Organizational Identity Signaling: How Women’s Political Organizations Influence Candidate Diversity

Abstract

How do signals sent by women’s political organizations influence the diversity of who seeks them out? Women’s Candidate Training Organizations (WCTOs) are a vast network of political organizations operating in nearly all U.S. states, putting thousands of hours and millions of dollars into recruiting women candidates. These organizations provide an ideal case for understanding the impact of Organizational Identity Signaling. Political organizations vary in the signals they send about whose experiences will be centered in their programming, shaping who sees themselves within political spaces and gets the institutional support to participate in politics as a result. Using interviews with 57 Candidate Training Organizations, I provide evidence that while WCTOs nearly universally center and address women’s material and psychological barriers to running, they are less likely to focus on barriers faced by non-white candidates than equivalent non-gendered organizations. Using an original online survey experiment, I demonstrate the effect of these gendered and racial signals on women’s political ambition and its precedents, across race and ethnicity. This research has implications for understanding the role of identity-specific interest groups is shaping descriptive representation.