Can Hillary Clinton Change Politics?

Some people hold the view that women would govern differently if there were more of them in the political arena. Trench warfare is over; it is now time for collaboration. Is this a cliché?

Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for the American Democratic Party nomination, and her almost guaranteed presence in the 2016 presidential race, again raises a question which is resurrected each time a woman aspires to the highest office of a state: Will she be able to govern differently?

At a time when political debate seems more polarized and acrimonious than ever, some people suggest that greater female representation in the political arena would improve the climate. They say it would open the way for a government which is more angled toward seeking a consensus than to partisanship and cockfighting. Others see this as an enormous cliché: The hackneyed image of the “maternal” woman who cannot help but seek harmony wherever she goes, even in the cut and thrust of politics.

Let us be clear — the lion’s den will not be magically transformed into a bed of roses the moment that Hillary Clinton takes possession of the Oval Office. But if more women follow in her footsteps at all levels of government, will politics be changed for the better? At the moment, women account for only 20 percent of elected representatives in the United States Congress, 26 percent of members of the House of Commons in Ottawa and 27 percent of the National Assembly of Quebec. Only 24 countries in the world have a woman head of state or head of government.

Two professors of political science, Patrick Miller of the University of Kansas and Pamela Johnston Conover of the University of North Carolina, go some way to giving an answer in a new study which appeared in the journal “Politics, Groups, and Identities” this year. They are among the first to have undertaken a scientific analysis of the way that the two sexes approach political rivalries.

The experts were interested in one of the most polarized arenas ever: the mid-term elections to the United States Congress in 2010. They looked into the data provided by a poll of 55,000 people, conducted by a consortium of American universities at the time of the elections. The participants, who identified themselves as either Democrats or Republicans, answered questions on their interactions with supporters of the opposite camp.

The results supported the cliché. Partisanship renders men impervious to the arguments of their adversaries, whereas women, even those most loyal to their party, remain disposed to dialogue with the enemy.

Neither men nor women will bend over backward to talk with people who do not share their opinion. We all have a tendency to mix mainly with those who think like we do. But the data shows that men are even more entrenched in their positions. For example, Democratic men are much more likely than women of the same allegiance never to talk politics with Republicans, and vice-versa. Proportionally, more men also admit that they do not listen to what their adversaries have to say in any case. And when they are asked what they think a conversation with the enemy would be like, men imagine the worst: They expect to feel ill at ease, irritated, suspicious or hostile in such a situation, whereas women, even those most attached to their party, envisage these discussions with relative optimism.

But perhaps they need to be pushed a little. What happens when they are confronted with the ideas of those rivals that they would rather ignore? That is what Patrick Miller and Pamela Johnston Conover wanted to check in the second phase of their study. The researchers recruited 460 university students with different political affiliations and showed them a fictitious editorial, signed either by a Republican or Democratic senator. The subjects then had to give their opinion on what they had just read. Once again, the men proved to be more blindly partisan. They had a greater tendency than the women to reject out of hand the arguments of the opposing party. In fact, going by how little time they spent reading the text in question, many of them had got no further than the title before unconsciously deciding that they were strongly opposed to the position cited in the text, simply because it bore the signature of an elected representative of the opposing clan. Did you think “dialogue of the deaf”?

Of course, women also spontaneously reject their opponents’ ideas. But according to this study, they are less hostile than men and listen for longer before forming an opinion.

The idea that women will pacify the political forum solely because they are women is annoying. This oh-so-traditional idea of femininity as conciliatory, empathetic and virtuous, this way of seeing women as angels, once again serves to reinforce the idea that they are not really made for the tough power struggles which are an essential ingredient of political leadership. The Hillary Clintons of this world must be able to aspire to the highest echelons, without us waiting for them to get there through gentleness and caring.