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A conference paper related to the significance of women's political and social standing and public policy is to be presented at the Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association on August 29-31, 2014. Topics discussed include theological principles related to the need for male leadership, views of Beverly LaHaye, founder of conservative women's group Concerned Women for America (CWA), on the primacy of motherhood, and understanding of motherhood by conservative women leaders.

Despite high success rates when they run for office, women are still underrepresented in federal, state and local elective office. Past research has explored factors that contribute to the scarcity of female candidates on the state and federal level, but little attention has been paid to the local level. This paper begins to fill that gap by exploring electoral and fundraising patterns in mayoral and council elections in seven cities. We find that, similar to state and federal elections, women do just as well as men when they seek office but fewer women run. Further, of the women who do mount campaigns their backgrounds are quite similar to male candidates. As for fundraising, female candidates receive contributions from the same sources as male candidates and in comparable amounts. In general, we found few differences between male and female candidates. These findings highlight the importance of self-selection in the decision to run for office and informs the body of research on why more women do not run for elective office. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant body of work documents and explains the gender gap in voting preferences between women and men. This gap-the difference in the proportion of women and the proportion of men voting for any given candidate-has been evident in every presidential election since 1980, ranging in exit polls from a low of 4% in 1992 to a high of 11% in 1996. A gender gap has also been apparent in a majority of races for U.S. Senate and gubernatorial seats in recent elections. In all presidential elections as well as most other elections where a gender gap has been observed, proportionately more women than men have supported the Democratic candidate.Because women have been more likely than men to vote for Democratic candidates in most elections, much of the existing research has focused on examining various explanations for why women are more Democratic. In analyzing how and why women are different from men politically, this research, explicitly or implicitly, has tended to place Democratic women at the center of analysis. By concentrating on the question of why women vote more Democratic than men, researchers have overlooked the sizeable proportion of the female electorate that votes Republican and have thus neglected large proportions of women voters. In so doing, they have also inadvertently have left unexplored questions about how women who vote Republican may differ from both the men who vote Republican and the women who vote Democratic. In this paper, we reverse the focus of previous research, looking at the women who vote Republican and centering them in our analysis. We explore both the characteristics of the Republican women voters and the issues and concerns that motivate their political behavior. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]