This experiment sent state legislators an email from an individual seeking advice on running for office, varying the gender and party of the sender. This project explores two inquiries—who the legislators choose to respond to and how the legislators’ own gender and partisan identities shape that decision. I theorize that women in politics is a salient issue for legislators; therefore, they will be more willing to advise politically ambitious women. Overall, I find that legislators are more willing to offer help when the aspirant is a woman and of the same party. When primed to further consider women in politics, legislators are more likely to offer gender-specific advice. Democrats rather than women legislators drive this heightened responsiveness to the woman aspirant. These findings highlight what role public officials can play in closing the candidate gender gap, and how legislators’ multiple identities intersect and frame their decisions to aid political aspirants.
This article explores diversity within top leadership positions in state governments, specifically, the role that position selection method plays in promoting the inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities into positions of power. We hypothesize that minorities will be more likely to serve in appointed positions as governors consider diversity in making appointments and less likely to serve in elected positions due to the additional hurdles for candidates of color. Using an original data set of state executive leaders from 2001 to 2017 from all 50 states, we find evidence that institutional design influences levels of diversity among state executive leaders. Racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to be appointed than elected to state executive leadership positions. In addition, we find that Democratic governors are more likely than Republican governors to appoint minorities. Ultimately, this evidence is important for understanding how institutional design can have consequences for descriptive representation, specifically for groups that have been historically excluded from political life.
In the past 25 years, education funding in Oklahoma has stagnated. In some schools, students learn about American politics from tattered textbooks in which George W. Bush is listed as the current president (Hendry and Pasquantonio 2018). Across the board, teachers are grossly underpaid, yet many are compelled to buy school supplies with their own funds (Felder 2018a). Moreover, in one out of five schools, students come to class only four days a week (Carlson 2018). After the state legislature failed to pass a funding package to sufficiently increase spending on schools and salaries in early 2018, teachers across Oklahoma walked out on their jobs to protest at the Capitol for nine days. In addition to sharing their grievances, the hundreds of protesting educators had something else in common: many were women.
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