Alessandra Cassar, Jennifer Pate, and Mary Rigdon bring a new hypothesis to the study of the gender gap in political ambition. Much of the existing literature has focused on familiar explanations for why women are less likely to run: differences in confidence, recruitment, risk tolerance, or willingness to enter competitive environments. CPR add a different possibility. Drawing on a broader body of research showing that women are often more responsive to “prosocial incentives”—incentives that enable and reward helping others—they ask whether part of the gap may reflect not much aversion to competition, but rather aversion to the way political competition itself is structured. Their paper “The Puzzle of Political Ambition and Prosociality” is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
