New Books In Political Science

Katelyn Stauffer, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia, has an excellent new book focusing on how voters and citizens perceive the legitimacy and functionality of political institutions, especially when they think there are women elected to those institutions. The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the United States (Oxford UP, 2025) weaves together a number of different threads to reach some interesting conclusions about women in elected office and the trust that voters have in those elected offices and institutions. Stauffer starts the research trajectory with a framing around representation, and how the different kinds of representation within elected bodies connects to how voters think about those bodies themselves and whether they trust them and think they are effective. This opens the path to bring in the question of gender, and how voters’ or citizens’ perceptions of how many women are in legislative bodies also co