(Reuters) – Like her or not, Hillary Clinton may be a cure for political apathy
America is often described as an increasingly divided nation, and when it comes to Hillary Rodham Clinton, that couldn’t be truer. A recent poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News found her negative rating to be just two points less than her positive rating, at 41 and 43 percent respectively.
The point, though, is that people care about Clinton — and that’s usually the case whenever there’s a woman on the ballot, according to a new study.
Researchers at Arizona State University reported a demonstrable link between women senators and women’s political engagement. When women voters are represented by senators of their gender, they are more likely to vote, donate to a candidate, belong to a political organization, or get other people “to vote for a particular candidate.”
This is all good news as, if you take voter turnout as a measure, Americans are awfully apathetic about politics. The US ranks 120th out of 169 countries when it comes to voter turnout. Just 54% of eligible voters showed up at the polls on election day in 2012, and in the 2010 midterm elections, turnout was a dismal 37%.
The apathy problem is exacerbated by the fact that women, who represent half of the population, are less informed about and invested in politics than men. “Even at the start of the 21st century,” write Kim Fridkin and Patrick Kenney, the authors of the report, “women know far less about their senators than men.” Other studies show that women tend to be less informed about national and international politics than men are.
It is easy to see why that is. Just 18.5 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives are filled by women (that’s 99 out of 535), and only 24 percent of state legislators are women. There are currently 3 women state Governors in the US, and over 20 states have never elected a woman to the Governor’s mansion. Iowa and Mississippi have never sent a single woman to Washington as part of a congressional delegation – ever. In the 225 year history of the United States Supreme Court, precisely 4 women have served as justices. And, of course, women are 0 in 44 in the executive branch. The numbers are grim, and they appear to have stalled.
While the scale of American political apathy, especially among women, is high, a Clinton win could go a long way to closing the gender gap in political engagement.
There is a downside, however.
Women’s participation in politics is often followed by a political and cultural backlash. We got a taste of that during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential run in 2008. The sexist tone of the commentary about Clinton that year has been catalogued many times: detractors and supporters alike discussed her hair, her wrinkles, her laugh, her clothing, her emotions, her husband. Anything, it felt like, but her policies and capacity to lead.
So, to what extent are gains made by female politicians negated by bias in the coverage about them? That remains to be seen. And, who knows, perhaps a nasty backlash is just what it takes to galvanize the politically aloof to be more involved. That certainly has been the case in previous cases of high-profile sexism at home and abroad.
And, speaking of unintended consequences of a Hillary campaign, one might be that it could actually increase political apathy– among men.
A 2014 study published in American Politics Research, found that “When the candidate from their own party is female, men are less likely to express an interest in participating in the election and more likely to say they are not sure who they would vote for in the election.”
