Where Women Represent: Women’s Rise to Power in Local Elected Offices

• In Event: Gender in Local and Rural Political Contexts

Abstract

Local political offices are thought to be an important gateway for women to enter politics (Carroll and Sanbonmatsu 2013). And, women appear to have higher rates of success when they run for local political offices (Crowder-Meyer, et al., 2015) because local offices are thought to match the feminine strengths of female political candidates (Rosenwasser and Dean 1989, Atkeson and Krebs 2008). Experimental research suggests that local offices are not any easier for female candidates relative to federal offices because voters still want to see candidates with masculine qualities in political leadership roles (Bauer 2018). The extent to which women are successful in local elected offices is not entirely clear due, in part, to a lack of data on women’s rates of representation in local elected office (Holman 2017). Moreover, much of what scholars know about women in local elected offices tends to focus on white women as the officeholders (for an exception see Cargile and Pringle 2019). This manuscript seeks to shed light on the role of women in local elected office including the extent to which women and women of color have paths to serve in local political offices, and whether local elected office serves as a stepping-stone to other or higher political offices.

This project examines women’s rates of representation in the city councils and county boards of approximately 130 municipal governments in the U.S. through an original and rigorous data collection of women’s representation at the local level. I analyze not only women’s overall rates of representation in local elected offices but also how representation varies across race and gender. With these data, I pinpoint where women are most likely to rise to political power, and the characteristics of these local institutions that give rise to more diverse elected bodies. Past work on women’s emergence as congressional candidates suggests that women will emerge in cities that are more racially diverse, have more blue-collar workers, and with more urban rather than rural populations (Palmer and Simon 2008). I show that these factors do not play as strong a role in predicting women’s success in local elections. I not only chart women’s patterns of success in local elections, but I also examine women’s paths through the political pipeline to test whether local offices offer a viable way for women to move up the political pipeline. I show that local political offices serve as a stepping-stone for non-minority women in politics but not for minority women.

This research has implications for not just research on gender, race, and politics, but also speaks to the dynamics of descriptive representation at one of the lowest levels of government that can have a direct and daily effect on people’s lives. The extent to which local offices descriptively represent the cities and counties they serve is an important metric that speaks to patterns of political participation and perceptions of democratic legitimacy among citizens (Clayton et al. 2019). Normalizing the image of women as political leaders starts with the exposure to women in leadership roles in local government.

Author

• Nichole Bauer, Louisiana State University