The Merits of Diversity in Government Always Running: Candidate Emergence among Women of Color over Time (original) (raw)

2018, Political Research Quarterly

The 2016 election saw a record number women (re) elected to the U.S. Congress, but these rates were still below parity. 1 Women consistently report fewer instances of recruitment and encouragement to run compared with men, and women consider running for office less frequently than men (Barreto et al. 2017). However, these trends represent the aggregate experiences of all women and vary when disaggregated by race and gender. For example, black women report higher rates of encouragement , and black women and Latinas more frequently consider a running relative to white or Asian women (Barreto et al. 2017). These differences are regularly eschewed in favor of discussion of women's political emergence and experiences in the aggregate. As a result, much of what we do know about women's decisions to run focuses explicitly on gender without the impact of its interaction with race. How does intersectionality condition women's emergence as candidates for the U.S. Congress? We find many conditions thought necessary for women's emergence as candidates are contextual and temporally specific. Moreover, conditions that encourage women to run in the aggregate do not necessarily apply for women of color. In this paper, we add to a growing body of work on candidate emergence focusing on intersectionality. The gender and politics literature has been critiqued for focus-ing on the experiences of all women to the exclusion of women of color (e.g., Paxton, Kunovich, and Hughes 2007; Smooth 2006) and frequently justified as a data limitation problem (but see Brown and Gershon 2017). Using a novel dataset of U.S. Congressional primary elections from 1980 through 2012, we overcome this limitation by using a cross-sectional time series (CSTS) analysis. We find many influences on women's emergence are conditional by race/ethnicity. Our results suggest examining the intersection of race and gender is essential and that data availability need not be a prohibitive factor in explaining the nuanced experiences of women candidates. Women's representation in Congress is not proportional to the population, and scholarly debates question whether this disparity is a problem for representation. These substantive and descriptive representation discussions focus Abstract The number of women seeking congressional office in the United States has dramatically increased since 1980. Previous research on women candidates explores why women run, but new research on candidate emergence shows that women face different challenges and advantages based on their race and ethnicity. We investigate these differences by disaggregating data on women's candidate emergence by race and ethnicity to examine how these theories work when explicitly considering race and ethnicity. We focus our examination on women running in House primaries between 1980 and 2012. We argue that theories of candidate emergence are conditional to the racial and/or ethnic identification of the candidate. We employ a cross-sectional time series analysis with the intuition that examining congressional elections over time will allow us to make general comments about the participation of women in congressional elections. We find that many of the conditions thought necessary for women's emergence as candidates are contextual and temporally specific. Moreover, conditions that encourage women to run do not necessarily apply to women of color.