role Congruity Theory (RCT) broadly suggests that when women step into leadership roles, they violate the expectations of their role as women. This article uses RCT to develop and directly test theories related to which types of gender stereotype role violations might cause voter bias toward women politicians. We argue and find that voter prejudice...

Social role theory provides a framework to help understand the complexity of gender in the political sphere. We demonstrate how SRT both helps to explain extant research findings and to generate future research that will help explain the complicated ways in which gender shapes U.S. politics. This article considers two broad categories of behavior:...

This research explores how poor socioeconomic conditions affect trait evaluations and support for Black political candidates compared to White candidates. Previous research finds that female leaders are perceived as more likely to bring change, which is desired under declining conditions, and typical preferences for male leaders are diminished duri...

Traveling to academic conferences to present research and network is essential for scholars to achieve success in the academy. Scholars with family obligations face barriers to participating in conferences, partly because most regional and national conferences are not organized to be family-friendly. While balancing travel to academic conferences w...

Political institutions in the U.S. continue to be dominated by men. Media and scholarly accounts often focus on how demand factors, such as political parties and elite networks, and supply factors, such as women’s self-confidence and political interest, combine to depress women’s representation. Yet, we know little about whether these narratives ma...

In this article, we study the interaction between candidate gender and party on voter evaluations. Theories from psychology are the basis for our hypotheses about how candidate identities such as party and gender combine: Party might dominate certain evaluations, gender might dominate others, or gender and party might work in either an additive or...

Campaigns invoke identity appeals to specific groups of voters, including women. To understand whether these campaign appeals matter in affecting voters’ choices, we must better understand how women respond to these appeals, the causal mechanism driving responses, and whether male and female candidates can use these ads with equal effectiveness. Us...

We provide a novel approach to understanding the political ambition gap between men and women by examining perceptions of the role of politician. Across three studies, we find that political careers are viewed as fulfilling power-related goals, such as self-promotion and competition. We connect these goals to a tolerance for interpersonal conflict...

In this article, we develop an argument for better integrating the political science curricula on methodology with gender politics. We demonstrate how these two areas are presently distinct and nonoverlapping with an analysis of commonly used methodology and women and politics textbooks. We examine the implications of these results for female stude...

Citizens' personal identity groups exert a powerful influence over their preferences, particularly when their identity-related interests are perceived to be under threat. In American political rhetoric, parents are an identity group frequently targeted with fear and anxiety in the hopes of attracting support for particular policies. In this paper,...

As a result of changes in the campaign landscape, candidates have several strategic options available to them, particularly when considering how to respond to voters’ gender stereotypes. The goal of this paper is to understand candidates’ use of strategies based on gender stereotypes by emphasizing either particular issues or particular traits that...

American government textbooks signal to students the kinds of topics that are important and, by omission, the kinds of topics that are not important to the discipline of political science. This article examines portrayals of women in introductory American politics textbooks through a quantitative content analysis of 22 widely used texts. We find th...

One explanation for the dearth of women in elected office is that voters stereotype candidates based on their gender. Research in this vein often assumes that female candidates will be stereotyped similarly to women (e.g., as compassionate) and measures stereotypes as such. We question this assumption, proposing instead that female politicians cons...

A candidate's gender affects vote choice, but the manner in which candidates can influence the effects of their gender is not well understood. I address candidates’ strategies based on gender stereotypes, that is, how voters are influenced by rhetoric that is either consistent (gender-reinforcing) or inconsistent (gender-bending) with gender stereo...

Within the subfields of political psychology and the study of gender, the introduction of new data collection efforts, methodologies, and theoretical approaches are transforming our understandings of these two fields and the places at which they intersect. In this article we present an overview of the research that was presented at a National Scien...

This symposium consists of three papers written after a small mentoring conference, New Research on Gender in Political Psychology , which was held in New Brunswick, New Jersey, March 4–5, 2011. As junior scholars, we received a grant from the National Science Foundation (#SES-1014854) to organize a conference for the purposes of mentoring pretenur...

Quantitative Literacy is a competence as important as general literacy; yet, while writing requirements are seemingly ubiquitous across the college curriculum, quantitative literacy requirements are not. The current project provides preliminary evidence of the reliability and validity of a quantitative literacy measure suitable for delivery online....

The current research explores role congruity processes from a new vantage point by investigating how the need for change might shift gender-based leadership preferences. According to role congruity theory, favorability toward leaders results from alignment between what is desired in a leadership role and the characteristics stereotypically ascribed...

Do voters have the same stereotypes of Black politicians that they have of Black people in general? We argue that common stereotypes of Blacks (e.g., lazy, violent) may not apply to perceptions of Black politicians. Instead, we hypothesize that Black politicians are a unique subtype of the larger group Blacks, different enough to warrant their own...

Men and women tend to espouse different political attitudes, as widely noted by both journalists and social scientists. A deeper understanding of why and when gender gaps exist is necessary because at least some gender differences in the political realm are both pervasive and impactful. In this article, we apply a social role theory framework to un...

Much research suggests that political experts are more likely to structure attitudes toward different issues in an ideologically consistent fashion. Based on recent studies of motivational influences on social cognition, we hypothesize that only experts with a high need to evaluate—a strong motivation to establish evaluations of social objects—may...

Many political science departments offer, and increasing numbers of them require, undergraduate research methods courses. At the same time, studies cite high levels of student anxiety about such courses. Utilizing survey data from both students who take and faculty who teach methods, we conduct an analysis that compares the barriers students and fa...

This research examined the hypothesis that gender gaps in voting stem from differences in the extent to which men and women agree with candidates' issue stances. Two initial experiments portraying candidates by their sex and attitudes and a third experiment that also included information about political party produced the predicted attitudinal gend...

The goal of this paper is to assess current measures of female politician stereotypes related to traits. We assess the theory of stereotypes that female politician stereotypes overlap with woman stereotypes (e.g., warm, nice, empathetic as in Deaux & Lewis, 1984) and whether other traits, such as negative traits found to describe women leaders, suc...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.