Female Candidates, Partisanship and Strategy for Electoral Competition

• In Event: Running as Candidate, Gender and Elections

Abstract

From the beginning of their career, ambitious women carefully build their strategies to succeed in political competition. In this respect, it is rational to speculate that female candidates may consider partisanship choice based on not only ideological affinity to a party but also opportunity structures provided by a party, whereby they may face a trade-off between policy concerns and office-seeking motivations. Therefore, in this paper, I advance a theory of strategic partisanship choice of female candidates for winning elections. I argue that a (moderate) liberal female candidate may run the election under the Republican label under a particular condition. I test my theoretical claims using both the aggregate- and individual-level data on U.S. House primary elections from 2006 to 2018. I find evidence that partially supports my hypotheses.

Author

• Jonghoon Lee, Texas A&M University