J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht Receive the 2021 Victoria Schuck Award

The Victoria Schuck Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best book published on women and politics.   

J. Kevin Corder is a professor of political science at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and other outlets in political science and public administration. Much of his work focuses on economic policy, including two books on the Federal Reserve System. In 2013, Dr. Corder received a Fulbright–Schuman European Affairs program grant to study the regulation of banks in Malta and the United Kingdom. He shared a National Science Foundation grant and the Carrie Chapman Catt prize with Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame.  They are the authors of Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal and A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections since Suffrage (both Cambridge University Press).

Christina Wolbrecht is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches and writes on American politics, political parties, gender, and American political development. With J. Kevin Corder, Wolbrecht’s recent work has focused on women voters and American elections since suffrage, including two books: A Century of Votes for Women (Cambridge 2020) and Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal  (Cambridge 2016), which received the 2017 Victoria Schuck awarded from the APSA. She also is the author of The Politics of Women’s Rights: Parties, Positions, and Change (Princeton 2000), which received the 2001 Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section. She is currently working on a book and papers about women as political role models (with David E. Campbell) and another project on the causes and consequences of the appointment of women to local boards (with Mirya Holman and economist Lakshmi Iyer). 

Citation from the Award Committee: 

In A Century of Votes, Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder examine the trajectory of women’s voting behavior since the ratification of the 19th Amendment in the United States in 1920. Considering both women’s turnout rates and vote choices during the span of a century, Wolbrecht and Corder demonstrate through rigorous data analysis and clear prose how women’s electoral behavior shifts over five epochs, from women’s entry as new voters in the electorate to the post-World War II era of the feminine mystique, to the rise of feminism during the Second Wave women’s movement, to the discovery of the gender gap by pundits and the media, to the growing diversity of the electorate in the new millennium. Along the way, Wolbrecht and Corder consider how gender stereotypes inform how political scientists understand and often discuss women voters. While gender is an important category in shaping women’s voting choices, their book documents how gender mixes with socioeconomic status, race, region, age, motherhood, and marriage status in determining how women vote, showing that the story of women voters is often far more nuanced than portrayed by the popular media. Written in an accessible way that speaks to multiple audiences, A Century of Votes is destined to become the definitive source on women’s voting behavior in the United States. 

 

APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Melissa Deckman (Chair), Washington College; Dr. Lisa A. Bryant, California State University, Fresno; and Dr. Louise K. Davidson-Schmich, University of Miami .