Female Candidates’ Incumbency and Quality (Dis)Advantage in Local Elections

ABSTRACT

As springboards to higher office we need to better understand women’s electoral success at lower-level offices to eliminate the gender gap among elected officials in the United States. To help understand women’s success as local candidates, we ask: is there a difference in electoral performance between men and women with political experience who run for local office? We use an aggregate dataset of mayoral and city council elections in California between 2008 and 2015, focusing on two types of “quality” candidates – incumbents and candidates with previous elected experience. We found that female incumbents and female candidates with previous elected experience garner lower vote shares than their male counterparts, and these patterns are more pronounced in big city elections accounting for campaign financing. Despite the presumption that women do better than men in lower-level offices, male candidates get a bigger boost from incumbency and previous elected experience than female candidates.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• local elections
• candidate quality
• incumbency
• gender gap

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In jurisdictions with ranked-choice voting, percent vote share is calculated from the first round of voting.

2. This reference to Jacobson’s (1989) measure of candidate quality is not perfect because it only captures whether the candidate currently is holding elected office. Since candidates cannot include former office holding experience in their ballot designation, this measure of quality does not capture candidates who previously, but not currently, held elected office. However, in our analysis of the four most populous cities, our candidate quality variable does include candidates with any elected office holding experience (even if not current) because coding for four largest cities does not rely solely on ballot designation text.

3. Note that 95% confidence intervals in corresponding figures may overlap, even when differences are statistically significant at the p < 0.05 level (see Austin and Hux 2002; Knezevic 2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle Joesten Martin

Danielle Joesten Martin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University, Sacramento. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science at University of California, Davis. Her current research focuses on how voters perceive and use cues such as candidate gender, ideology, occupation, and incumbency, and how these factors impact candidate success in congressional and local elections. Her work has been published in Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, American Politics Research, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, and Social Science Quarterly.

Meredith Conroy

Meredith Conroy is a Professor of Political Science at California State University, San Bernardino. Meredith earned her PhD in political science from University of California, Santa Barbara. Meredith’s research interests include how gender is communicated in political news coverage, and how this impacts American politics, and also representation more broadly. She has published articles in journals such as Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, and Gender & Politics, and is the author of Who Runs? The Masculine Advantage in Candidate Emergence (University of Michigan Press 2020).