What Women Voters Want

by Colette Marcellin

PhD Candidate in Political Science, Vanderbilt University

& Register Her Contributor

Though women constitute a majority of the US population, women are not always able to demonstrate our strength in numbers. Women remain dramatically underrepresented across all levels of government and many women are not registered to vote or empowered to participate in politics. And when women do participate, women don’t tend to unite around similar political issues or candidates. Yet every day, largely male politicians are making decisions that have critical implications for women’s lives — especially for the most marginalized women. Women’s voices need to be heard in political office and at the ballot box, and I am partnering with Register Her to test ways to encourage women to use their voices.

As a PhD candidate in political science at Vanderbilt University, I study women’s political attitudes and behavior in the U.S. with a focus on how women respond to social movements and what motivates women to engage in politics. For the past few months, I have been working with Register Her to develop a partnership to experimentally test the effects of Register Her and its community partners’ voter registration and activation efforts. In particular, we will incorporate my research on what kinds of messaging may mobilize women into Register Her’s voter registration efforts this fall, and we will conduct a field experiment to examine the effects of different messages on Register Her’s outcomes of interest. By randomizing which messages community fellows use, we will be able to identify cause and effect relationships between Register Her’s outreach messaging and key outcomes like voter registration.

Researcher-practitioner partnerships like ours are deeply important. Register Her is doing the critical work on the ground of mobilizing women in communities across the US, but in busy election seasons, it can be difficult to identify which efforts work best. On the researcher side, too often academic research doesn’t reach the organizations and communities that would benefit from it and academics do not always have the opportunity to see how their research translates to real world settings. Our partnership has the exciting potential to measure and hopefully increase the impact of Register Her’s and its community partners’ work, and to contribute to academic research on women’s political behavior.

Community Fellows from We Must Vote in Jackson, Mississippi.

Working to empower women in politics is a process that does not pause in between national election cycles. State and local elections are taking place across the US this year, and our partnership with We Must Vote in Mississippi will work to register young women to vote in Mississippi’s state senate elections this fall. Mobilizing women to vote has the potential to reshape what American politics and policies look like and I am thrilled to be collaborating with Register Her to help contribute to this mission.