More Women Can Run: Gender and Pathways to the State Legislatures

Abstract

Why are there so few women in legislative office in the United States? Recognizing that electoral politics in the United States is “far from gender-neutral territory” (p. 61), Susan J. Carroll and Kira Sanbonmatsu engage this question by considering major changes in women's election to state legislative office, where women's representation continues to be low, and is declining in the new millennium, with women's legislative numbers driven primarily by the success of Democratic women. At the state legislative level, Republican women are being closed out of office, even where the Republican Party has been increasingly successful overall. Why are men so over-represented in state legislatures? Why is women's representation declining? Why have Republican women been increasingly less successful in winning election to state legislative office than have their Democratic sisters? Carroll and Sanbonmatsu bring an explicitly gendered approach to these questions, treating men's political experience and candidacy as factors for analysis, rather than as the universal path to legislative office, and consider “women on their own terms” (p. 11) to explore additional gendered pathways. More Women Can Run contributes to the research on women's candidacies by explicitly gendering the analysis, incorporating party as a major explanatory variable, and recasting the decision to run for office as contextually determined rather than an autonomous individual choice. Engaging the ambition scholarship, which emphasizes individual psychological factors that precede the decision to run for office, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu argue that “ambition and candidacy may arise simultaneously” (p. 44). They shift the focus to recruitment and political opportunity, testing a “relationally embedded decision” model of commitments to family and significant others in shaping the decision to run. The authors do not claim “that there is a ‘male’ or ‘female’ way of making the decision to seek office” but rather “advance an alternative view of candidacy that may more often characterize women's decision-making process than men's” (p. 44).

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