February 26, 2008
Palmer’s research explores political glass ceiling
In hindsight, it’s clear that Barbara Palmer was destined to study the nexus of women and politics.
“My earliest memories are of my mother bringing me to League of Women Voters meetings when I was really little,” the SPA professor says. “I remember the women sitting in a circle and talking about politics. My mom has always been very interested in politics and is still very involved in politics.”
Growing up in an enlightened home in suburban St. Paul, Minn., Palmer was blissfully ignorant of the inequities women faced in society, especially in the world of politics.
“It wasn’t until I got to college that I became more aware of the lack of women,” she says. “I grew up in a household where I was always told, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ I didn’t even recognize that there were barriers and that women were excluded historically, traditionally, from certain roles. It wasn’t until I left . . . that I started looking around and thinking, huh?”
That simple puzzlement sparked Palmer’s life work. An expert in women in politics, Palmer has just released the second edition of a book she coauthored, Breaking the Political Glass Ceiling: Women and Congressional Elections.
The new edition features chapters exploring the differences in election rates between Democratic and Republican women in Congress, and dissecting the presidential candidacy of New York senator Hillary Clinton.
“It’s incredibly inspiring that we have a woman who is running, and it’s incredibly inspiring that we have an African American who’s running,” she says. “I never thought in my lifetime I would see either one of those, let alone, both of those things happening at the same time.”
Palmer’s voyage into the academic world began in earnest while she was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.
“I was the campus coordinator for Students for Dukakis, which was humiliating,” she says. “In 1988 I was involved in all kinds of local campaigns, and I noticed that every campaign I worked for, they lost. So I thought, maybe this is not good, maybe there’s another path for me, because I seem to be a jinx.”
At the same time Palmer began tutoring, and she found she had a knack for it.
“I went to grad school because I really didn’t know what I wanted to do—which I do not recommend to my students at all—but it turned out to be a good move for me,” she says. “I discovered that you could read cool books, and write, and they would pay you to do this, not a whole lot, but you could spend all your time learning, which I loved. That’s what I love about academic life.”
After earning her PhD, Palmer taught at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where she met her research partner, Dennis Ross. The two merged their studies and spent two years compiling a data set on women in elections that includes every primary and general election from 1956 to 2006. That’s more than 30,000 candidates and 15,000 elections.
“The central question that guides all of our research is why is it taking so long for women to be integrated into Congress,” says Palmer, who came to AU in 2001.
The duo arrived at two main conclusions.
“Everyone accepts the fact that incumbency is a huge obstacle for any group that has very low participation rates in Congress, whether you want to get young people in or more women or people of color,” she says. “It is true that once women get elected to Congress, they are just as successful in maintaining re-election as their male counterparts, but we started to dig beneath the surface, and found that female incumbents actually have to work harder to hang onto their seats. A female incumbent is more likely to be challenged within her own party. In the opposition primary people come out of the woodwork to run against her. It is not uncommon when you have a female incumbent in the opposition primary you will find, five, six, seven, eight candidates running so they can run against her in the general. You do not find that for male incumbents.
“We discovered that female candidates tend to cluster in certain House districts. Women in Congress are not randomly distributed across the United States. One third of the women in Congress right now come from California and New York.”
Redistricting, Palmer says, is at the heart of this matter. As Congressional districts have been gerrymandered over the past 20 years, more and more hold supermajorities of either Republicans or Democrats. This makes it difficult for women from both parties to get elected.
“Voters have a tendency to perceive women candidates as more liberal than they are,” she says. “Doesn’t mean it’s true, but that’s the assumption.”
Thus, Democratic women have an easier time among the uberliberals who usually vote in the primaries than Republican women do winning votes from the far right wingers who are more likely to vote in GOP contests.
“A big part of our analysis in the book is looking at the demographic characteristics of the districts where women are successful,” Palmer says. “There are some interesting relationships across parties. Women candidates tend to come from the wealthiest districts in the country. Women tend to come from districts that are more diverse racially and ethnically.”
There are currently 70 women in the House, and 16 in the Senate, the most in U.S. history. None of those races were nearly as monumental as Clinton’s run for the White House, which Palmer believes will be a positive whether she wins or falls short.
“Issues of gender, issues of race, and now the way they’re interacting, are complicated,” she says.
All the more reason for Palmer to continue studying them.
“For me, teaching is actually an excuse to learn stuff,” she says. “Every time I teach a class I have to update it to make it relevant. One of the things I love about teaching politics is it’s never the same.”
