Twice as Hard, Half as Good
What are women’s pathways to political office? And what are the barriers they face along the way that can explain the continued lack of women’s representation in elected office?
To answer these questions, this ERC-funded Horizon 5-year mixed methods research project reconsiders the “gender penalty” faced by women candidates accounting for their everyday experiences on the campaign trail. We ask whether women are working “twice as hard” to achieve similar levels of electoral success.
To better understand how everyday encounters on the campaign trail – whether online, offline, or in the media - shape women’s campaign efforts and chances at electoral success, this ambitious five-year program of research captures candidate experiences and assesses their impact on electoral outcomes. We employ a mixed-methods approach, bringing together ethnographic participant-observation of candidates on the campaign trail in four countries with quantitative media analysis, candidate surveys and a battery of items administered in Round 11 of the European Social Survey to create a cross-national gender attitudes index. This rich data generates new insights into the causes of women’s continued under-representation in politics.
Projects and methods
Across the three projects, the research team have integrated different methods and modes of analysis including qualitative ethnographic participant observation, surveys of electors and candidates, automated text analysis and survey experiments.
While mixing qualitative and quantitative data may be standard in the social sciences, this project’s innovative elements are the use of comparative ethnographic research in election campaigns and applying computational models to understand sexism across structured and unstructured data. The ethnographic data charts everyday experiences of candidates not easily captured in a survey. For example, the complexities of individuals’ experiences, the unspoken ways candidates navigate their interactions with the public, their party and the media, and the often deeply felt emotional responses entwined with experiencing sexism.
This rich and detailed data on everyday “real life” campaigning has enabled a nuanced understanding of the way that sexism is experienced and played out in social interaction in both subtle and non-subtle ways, not captured in the candidate surveys. Likewise, the quantitative voter and candidate survey data, from the ESS and election surveys, will inform the themes that the research team explores in our in-depth interviews with candidates and in informal conversations during fieldwork.
Project 1: Reconceptualising voter bias
Project 1: Reconceptualising voter bias
The aim of this project is to understand the dimensions of voter sexism.
There is evidence that voter sexism still acts as a barrier to women’s representation. Advancing this evidence, the project explores cross-national variation in sexism, which dimensions of sexism are linked to women’s political representation, and the influence of these factors on the representation of women.
A main tool documenting the existence of voter sexism is a new module fielded in Round 11 of the ESS (fieldwork 2023 in over 30 countries) -- “Gender in Contemporary Europe: Rethinking Equality and the Backlash” (Banducci et al., 2020). The bulk of cross-national surveys have placed their focus on acceptance of equal participation of women in society, and in the workforce in particular (such as the items included in the ESS, International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and World Values Survey (WVS). While these surveys capture an important aspect of cultural norms about the position of women, they are the tip of the iceberg, insofar as we are missing the attitudes and psychological predispositions underpinning these norms, namely prejudices.
We have included additional sources of data for Project 1: 1) Online panel surveys conducted at the time of national elections in the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey; 2) Existing cross-national survey data (e.g. Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and World Values Survey). From these data, we construct indicators of sexist attitudes across all participating countries, test through individual and aggregate analysis how these indicators are related to electoral outcomes (e.g. success of women candidates) and media coverage (see below).
Project 2: On the campaign trail
Project 2: On the campaign trail
The aim of this project is to understand how and under which conditions women candidates experience sexism and violence on the campaign trail.
The barriers to women’s representation have structural and relational dimensions. Examining how candidates experience these barriers in everyday contexts while campaigning has generated a nuanced understanding of their multivalent dynamics. Furthermore, voter sexism and media bias, whether real or perceived, places strategic imperatives on women candidates. This gender penalty may play out differently in interactions with journalists, talking to voters or using social media during the campaign period, and in relation to their classed, racialised, religious and generational gendered identities.
To examine these imperatives, the research team conducted ethnographic interviews and participant observation during the campaign period in each of the four countries. Collectively, we have shadowed 43 candidates over 200 days of participant observation campaigning in four national and two local/provincial elections. We have observed campaign teams and attended local campaign events (e.g. candidate meetings with voter groups, speeches and hustings) as well as party conferences. Through an immersed ethnographic approach, we also observed interactions between candidates with voters, journalists and campaign workers across multiple settings from the doorstep to the stage, building a deep understanding of the everyday dynamics of the campaign. We have conducted almost 100 informal interviews and engaged in informal individual and group conversations with a wide range of people including voters, campaigners and candidates. This has been combined with monitoring the social media and news media coverage of the candidates and their campaigns in real time.
Collectively, this ethnographic data provides a rich and nuanced contextual account of everyday sexism on the campaign trail across electoral systems, local and national geographies and cultures.
Project 3: The gender penalty and working twice as hard
Project 3: The gender penalty and working twice as hard
Campaign effort, media and voter bias
The aim of this project is to understand how the media shape the “gender penalty” and the “twice as good” effect.
Media coverage is considered to be endogenous to the amount of effort made in the campaign, whereas voter preferences are influenced by media coverage and conditioned by sexist attitudes. This project brings together the cultures of electoral sexism research from Project 1 and how candidates negotiate the gender penalty to examine the 'twice as good' hypothesis. We link data from elections surveys, candidate surveys and quantitative content analysis of the media coverage and social media campaigns in the same four countries of our ethnographic work.
Drawing on insights from the ethnographic work in Project 2 and applying them to original and existing surveys of citizens and candidates and large-scale media analysis, we assess two linked mechanisms: First, the extent to which candidates anticipate media and voter sexism and how does this influence their campaign effort. Second, how candidate quality and campaign effort influence media coverage, whether media coverage is biased and how this bias influences voter evaluations of candidates.
As in project 2, we map how these relationships vary across contexts as well as across parties and candidates (e.g. candidates of colour and younger/older candidates). Our analytical strategy models candidate electoral success as a function of media coverage and voter preferences.
Publications and reports
Publications and reports
Publications
Alexander, A., Banducci, S., Coffe, H., Fortin-Rittberger, J. and Fraile Maldonado, M. BSA 42, Gender Identity, National Centre for Social Research, (2025)
Banducci, S., Everitt, J., & Gidengil, E., Studying Gender Stereotypes of Political Candidates Over Four Decades. European Journal of Politics and Gender, 1-27 (2025) https://doi.org/10.1332/25151088Y2025D000000086
Dutta, A., Banducci, S. & Camargo, C.Q. Divided by discipline? A systematic literature review on the quantification of online sexism and misogyny using a semi-automated approach. Scientometrics 130, 4915–4971 (2025)
Longdon, B., & Banducci, S., The Role of Sexism in Holding Politicians Accountable for Sexual Misconduct, Frontiers in Political Science 5 (2023)
Book chapters
Arabaghatta Basavaraj, K. , English, P., & Banducci, S. (2025) Candidate Experience and the ‘Gender Penalty’ in the 2019 General Election, in eds, Banducci, S., Horvath, L., Kolpinskaya, E., & Stevens, D., Media and the British General Elections of 2015-2019, Edinburgh University Press
Written evidence
Banducci, S., Tyler, K., Fagin, J., Blamire, J., Tirado Castro, A., van Zijl, J., Addressing Candidate Security in Contemporary Election Campaigns, submitted to the Speaker's Conference on the security of candidates, MPs and elections
Collignon, S., Rüdig, W., & Banducci, S., Written evidence submitted to the Speaker's Conference on the security of candidates, MPs and elections
Reports
Alexander, A., Banducci, S., Coffe, H., Fortin-Rittberger, J. and Fraile Maldonado, M., Gender in contemporary Europe: Rethinking equality and the backlash, Topline results from Round 11 of the European Social Survey, ESS Topline Results Series (14), 5 June 2025
Van Zijl, J., Examining Women’s Experiences on the Campaign Trail: Campaign Ethnographies in the 2023 Dutch Provincial Elections - A Pilot Study for TWICEASGOOD. Examining Women’s Experiences on the Campaign Trail: Campaign Ethnographies in the 2023 Dutch Provincial Elections - Summary Report 26 July 2023
Selected Conference Papers
Banducci, S., Beyond the Binary: Advancing Cross-National Measures of Gender Identity, American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting and Exhibition, Vancouver, Canada, September 2025
Blamire, J., Exploring women candidates’ experiences on the campaign trail: campaign ethnographies in the 2024 UK general election, Associotion of Social Anthropologists UK (ASA) Conference, University of Birmingham, UK, April 2025
Ekinci, E. I., Çarkoglu, A., Banducci, S., The Gender Penalty in Turkish Politics: Social Media Campaign Efforts and Candidate Renomination, 15th Annual Conference of the European Political Science Association (EPSA), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, June 2025
Fagin, J. "Sometimes People Just Need Someone to Shout At": Women Political Candidates Navigating Anger and Apathy on the Campaign Trail During the 2024 UK General Election, Political Science Association (PSA) Conference, Birmingham, UK, April 2025
Senk, K., van Zijl, J. Banducci, S., Collignon, S. Is it more costly to be visible or to be viable? Violence Against Women Candidates in Subnational Elections, Political Science Association (PSA) Conference, Birmingham, UK, April 2025
Tirado Castro, A. & Senk, K., Polarized Hearts and Minds: Gender Differences in Affective Polarization, European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG), Ghent, Belgium, July 2024
Van Zijl, J., The Campaign Heat: Navigating Violence. 28th World Conference of Political Science, International Political Association (IPSA) conference, Seoul, Korea, July 2025
