Katelyn E. Stauffer, "The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S." (Oxford UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – "The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S."
Guest: Katelyn E. Stauffer
Host: Lily Gorn
Date: March 12, 2026
Book: The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S. (Oxford UP, 2025)

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Overview

This episode features Dr. Katelyn E. Stauffer discussing her book, "The Politics of Perception." The book investigates how Americans’ beliefs about the inclusion of women in legislative bodies shape their perceptions of democratic legitimacy and institutional trust—even when those beliefs are inaccurate. Stauffer unpacks how perceptions and misperceptions about women's representation powerfully influence attitudes toward Congress, partisanship, and democracy itself.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of the Project

• Stauffer traces the book’s beginnings to a graduate survey design class where an initial question—“How many women do you think are in Congress?”—sparked a decade-long research journey ([01:37]).
• Over time, this classroom curiosity evolved into a dissertation and, eventually, a book comparing subjective perceptions to actual political representation ([01:37]).

2. Central Thesis & Theoretical Framework

• The book brings together two academic traditions: American politics’ focus on individual officeholders and comparative politics’ more collective view of representation ([04:03]).
• Stauffer applies the concept of symbolic representation—how institutions "feel" to the public—drawing from Hannah Pitkin’s famous typology (formalistic, descriptive, substantive, and symbolic) ([13:16]).
• Quote: "Even though people might not know what Congress looks like, they still think about it in very gendered ways. And so the belief that you have about how many women are in Congress can still drive your attitudes, and you can still think about Congress through a very gendered lens, even if that lens itself is inaccurate." — Katelyn Stauffer ([05:18])

3. Public Knowledge & Misperception

• Most Americans do not have an accurate sense of how many women are in legislative offices; survey respondents gave wildly varying estimates ([07:17]).
• Quote: "Some people are telling me there's 2% women in Congress. Other people think, hey, we're pretty close to parity. And it doesn't seem like there's a huge rhyme or reason to who really underestimates it and who really overestimates it." — Katelyn Stauffer ([07:38])
• Despite this, their beliefs (accurate or not) significantly influence their trust in Congress and perceptions of policy outcomes ([09:16]).

4. Gender Stereotypes & Attitudinal Consequences

• Stauffer identifies two attitude “chunks”:
  • General fairness and institutional legitimacy
  • Policy and procedural evaluations linked to gender stereotypes ([09:16])
• If respondents believe Congress includes many women, they're more likely to ascribe positive traits—such as compromise, lack of corruption, and capacity for tackling “women's issues”—to the institution ([09:16]).
• Quote: "One of the things I look at in the book is, all right, if you think there are a lot of women in Congress, are you more likely to apply those [positive] stereotypes in a more collective way?" — Katelyn Stauffer ([10:32])

5. Hannah Pitkin’s Framework and Symbolic Representation

• Stauffer leverages Pitkin’s concepts, focusing especially on the link between descriptive (who’s in office) and symbolic (how represented people feel) components ([13:16]).
• Quote: "What I'm really at the crux of this book interested in is that descriptive-symbolic link and how people use information about descriptive representation to decide are we getting that fair and effective representation?" — Katelyn Stauffer ([14:33])

6. Partisanship and Gender

• Democrats tend to see higher women’s inclusion positively as reinforcing both gender and party identity, while Republicans, especially men, are more agnostic—unless specifically primed to think about women within the GOP ([17:21]).
• Quote: "For Republican women...when they thought there were a lot of women in Congress, they tended to be more efficacious, they tended to approve more, they thought the process was working better...It was Republican men who just don't really seem to care much about women's inclusion... They're pretty agnostic. There's not backlash either." — Katelyn Stauffer ([18:42])
• When asked specifically about GOP women, Republican men’s attitudes became more positive ([19:59]).

7. Role of Misperceptions in Political Opinion

• People act on their beliefs, not on reality: those who (even incorrectly) perceive higher women’s presence in Congress express higher trust and satisfaction ([24:01]).
• Quote: "Basically, people who think there are a lot of women in Congress seem to like Congress a lot better than people who think there are not women." — Katelyn Stauffer ([24:11])

8. Data Sources & Methods

• Stauffer primarily uses the Cooperative Election Study (CES), a massive annual survey of Americans, augmenting it with her own questions about perceptions of women in Congress ([25:12]).
• She also drew on experimental and online convenience-sample data to triangulate findings ([26:50]).

9. Comparative Perspective

• Stauffer’s approach is influenced by comparative politics, especially parliamentary systems where party (not individual) representation is the focus ([28:25]).
• She proposes a collective representation framework as a supplement to America’s typical individual-centric analysis ([30:42]).

10. Future Work

• Stauffer is working on two new book projects:
  • Analyzing gender’s impact in policing and police outcomes ([31:35]).
  • Studying feminism as a political identity—why people espouse feminist policies but resist the label ([31:55]).

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Notable Quotes

• "Even though people might not know what Congress looks like, they still think about it in very gendered ways." — Katelyn Stauffer ([05:18])
• "Republican men...just don't really seem to care much about women's inclusion...There's not backlash either—it just seems like it's not in the calculus at all." — Katelyn Stauffer ([18:42])
• "People who think there are a lot of women in Congress seem to like Congress a lot better than people who think there are not women." — Katelyn Stauffer ([24:11])
• "That descriptive-symbolic link [is] how people use information about descriptive representation to decide: are we getting that fair and effective representation?" — Katelyn Stauffer ([14:33])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:37] — Stauffer’s academic background and project origins
• [04:03] — Book’s two main theoretical pivots: individual vs. collective representation
• [07:17] — Survey findings on Americans’ knowledge of women in Congress
• [09:16] — How gendered perceptions influence trust, responsiveness, and policy attitudes
• [13:16] — Discussion of Hannah Pitkin’s representation framework
• [17:21] — Partisanship, gender, and representation
• [22:13] — Misperceptions and how they shape political opinion
• [25:12] — Data sources: Cooperative Election Study and methodology
• [28:25] — Comparative politics lens and influence on U.S. analysis
• [31:35] — Stauffer’s future research projects

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Memorable Moments

• Stauffer’s story of how a grad-school assignment snowballed into a years-long research agenda ([01:37]).
• The finding that although public knowledge is low, “the average” survey estimate almost matches the real number, but individuals are almost all wrong—highlighting the limits of aggregate statistics ([07:17]).
• Stauffer’s revelation that Republican men’s indifference to women’s representation is not backlash but true agnosticism—unless the women are Republicans ([17:21]).

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Closing

Stauffer recommends supporting Ghost Bookstore in Athens, GA, for book orders ([33:51]).

Her conversation with Lily Gorn offers an insightful, empirically grounded look at how Americans’ beliefs about women’s inclusion—however inaccurate—influence democratic legitimacy, political trust, and attitudes toward government.

For deeper insight: read "The Politics of Perception" (Oxford UP, 2025).

Transcript

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[Katie Stouffer]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Lily Gorn]

Hello, this is Lily Gorn with the New Books Network, the new Books in Political Science podcast. Today I'm joined by Katie Stouffer, who's the author of the Politics of How Beliefs About Women's Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the United States. The this was published at the very end of 2025 by Oxford University Press, and I'd like to welcome Katie to the New Books Network and ask her to tell us a little bit about herself and how she came to this particular project. Hi Katie.

[Katie Stouffer]

Hi Lily. Thanks for having me. So yeah, I'm really excited to be here to talk about the project. So this is really a book about how people think about women's inclusion and what it means for how they think about democracy and political institutions. The story of how this book started is a Long, Windy Road. So this actually began the first summer after my first year as a graduate student at Indiana University. I was taking a survey design class and I needed to come up with some questions to toss onto our class survey. And I asked a question based on an article by Kira San Benmatsu. I thought, let's just ask people, people how many women they think are in Congress. She had done that some earlier research and I thought, well, let's map it onto some attitudes that Kira didn't look at. So really it was just for that class. And then about a year and a half later, I was taking a public opinion course, picked that back up as a paper that I thought I could knock out in a semester and put it down Again for a little bit. And then a couple years later, it was time for a prospectus. And it was something I picked up and dusted off and became my dissertation. Took another five years after the dissertation to turn it into a book, but that's where it came from. And I'm also currently an associate professor at the University of Georgia, and so that's kind of where I am. And so the book and I have really grown up together quite a bit in academia.

[Lily Gorn]

And it's a really, really interesting book, particularly for any of us who are interested in understanding what voters think. But both about institutions, questions of gender, you know, sort of understanding how democracy actually works, you sort of dive into a lot of different perspectives and dimensions of that. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about that sort of broader overview that you're presenting. As you've sort of made mention, is this weaving together of this question of women's inclusion in legislatures, so not executives, where they can usually be seen alone, and also what the legislatures themselves in the United States, how they are perceived by the voting public. Can you talk about sort of that broader thesis that you're kind of working with here?

[Katie Stouffer]

Yeah, sure. So I really think about the book as making two kind of big pivots. If we're thinking about how American politics scholars have approached questions related to symbolic representation. And so by symbolic representation, what I'm really interested there is how do people feel about the representation that they are receiving from institutions? So do we feel like Congress is responsive to us? Do we trust Congress? And I'm just really drawn to that institutional piece of it. And one of the things I noticed was that a lot of the literature in American politics, when we talk about what does it mean for women to be included and how do they shape attitudes, we tend to talk about candidates and individual office holders. So what does it mean for me to be represented by a woman in Congress? And I think that divergence makes a lot of sense. The comparative politics folks tend to think about it a little bit differently. And because we're dealing with different electoral structures. And so it was really fortunate for me. When I was a graduate student, I took a class on gender in comparative politics. And so we read some stuff that was more from this collective perspective. And to me, thinking about the attitudes I was interested in, I thought, well, that makes much more sense. Like me having a woman represent me in Congress. I don't know, I may still not like Congress because I might not like everybody else who's in it. And so that kind of comparative perspective of thinking about the institution as a whole, and the idea that we can be represented by people who we don't directly get to vote for, they can still serve a role for us, I thought just was really compelling. And so I thought, you know, let's borrow from the comparative politics, folks, and let's kind of import that approach. Now, the challenge I ran into with that then, being a scholar of American public opinion, was the immediate question you get is, well, does anybody actually know anything about what Congress looks like? And I thought before I dug into this research that probably the answer was an emphatic no. It is an emphatic no. Um, and so it was kind of this grappling with, you know, did it mean abandoning the project? And I thought, no, that doesn't seem terribly satisfying. And so I kind of wove these two strands together. And the idea of the book is really, even though people might not know what Congress looks like, they still think about it in very gendered ways. And so the belief that you have about how many women are in Congress can still drive your attitudes, and you can still think about Congress through a very gendered lens, even if that lens itself is inaccurate.

[Lily Gorn]

And. And you found in terms of the surveys that you were able to use, that most of the time, voters don't have a clear sense of how many women are in elected office in their legislatures. Like, we can all point to Kamala Harris as, like, the first female vice president, or we can, you know, we can point to Kristi Noem, who had been governor of South Dakota and a cabinet secretary, but how many women are in the United States Congress or in the Wisconsin state House? This seems to be where people are, like, I don't know.

[Katie Stouffer]

Yes, that's right. And so one of the things I do find it funny, if you take the average. So. And a lot of the surveys I use in this paper, in this book, rather, you know, I'm surveying a thousand folks at a time often, and I'm asking them, yeah, make your best guess what percentage of people in Congress are women? And the funny thing is that the average of all those answers comes pretty close. But if you look at the spread of the guesses people are giving you, if you pulled a random person out of that 1,000, the odds are good they're not telling you the right answer. And it really is this broad kind of extremity in what people think. You know, some people are telling me there's 2% women in Congress. Other people think, hey, we're pretty close to parity. And it doesn't seem like there's a huge rhyme or reason to who really underestimates it and who really overestimates it. But I think the overwhelming conclusion is almost everybody is getting it wrong in some way.

[Lily Gorn]

And so that sort of leads to the broader question with regard to. And one of the things that you. You do spend a lot of time on discussing in the book, because of the connection between sort of institutional legitimacy and good government and the role of women in those spaces. So while people have, like, no good clue as to how many women. Women there are who are representing them in, say, the Wisconsin state House or the Georgia state House, where you are, or in the United States Senate, they also are sort of connecting some of those things to their understanding of the policy outcomes, the. The trust they have. Can you talk about, like, where gender intersects with that kind of stuff, sort of perceptions that voters have?

[Katie Stouffer]

Yeah, absolutely. So I really kind of tackle this in two kind of chunks of attitudes, I would say. So the first is just thinking about ideas related to basic fairness, that something feels really wrong to think about a Congress that doesn't include women because we know women are roughly half the population. And so I look at attitudes, just looking at very basic things. Would you trust this institution without oversight to do the right thing? Do you approve of Congress? Do you think Congress is responsive to people like you? So some of these bigger attitudes, where I would really expect kind of inclusion of all sorts of groups should move the needle here. So I would also expect, right, that what we think about the racial composition of Congress affects these attitudes, class composition, because these are attitudes that are much more kind of broad based in. The idea is, does that institution look like the population? And gender is one piece of that. The second set of attitudes that I examine in the book, I would argue is a more distinct gendered lens here. So it's not just about we want to see groups included in our institutions here. I draw on some research about gender stereotypes. And the idea here is, what do we actually think about how Congress works? We know Americans do not like Congress very much. They tend to tell us the process that Congress uses is terrible. It's marred by gridlock, special interests, corruption, all sorts of terrible things. And one of the things that I found so interesting and kind of was really a starting point for me with this project is when I hear all of those things that people don't like about the process. I think about research on gender stereotypes, which finds people tend to ascribe the exact opposite of those terms to women. And so one of the things I look at in the book is, all right, if you think there are a lot of women in Congress, are you more likely to apply those stereotypes in a more collective way? And so if I think Congress is 45% women, am I more likely to say there might be some compromise presentation? Maybe people are working to get things done? It's not quite as corrupt as somebody might think it is who believes they're only 5% women. And so how can those perceptions really drive attitudes about the process? And then I also use the literature on gender stereotypes and dig into kind of what issues do we think Congress will be able to tackle based on our thoughts on the membership? And there, what I find is, really, people tend to think Congress is going to be more capable on all sorts of issues, but especially issues that we would associate with women because of stereotypes. Again, all issues, there's kind of this competency boost, but there is a more kind of nuanced relationship when we think about issues that we would normally consider, quote, women's issues or more feminine issue areas.

[Lily Gorn]

And so part of what you're also talking about in the book that I found interesting, because a lot of the research that I do is kind of on the sort of symbolic representation that we see see in fiction of people who are holding power and how that has changed over the years and how that may influence framing and understandings of actual people holding power is you get into sort of the descriptive and symbolic character of representation, which is drawing on Hannah Pitkin's work. And so I was wondering if you can talk a little bit broadly about the sort of framework that you use from Pitkin in terms of this sort of broader understanding of why we might want to see not only women in elected legislatures, but also people of color or Native Americans or LGBTQ members.

[Katie Stouffer]

Yeah, yeah. Happy to talk about Pitkin's framework. I love talking about that. We just covered that in class earlier this week. So. So. So, you know, Pitkin really gives us kind of four subcomponents of representation. Now, she's really clear that in her mind, this is one coherent whole concept, and we should be careful to not split it up too much and that you can't really have one form without the other. Of course, we as scholars, to empirically study this, sometimes we do have to break it down a little bit more than perhaps theoretically, we would like to deal. But she really gives us four elements of representation. So she starts with formalistic representation, which is, how do we get the people that we get in office? So what do elections look like and what are the rules there? We can think about things like gender quotas. And then descriptive representation is really just how similar is either the representative or perhaps the institution as a whole to those that they are representing. So in my context, looking at women, the question is really, you know, are women represented by women collectively? So does Congress? What do we think Congress looks like and benchmark that to the population? She also talks about substantive representation, which is really what people are doing in office. So the bills they're passing, the way they're trying to advocate for our interests, and then symbolic representation. And I really like Leslie Schwindtbaer and Bill Mishler's definition. I think they really succinctly captured and it's the feeling that you are being fairly and effectively represented. And so what I'm really at the crux of this book interested in is that descriptive symbolic link and how people use information about descriptive representation to decide are we getting that fair and effective representation representation? And I would argue that people think no, if women are not included, we don't think that we're fairly ineffectively represented because having exclusion means certain voices are not being heard. That doesn't yield good representation. It doesn't lead terribly effective representation. And then just kind of looping back to some of the stereotypes I was talking about earlier. Right? If you think that Congress's process is completely corrupt, completely marred by gridlock, that doesn't really sound like fair and effective representation to me.

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[Lily Gorn]

Yeah, and so I wanted to then follow that up by asking you because this is also one of the issues that is often sort of on one side of the aisle and not on the other side of the aisle. You have an entire chapter that focuses on, on the partisanship and gender question in this broader sort of representation umbrella. And there are definitely different assessments, shall we say. Can, can you talk a little bit about what you found in the survey and the analysis of the information you were getting?

[Katie Stouffer]

Yeah, absolutely. So you're right. I. So I have a whole chapter talking about partisanship. And to me, that chapter was just so e. Because one of the things we know, there is unevenness across the two political parties in terms of inclusion. Right. The Democrats tend to be the more inclusive party, especially if we're looking at Congress like they're pretty close to parity in that caucus and the Republicans are not. And so one of the things I really wanted to dig into was where is partisanship coming into play in this story? Because. Right. I think we wouldn't really expect extremely conservative women to think, you know, there are a lot of very liberal women in Congress and say, well, but that still seems good to me because they're women, like ideology and party have to be involved here in some way, shape or form. And one of the things that we know from research is that people do tend to assume women are more liberal relative to men. They assume they are more likely to be in the Democratic Party, which, you know, there's some basis in that belief. But. So one of the things I wanted to dig into was, well, when I'm asking people, how many women do you think are in Congress? You might be defaulting to Why? I think 40% of Congress is women, and I'm going to assume most of them are Democrats. And so for Republicans, that does really raise an issue of, well, which identity do you want to see represented? And is there a tension there for Democrats, if you make that assumption, it's pretty reinforcing. Women in Congress, I think they're Democrats. Great. Both of my identities are potentially represented there. And so in the party chapter, I found some really interesting differences when we looked between Republican men and women. So for Republican women, what they tended to do when I looked at my surveys was they tended to respond pretty favorably to beliefs about women's inclusion. So when Republican women thought there were a lot of women in Congress, they tended to be more efficacious, they tended to approve more, they thought the process was working better, all sorts of stuff. And so they kind of behaved like Democrats. And among Democrats, men and women were behaving pretty consistently with one another. There weren't huge differences there. But so Republican women are really reacting more similarly to Democrats. It was Republican men who just don't really seem to care much about women's inclusion. And by that I really mean it seems like they're pretty agnostic. Like, it just did not map onto any attitudes at all. And so by agnostic there, I do want to be clear, there's not backlash either. So it doesn't look like Republican men think there are a lot of women in Congress and that makes them like Congress less. It just seems like it's something that's not in the calculus at all for them. Now, the exception there is when I looked at, in one year, I asked people, I want you to think about the two parties in Congress and women's inclusion there. Now, when I asked people on the Republican side to think about Republican women and how many women they thought there when they had that Republican descriptor, they liked their party more when they thought there were more women included. So as long as you could kind of give that caveat or that little prime of. I want you to think about your party. We liked women's inclusion. They didn't really think about it when it came to think about how many women are in the Democratic Party party.

[Lily Gorn]

So, so that in that regard, there was a sort of idea that the entire Congress was better off because there were more potentially people of my party who were women in Congress. And, and which is, again, sort of fascinating. And, and so one of the things that you do talk about throughout the book and that we've also been talking about a bit is the sort of concept of the misperceptions. And we were just sort of talking a little bit about that with regard to partisanship. And this is sort of maybe the sort of story of Congress in general, because I remember way back when that I started studying political science and I read about the fact that, you know, most people don't know anybody in Congress and they don't know the name of their representative, but they know what their representative is doing for them. And, and I know that's like back from the 70s or something because I'm super old, but, but, but this seems to be sort of a constant perception, misperception issue. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how you're sort of teasing out some of these things to, to better get at whether or not people have an accurate assessment in general of sort of legislative offices? And then again, the twist that gender plays.

[Katie Stouffer]

Yeah. So, I mean, you're right. The American public does not know a lot about politics. But one of the things that I think is so interesting, and there's the set of scholarship that I really try to build on in this book, is the idea that, and we can all kind of think about maybe, you know, maybe our uncle that we see at Thanksgiving who he seems to think he knows a lot about politics and he might be really wrong, but he believes very firmly in that wrongness. And we know that that is how people approach politics as well. People have all sorts of thoughts that they think are, you know, are real facts that are just incorrect, but they still draw on them when they orient themselves towards politics. And so that's one of the things I discuss in the book is, you know, I spent about 10 years asking people on surveys if you had to make your best guess what percentage of people and women are Congress. And as we already discussed, right, overwhelmingly people are wrong, but we know that they're still evaluating Congress. And so what are they drawing on? And so my argument is really, it is these misperceptions. And so that is one of the shifts I think that the book makes compared to past scholarship is to say let's not use objective indicators and let's not look at state legislatures where we have all this great, like, real life variation, because people don't know about that. So let's look at what they believe and let's see how that belief shapes other attitudes. And so really what I do in the book is I just look at how those different estimates map onto attitudes. And so the most simple way I can say it is basically people who think there are a lot of women in Congress seem to like Congress a lot better than people who think there are not women.

[Lily Gorn]

And, and so this, this itself is like, you know, we, we sort of talk about, like living in reality and fact based on understandings. But what your research is suggesting is if we are perceiving things incorrectly, we're still thinking that is the reality.

[Katie Stouffer]

Totally. Yeah. That's a great way to phrase it.

[Lily Gorn]

And, and so, and in politics, this is again, like, how do we get to decisions and outcomes that we as a voter want, if what the information that we're putting in is not necessarily based in fact, just always interesting. Always interesting. So I, I did want to ask you a little bit about, without getting too in the weeds, a little bit about the data that you were able to use that you said it was from the Cooperative Election Study, and, and sort of what it was that you did in terms of surveying people and what Those surveys kind of generated to help you form the data that you were then analyzing.

[Katie Stouffer]

Yeah, so the CES is my biggest resource in this book for sure. I would say 90% of the book probably don't quote me on that percentage, but a good chunk of the book draws on CES data. And the CES is just a really wonderful study and I'm just really lucky to have been able to be a part of it for as long as I have been. So the CES is a massive survey fielded by the survey firm YouGov. But scholars, you know, build this really nice base survey. And every year, you know, somewhere between 35 and 55,000 people participate in this survey. So we get this really nice slice of public opinion with that. But what's so cool about the study is that teams of researchers can add on to the base survey. And so that's what I did for many, many years. And so I was able to take a subset of a thousand people who were part of that bigger sample and I was able to ask them some extra questions. And so for many years it was again that, make your guess, how many women do you think are in Congress? And then looking at some of these attitudes like trust, external political efficacy, I was very lucky. In graduate school, one of our faculty members, he had this great battery of questions asking people to Congress, report card style grades that he very graciously said, yes, Katie, use those questions. They fit your theory really well, run with it. And so, yeah, spending just really consistently trying to track what do these perceptions look like. And then getting as many different attitudes as I could as I started to think through really, what are the broad, broad ways these beliefs about inclusion are likely to matter. I also used some data that was more online, convenience based sampling. I have some experiments in the book that happy to talk about if that's interesting. But really, yeah, the CES is just a really wonderful resource. And so I think any scholar, if you're able to gather a team together and get in on the ces, it's a really great resource and it really is a collaborative project. So I've been on team modules here at uga, my former position at South Carolina, we would often collaborate. And so you build a survey with your colleagues and it's a really cool experience as well.

[Lily Gorn]

And so one of the points that you have also talked about and that I found really interesting when I was sort of reading through the research in the book is that you sort of happen into the comparative sort of analysis frame because in part because parliamentary systems operate differently than the US legislative system. And that there were ways of analyzing the parliamentary systems or non sort of US forms that, that were able to produce some, some of that information that you were really kind of looking for. Can you talk about how you kind of fell into that and how it, how it helped you to be able to come back to the US system?

[Katie Stouffer]

Yeah, totally. So, you know, it is funny. It really is a kind of just happenstance of fate in a way. So when I was a graduate student at Indiana, we hired a comparativist who studied gender. And she started my second year. I will give a shout out to her, Diana o'. Brien. And everybody said, she is so great. She's doing all this amazing gender work. And Katie, you have to take her class. I said, okay, that sounds fine to me. I'll take the gender. I'll leave the comparative out of it was my thought going in. The great irony is that I took in a lot of the comparative in the end. And so that class, I was pretty early in my coursework still, so it was really a formative class for me. And it was one of two classes I took that focused very, very heavily on gender. And so I would say it really formed the way I thought about the question. And you're right. So comparative politics scholars do tend to think about a collective frame a bit more than American politics scholars. Because of the way many parliamentary elections are structured, it doesn't make sense to think about an individual candidate because that's not how you're voting. You're voting for a party and the party has their list. And so it's just a different way of thinking about it. But what was funny was because since that was kind of my first formative experience thinking about it, that just made sense to me. I didn't really think that that was a comparative politics framework. I just thought it made sense. And then it was a surprise to me as I started digging in more, getting into my own research and looking at the American politics scholarship, it was very surprising to me that that perspective was missing because I had just kind of internalized it as the default. And so when I realized it was in fact missing, I thought, well, this seems like a pretty good route for you to take. Let's kind of try to fold this

[Lily Gorn]

in a bit more because I found that really interesting as I was thinking about the research that you are presenting in the book. And it makes so much sense. But of course, in the American system, it's all so individually based that we so rarely think about it in a More sort of collaborative and as you say, collective framework.

[Katie Stouffer]

Absolutely. And I mean, it makes sense, right? American politics, college, we love voting, we love candidates, and our system is designed in such a way that it makes total sense that that's how the scholarship has unfolded. But I just kept thinking that has given us so many insights, and it's not an either or, it's a both. And. And so I wanted to bring that and collective framework to this because I think, you know, once we elect somebody to Congress, that's not the end of the story. Now they have to go collaborate with 99 other folks if they're a senator, 434 if they're a House member. And that surely matters for how we think about an institution.

[Lily Gorn]

Exactly, exactly. So I was wondering, Katie, since this seemed like a project that took a little bit of gestation, what is it that you're working on now?

[Katie Stouffer]

Oh, great question. Well, despite my protest that I would never write a book again after this one, I have two book projects that I'll talk about quickly. One is a book project with two former colleagues from the University of South Carolina, Kelsey Schaub and Me Ansong. And we have for a couple of years now been really interested in gender and how it impacts the police and policing outcomes. And so thinking about women police officers, how they behave in that role, whether they behave any differently for men and what that means for how the public interacts with the police. So that's one book there. The other book is a much newer project, but it's a project I'm really excited about. This is with another colleague, Elizabeth Connors, also at South Carolina. We had a great group of junior faculty there when I was on the faculty. And Liz and I are starting a new project. We've collected all sorts of data. We haven't written a ton of it yet, but about feminism as a political label and an identity and why there are so many people who we would say you hold pretty feminist policy positions. And yet when you ask them, are you a feminist? They say, oh, no, that's not me. I certainly not. I don't belong to that group. And so looking at kind of stereotypes people hold about feminists and how kind of breaking down those stereotypes, because many of these stereotypes are incredibly inaccurate, can help people to see feminists in a more warm light, to be more likely to accept that label for themselves, to ascribe that label to them. So that's another brand new project that I'm quite excited about.

[Lily Gorn]

Well, both of those sound really good, and I hope that you will come on the New Books Network and talk to me about them when they're books.

[Katie Stouffer]

Absolutely.

[Lily Gorn]

With your co authors. It would be fabulous. So I want to thank Katie Stouffer for joining me today to talk about the politics of perception, how beliefs about women, women's inclusion shape democratic legitimacy in the United States, published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Katie, is there a brick and mortar store with an online presence to which you would like to make a shout out?

[Katie Stouffer]

I would. So there is a great bookstore in Athens, Georgia. They are called Ghost. I believe you can ask them to order anything online and they have some third parties that they work with where Ghost will get credit for the sale if you go through them. But Ghost is a new store in Athens. It's a great store. They do a lot of good in the community. So you can support them. I would highly recommend that.

[Lily Gorn]

All right. I will put the the website in the show notes for this podcast. And so thank you so much, Katie, for joining me to talk about this excellent new book.

[Katie Stouffer]

Thanks for having me, Lily. It's my pleasure.