UC Riverside

Research shows that when women run, they win just as often as men. Evidence suggests, however, that women are running for Congress at record-breaking levels yet the proportion of women in either chamber has not appreciably increased. I reconcile these disparate findings through the theory of partisan exclusion. I argue that the success of Democratic women masks the difficulties Republican women face in their bids for office. I further argue that these divergent experiences are the result of Republican women’s disproportionate absence from the local party networks that identify and vet potential candidates.

In Chapter One, I examine the effects of Republican women’s disproportionate absence from local party networks on their primary election success by comparing several features of their campaigns to those of Democratic women who I argue are more likely to be members of local party networks. I find that Republican women’s campaigns suffer from serious deficiencies when compared to Democratic women’s campaigns and that these deficiencies contribute to a nine-point difference in primary election vote share between Republican women and Democratic women.

In Chapter Two, I examine the fundraising strategies of Republican and Democratic women. I find that Democratic women heavily rely on external funding sources like political action committees and individual contributions which reflect their increased presence in local party networks while Republican women rely more heavily on self-financing which reflects their inability to access to donor lists and networked donors.

Finally, in Chapter Three I use an original survey of county party chairs to examine potential gender bias in recruitment. When prompted to name a potential candidate, Democratic county party chairs were twice as likely to name a woman than were Republican county party chairs. These differences were magnified amongst county party chairs reporting that they worked within a network to identify and vet candidates.

Taken together, results suggest that women’s underrepresentation in Congress is driven in large part by Republican women’s underrepresentation and that the Republican Party, at least at the local level, does not prioritize the election of women.