This chapter focuses on the relationships among gender, party, recruitment, and political ambition. First, we focus on potential candidates’ partisan identity. The pool of female potential candidates – like the population of female elected officials – is dominated by Democrats. Yet we find that neither party affiliation nor partisan fervor affects interest in running for office. Still, political parties – through the recruitment process – play a critical role in the candidate emergence process. Here, our analysis highlights one of the book’s central findings: Women are significantly less likely than men to receive encouragement to run for office from party leaders, elected officials, and political activists. Despite the emergence of #MeToo, heightened public discourse about the need to elect more women, and efforts by women’s organizations to push back against Donald Trump, our results are not markedly different from twenty years earlier. The masculinized ethos that continues to shroud party organizations results in a smaller proportion of women than men recruited to enter the electoral arena.

This chapter focuses on the measurement of positive partisanship. For that purpose, I introduce the reader to the (positive) partisan identity scale that captures crucial components of partisan identity such as partisans’ sense of belonging to the in-party, feeling connected to other party members, as well as the emotional significance of the party membership.

In this chapter, I offer a thorough review of the scholarship that investigates the impact of partisan identity (i.e., expressive partisanship) on political behavior, including political attitudes, turnout, voting, and other forms of political participation.

In this chapter, I introduce instrumental and expressive partisanship as well as its their different predictions for political behavior.

I introduce a multi-item index that captures negative partisan identity. Utilizing this new scale, I demonstrate the magnitude of negative partisan identity among the electorate in the United States and in four European multi-party systems.

Much of the modern study of mass political behavior in the United States often returns to three books released during the Eisenhower administration. Voting by Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee (1954) approached its subject from a sociological perspective. Anthony Downs’ (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy is the foundational study of political decision-making from the rational-choice perspective. The American Voter by Campbell et al. (1960) pioneered the use of the mass survey for political research. These approaches to studying politics are ubiquitous now, but, at the time, these were pathbreaking methodological advances. The authors of these books were to the study of politics what Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley were to popular music.