Representation Gap Research Articles

Who Controls the Purse Strings? A Longitudinal Study of Gender and Donations in Canadian Politics

AbstractGender gaps in voter turnout and electoral representation have narrowed, but other forms of gender inequality remain. We examine gendered differences in donations: who donates and to whom? Donations furnish campaigns with necessary resources, provide voters with cues about candidate viability, and influence which issues politicians prioritize. We exploit an administrative data set to analyze donations to Canadian parties and candidates over a 25-year period. We use an automated classifier to estimate donor gender and then link these data to candidate and party characteristics. Importantly, and in contrast to null effects from research on gender affinity voting, we find women are more likely to donate to women candidates, but women donate less often and in smaller amounts than men. The lack of formal gendered donor networks and the reliance on more informal, male-dominated local connections may influence women donors’ behavior. Change over a quarter century has been modest, and large gender gaps persist.

Representation of indigenous peoples in times of progressive governments: lessons learned from Bolivia

ABSTRACT Indigenous peoples in Latin America are historically underrepresented in elected bodies. In 2009, Bolivia introduced a new mechanism for direct representation to counteract this systematic representation gap, securing 7 of 130 seats (5.4%) in the national parliament for indigenous peoples of the lowlands. The reform was part of a series of implementation conflicts related to a new vision of plurinational state-building, included in the new 2009 Constitution. Although most indigenous organizations were seeking a ‘power-sharing’ agreement with direct representation for all indigenous nations, the new government, led by President Evo Morales, successfully intervened in favor of a minority protection scheme. Furthermore, for the direct representatives, the room to maneuver left was severely limited, leaving little space to act on behalf of their minority constituencies. Curiously, this reduced version of direct representation is nonetheless the most advanced in Latin America. The Bolivian case provides important lessons on the ‘de-monopolization’ of political parties as a key factor in the effective representation of indigenous peoples in parliament, as well as on the importance of a goal-oriented design for electoral mechanisms focusing on substantive representation.

Causality and continuity close the gaps in event representation

Causality and continuity close the gaps in event representation

Causality and continuity close the gaps in event representations.

Imagine you see a video of someone pulling back their leg to kick a soccer ball, and then a soccer ball soaring toward a goal. You would likely infer that these scenes are two parts of the same event, and this inference would likely cause you to remember having seen the moment the person kicked the soccer ball, even if that information was never actually presented (Strickland & Keil, 2011, Cognition, 121[3], 409-415). What cues trigger people to "fill in" causal events from incomplete information? Is it due to the experience they have had with soccer balls being kicked toward goals? Is it the visual similarity of the object in both halves of the video? Or is it the mere spatiotemporal continuity of the event? In three experiments, we tested these different potential mechanisms underlying the "filling-in" effect. Experiment 1 showed that filling in occurs equally in familiar and unfamiliar contexts, indicating that familiarity with specific event schemas is unnecessary to trigger false memory. Experiment 2 showed that the visible continuation of a launched object's trajectory is all that is required to trigger filling in, regardless of other occurrences in the second half of the scene. Finally, Experiment 3 found that, using naturalistic videos, this filling-in effect is more heavily affected if the object's trajectory is discontinuous in space/time compared with if the object undergoes a noticeable transformation. Together, these findings indicate that the spontaneous formation of causal event representations is driven by object representation systems that prioritize spatiotemporal information over other object features.

Contract Labor and the Limits to Worker Representation: The Case of Hyundai Automobile Plants

The employment status of contract workers is generally characterized by precarious work and limited workers’ rights. Based on a case study of Hyundai automobile plants, this article demonstrates contradictions inherent in in-house contracting practices, which involve the deployment of contract workers alongside user firm employees. The use of contract workers has not only carried with it considerable changes in employment relationships, but also has great potential to undermine the rights of workers. Worker representation constitutes an important part of the changes in the workplace. By revealing structural constraints faced by contract workers in attempts to advance their interests in the user firm complex, the present study addresses the ‘representation gap’ between regular and contract workers and the associated problems. The findings of the study also shed light on tensions associated with the diversity of interests among workplace actors with respect to the union participation and representation of contract workers.

Candidate Supply Is Not a Barrier to Immigrant Representation: A Case–Control Study

AbstractImmigrants are underrepresented in most democratic parliaments. To explain the immigrant–native representation gap, existing research emphasizes party gatekeepers and structural conditions. But a more complete account must consider the possibility that the representation gap begins at the supply stage. Are immigrants simply less interested in elected office? To test this explanation, we carried out an innovative case–control survey in Sweden. We surveyed elected politicians, candidates for local office, and residents who have not run; stratified these samples by immigrant status; and linked all respondents to local political opportunity structures. We find that differences in political ambition, interest, and efficacy do not help explain immigrants' underrepresentation. Instead, the major hurdles lie in securing a candidate nomination and being placed on an electable list position. We conclude that there is a sufficient supply of potential immigrant candidates, but immigrants' ambition is thwarted by political elites.

The Representation Gap and Political Sophistication: A Contrarian Perspective

Political behavior research persistently questions the ability of the average citizen to make voting choices that accurately represent their political views. We argue that voters’ choices should be judged by the outcome of the choices, and not the decision-making process. The representation gap measures the policy agreement between voters and their chosen party using data from the 2014 European Election Study and the Chapel Hill Experts Survey. We consider whether the political sophistication of individual voters affects agreement levels. Negative results are rarely reported widely—but they can be important. This study finds little evidence that political interest, education, information level or even party identification substantially affect the size of the representation gap. Less and more sophisticated citizens both find ways to make voting decisions that broadly match their opinions. The results yield a more positive view of the mass public, the electoral process, and democratic representation.

The Future of Women in Psychological Science

There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field’s investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women’s career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issues that have been the subject of empirical study, discuss relevant evidence within and outside of psychological science, and draw on established psychological theory and social-science research to begin to chart a path forward. We hope that better understanding of these issues within the field will shed light on areas of existing gender gaps in the discipline and areas where positive change has happened, and spark conversation within our field about how to create lasting change to mitigate remaining gender differences in psychological science.

Do Politicians Discriminate Against Internal Migrants? Evidence from Nationwide Field Experiments in India

AbstractRural‐to‐urban migration is reshaping the economic and social landscape of the Global South. Yet migrants often struggle to integrate into cities. We conduct countrywide audit experiments in India to test whether urban politicians discriminate against internal migrants in providing constituency services. Signaling that a citizen is a city newcomer, as opposed to a long‐term resident, causes incumbent politicians to be significantly less likely to respond to requests for help. Standard “nativist” concerns do not appear to explain this representation gap. We theorize that migrants are structurally disposed to participate in destination‐area elections at lower rates than long‐term residents. Knowing this, reelection‐minded politicians decline to cater to migrant interests. Follow‐up experiments support the hypothesis. We expect our findings to generalize to fast‐urbanizing democracies, with implications for international immigration too. Policywise, mitigating migrants’ de facto disenfranchisement should improve their welfare.

Does economic inequality undermine political equality? Testing two common assumptions

In recent years, scholars have expressed concern that democratic political systems are more responsive to rich citizens than to poor citizens under conditions of economic inequality. However, it is unclear whether economic inequality leads to unequal influence on government. Moreover, despite claims that proportional representation reduces inequalities in representation, there is no evidence that it does. I test these two prominent claims by connecting two types of citizens’ preferences to the composition of government in non-presidential systems using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) dataset. I find that rich citizens gain better representation in government than the poor more often than the reverse. However, I find no evidence of an association between economic inequality and inequalities in representation or that proportional representation influences income gaps in representation.

A gender-generation gap in political representation? The contingent impact of preference voting in Norwegian municipal elections

ABSTRACT The article analyses the impact of preference votes on the gender balance in municipal councils in Norway, and to what extent this impact varies with candidates’ age, party and local context. We compare actual representation with a hypothetical closed-list outcome. The analyses show that both local political representation and the impact of preference votes are characterised by a gender-generation gap. Older women are underrepresented, while young women are represented on equal terms with young men. Young female candidates benefit from preference voting in larger municipalities, whereas the older generation of women loses out in both large and small municipalities. In conclusion, we argue that an intersectionality approach should pay more attention to variables other than ethnicity, including age and local context. Moreover, research on gender and political representation should take into account a gender-generation perspective.

Why So Few? The Gender Representation Gap in Academic STEM Fields: A System Dynamics Approach

We use a simulation approach to study what factors influence the under-representation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). In particular, we focus on understanding why, despite the increased representation of women in graduate programs and assistant professorship positions, we still observe a small proportion of women in tenured positions. To do so, we build a dynamic feedback model of women representation. According to the model, the gender representation gap – i.e., the lack of women in tenured professorship positions - is driven by gender bias and women’s perceptions of the workplace. We show that the behavior of this model is consistent with previous studies focusing on persistent gender gaps in knowledge-based organizations. Finally, we explore the behavior of the model under different experimental conditions.

Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics

In Dangerously Divided, Zoltan Hajnal shows that Black people (and, to a lesser extent, other people of color) disproportionately lose out in American elections and policy. With smart analyses and compelling figures, he describes the scale of this representation gap between white Americans and everybody else. The book convincingly demonstrates that race, far more than class, is key to predicting who wins and loses in American politics. And yet, in framing these features of American politics as surprising and in describing their causes with almost no reference to racism or white supremacy—I counted only eleven total uses of either of these terms in the body of the text—the book may contribute to the very problems it seeks to address. The best parts of Hajnal’s book are his analyses showing that white people win the most in almost every arena of American politics. Hajnal compiled data going back as far...

Candidate Emergence and the Success of Women

At least partially in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election (Jordan and Balz 2018), 2018 witnessed a record number of women running for and winning legislative elections across the country. This candidacy surge affords a unique opportunity to evaluate why individuals choose to run for office. Extant literature identifies both individual- and institutional-level determinants of candidate entry, yet little attention has been given to a critical institutional feature that can encourage or discourage women to put their names forward: primary type. This article develops a model of candidate emergence positing that different primary systems—by virtue of including and excluding the participation of various subpopulations of a state’s electorate—will be more or less attractive to potential female candidates relative to potential male candidates. We uncover evidence consistent with our theory: women appear less interested in running in certain types of primaries (e.g., semi-closed) but find other systems more appealing (e.g., nonpartisan). The results also indicate that after considering primary type, women tend to outperform men in the subsequent general election across the board. This study provides encouraging evidence that closing the representation gap is an increasingly achievable goal but that the rules of the electoral game continue to determine who is playing.

Cross-domain representation learning by domain-migration generative adversarial network for sketch based image retrieval

Sketch based image retrieval (SBIR), which uses free-hand sketches to search the images containing similar objects/scenes, is attracting more and more attentions as sketches could be got more easily with the development of touch devices. However, this task is difficult as the huge differences between sketches and images. In this paper, we propose a cross-domain representation learning framework to reduce these differences for SBIR. This framework aims to transfer sketches to images with the information learned both in the sketch domain and image domain by the proposed domain migration generative adversarial network (DMGAN). Furthermore, to reduce the representation gap between the generated images and natural images, a similarity learning network (SLN) is also proposed with the new designed loss function incorporating semantic information. Extensive experiments have been done from different aspects, including comparison with state-of-the-art methods. The results show that the proposed DMGAN and SLN really work for SBIR.

A glass half empty: Limited voices, limited groundwater security for California

Groundwater is a common pool resource that supports agriculture, human communities, and the environment. Public participation in common pool natural resources management can be affected by media representation of stakeholders and perceptions of identity as a stakeholder. Newspaper media has an outsized influence on framing subject matter, expertise, organizations, and who should participate. Media shapes individual, local, and regional perspectives around resource management and defines potential solutions to natural resources management. This study analyzes media coverage about California's new Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to understand impacts on public participation in common pool natural resources management and to identify represented stakeholders and solutions involved in groundwater sustainability. A total of 365 newspaper articles were collected from California newspapers in three readership locations. We also searched for representation of SGMA in Spanish-language publications. Article characteristics were analyzed through qualitative content analysis and quantitative nonparametric analysis. Results indicate bias for featuring agricultural industry, politician, and water managers' voices. Solutions for managing water resources were focused on new supply, demand reduction and infrastructure investment, though novel solutions were also presented. Most newspaper articles included few stakeholders and solutions, illustrating isolated, short narratives about a common pool resource. The trends and gaps in representation in California media coverage may contribute to the public's low levels of engagement in groundwater planning.

Women’s representation in business case studies – a framework of postmodernism to uncover hidden assumptions

A review of entrepreneurship literature indicates a gap in women representation in business pedagogy. Studies emphasise the importance of business schools and effective curriculum in influencing potential entrepreneurs in venture creation. To identify the gap of women representation and to evaluate the effectiveness of curriculum materials, the paper examines the role of pedagogical materials used in entrepreneurship programmes to develop more women entrepreneurs. The lack of an integrative framework for understanding the nature and implications of women representation related to issues of power and dominance, ‘white male privileges’ in decision-making, and representation of marginalised groups are hardly studied. The study used a framework of postmodernism to help inform and interpret past research and frame the research problem and discussion. The paper compared and critically examined the assumptions made in case studies of a widely used entrepreneurship textbook and used deconstruction to understand women's representation and portrayal in case studies.

Gender distribution and leadership trends in trauma surgery societies

IntroductionWomen are under-represented in the surgical disciplines and gender bias is believed to play a factor. We aimed to understand the gender distribution of membership, leadership opportunities, and scientific contributions...

The Role of Gender Stereotypes in a Political Campaign:

The purpose of this paper is to examine gender stereotypes as a mechanism that maintains the under representation of women within elected office. Focusing exclusively on American politics, this paper will explore the barriers female candidates face in running for office. In 2019, the percentage of women holding seats is 23.7 %. This statistic indicates that women occupy 127 of the 535 seats in Congress. Although a record breaking high, this amount still remains far from achieving parity within Congress. To explore women’s under representation, I ask what is the impact gender stereotypes have on a female’s candidacy? Exploring how gender stereotypes influence both voter preferences and the attitudes of party leaders, I predict that gender stereotypes can discourage both voters and party leaders from pursuing female candidates. Based on my research findings, I argue that the gender gap in political representation is in fact largely rooted in the campaign process that has and continues to present barriers for women seeking elected office.

The case for research integration, from genomics to remote sensing, to understand biodiversity change and functional dynamics in the world's lakes.

Freshwater ecosystems are heavily impacted by multiple stressors, and a freshwater biodiversity crisis is underway. This realization has prompted calls to integrate global freshwater ecosystem data, including traditional taxonomic and newer types of data (e.g., eDNA, remote sensing), to more comprehensively assess change among systems, regions, and organism groups. We argue that data integration should be done, not only with the important purpose of filling gaps in spatial, temporal, and organismal representation, but also with a more ambitious goal: to study fundamental cross-scale biological phenomena. Such knowledge is critical for discerning and projecting ecosystem functional dynamics, a realm of study where generalizations may be more tractable than those relying on taxonomic specificity. Integration could take us beyond cataloging biodiversity losses, and toward predicting ecosystem change more broadly. Fundamental biology questions should be central to integrative, interdisciplinary research on causal ecological mechanisms, combining traditional measures and more novel methods at the leading edge of the biological sciences. We propose a conceptual framework supporting this vision, identifying key questions and uncertainties associated with realizing this research potential. Our framework includes five interdisciplinary "complementarities." First, research approaches may provide comparative complementarity when they offer separate realizations of the same focal phenomenon. Second, for translational complementarity, data from one research approach is used to translate that from another, facilitating new inferences. Thirdly, causal complementarity arises when combining approaches allows us to "fill in" cause-effect relationships. Fourth, contextual complementarity is realized when together research methodologies establish the wider ecological and spatiotemporal context within which focal biological responses occur. Finally, integration may allow us to cross inferential scales through scaling complementarity. Explicitly identifying the modes and purposes of integrating research approaches, and reaching across disciplines to establish appropriate collaboration will allow researchers to address major biological questions that are more than the sum of the parts.