Appointees versus Elected Officials: The Implications of Institutional Design on Gender Representation in Political Leadership

ABSTRACT

We explore how institutional design, whether a position is elected or appointed, influences women’s representation in state executive leadership positions, including cabinet secretaries and heads of bureaucratic agencies. We expect this relationship is conditional on if the position addresses a stereotypically feminine or masculine policy area. As women are less politically ambitious and perceive electoral disadvantages in running for masculine positions, we expect the pool of women willing to accept an appointed masculine position is greater than those willing to run for elected office. However, for feminine positions, women may perceive their gender as an advantage and are more willing to run. Using original data of state executive leaders, we find women are more likely to serve in elected than appointed feminine positions, but the opposite is true for masculine positions. This article provides insight into how institutional decisions can impact the presence of underrepresented groups in government.

KEYWORDS:

• Appointments
• descriptive representation
• elections
• gender and politics
• state politics

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Mike Crespin, Chuck Finocchiaro, Kathleen Tipler, Peter McLaughlin, Bennie Ashton, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this project.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. We believe most governors face at least some pressure to consider diversity when making appointments; however, the amount of pressure they face may vary by state political culture. As a result, in our analysis we control for state political culture.

2. It is worth noting that one limitation of our study is that with our current data, we are unable to fully analyze the extent to which politics, competition, biases, and gatekeeping matter for who holds these state-level appointed positions. For example, we do not know how common it is for women to lobby for these positions. We know executives often appoint women as a result of strategic considerations as opposed to a genuine interest in promoting more women to government, which speaks to biases and gatekeeping (Valdini 2019), but we believe that future research should better consider these influences. However, we do not believe this limitation significantly weakens our theory. Past research finds that women are more likely to serve in appointed positions compared to elected positions because the women who serve in these positions are often motivated by personal or professional ambitions as opposed to political ambition (Sidorsky 2019). When this is coupled with the fact that women are election averse (Kanthak and Woon 2015), it is quite possible that women are willing to lobby for these positions even if they face competition, bias, and gatekeeping.

3. Our dataset includes anyone serving in these positions up to May 2017. Some of these officeholders held the same position more than once, but we only include the individual’s first tenure in each position.

4. Many of the positions identified by The Council of State Governments are not the top person within their department and serve under another leadership role. Therefore, these positions are outside the scope of our research question. Furthermore, in early data collection, we explored adding more positions, such as state auditor, to this data; however, biographical data for other positions was extremely lacking. These reasons are why we ultimately limited data collection to only seven positions.

5. Within our timeframe, we find only two examples of states changing the method of selection for one of these positions; therefore, we conclude that while some states have shifted the selection method of positions over time, most have made no changes in how they select these leaders from the original creation of these positions. Since the selection method of these positions has not changed, at least in recent history, it is worth mentioning that the decisions concerning whether to appoint or elect leaders to these position were likely made at a time when there was not much, if any, consideration as to how these decisions might affect the number of women who might hold these positions. For a more thorough examination as to whether some states are more likely than others to have elected positions opposed to appointed positions, see Rhinehart and Geras (2020).

6. For some states and positions information, especially in earlier years, was unavailable. For the years and positions included in this study, we found data on 98.9% of the observations. Missing data was excluded from the final analysis.

7. Fox and Oxley (2003) determined this classification based on previous scholarship, including Fox (1997), Kahn (1996), and Thomas (1994). By looking at how past research has categorized policy issues as stereotypically masculine or feminine, Fox and Oxley match the key policy issue in the title of each position with how past research has categorized this issue as either stereotypically masculine or feminine. For positions that do not include the policy issue in the title, Fox and Oxley did additional research on the primary responsibilities of the position to classify the position. Positions labeled neutral are those that are responsible for either both masculine and feminine policy issues or issues not clearly stereotyped with one gender or the other.

8. A majority of appointed positions in our data are typically nonpartisan positions. While we recognize that often the people serving in these positions have a partisan background, this information was not available for all. We assume even in nonpartisan appointed positions, the person is likely to be of the same political party of the governor who appointed them.

9. Louisiana did have a woman serve as interim state superintendent of education, but this position was excluded from these data as that position is appointed by the Louisiana Board of Education.

10. Governors who identified as third party or independent were coded based on the major party with which they previously identified. Third party and independent officeholders were coded as nonpartisan.

11. In our dataset, there were several observations in which the position is traditionally elected but due to a death or resignation, a governor appointment filled the position. These individuals were coded as appointed since that is the selection method by which the individual initially came to serve in the position.

12. To test if this interaction effect was statistically significant, we ran an incremental Type II F-test on Models 2 and 3 in Table 1 and found the interaction is significant in both models at p<0.05.

13. To further explore gender representation in these state executive leadership positions, we subset the data by selection method to observe other variables that may influence the probability of women serving in these positions. See the appendix for these results.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarina Rhinehart

Sarina Rhinehart is a Ph.D. graduate from the University of Oklahoma and works in state government.

Matthew J. Geras

Matthew J. Geras is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Jessica M. Hayden

Jessica M. Hayden is an assistant professor of American politics at Western Carolina University.