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There Can Be Only One (Woman on the Ticket): Gender in Candidate Nominations

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Abstract

Party elites and voters are reluctant to cede multiple ballot positions to women simultaneously, so that men are able to have running mates of either gender but women tend to have male running mates. Evidence from American gubernatorial elections, state legislative caucuses, and presidential tickets from around the world confirms this: nominating a woman for the top position reduces a party’s likelihood of nominating a woman for the second position by half or more.

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Notes

  1. The prior occasions where major-party gubernatorial nominations were both women (Hawaii in 2002, Nebraska in 1986) also featured men as the associated lieutenant-governor candidates.

  2. Currently, women comprise 21 % of national parliamentarians worldwide (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2013). Since the 1970s, women presidents, prime ministers and chancellors have increased from three to more than twenty (Hawkesworth 2012). In the United States, women hold 17 % of mayoral positions (of cities with more than 30,000 residents), 24 % of state legislative seats, 23 % of statewide elective executive positions, and 18 % of Congressional seats in the United States (Center for American women in politics 2013).

  3. Some suggest that the sacrificial lamb theory held in earlier decades but no longer applies (Welch and Studlar 1996), or that sacrificial-lamb strategies are partisan, with right-leaning parties being more likely to nominate women as sacrificial lambs (Cooperman and Oppenheimer 2001; Ryan et al. 2010; Sanbonmatsu 2002; Stambough and O’Regan 2007).

  4. Indeed, though executive positions are usually stereotyped as “masculine” (Duerst-Lahti 1997), the lieutenant governorship has been deemed more gender-neutral (Fox and Oxley 2003).

  5. Strictly speaking, candidates for lieutenant governor are not always on the same “ticket” as are those for governor: in some states the offices are formally elected separately, and winners can be from opposite parties. We thus refer generically to a party “slate” when discussing candidates who are on the same ballot representing the same party but may not be part of a package deal.

  6. If nominators worry that femaleness will harm electoral prospects or that women are less suited for a hard-fought campaign, races expected to be close may be less apt to see female candidates (Palmer and Simon 2008). Polls’ tendency to understate female-candidate performance (Stout and Kline 2011) may further hinder women’s chances of being nominated in competitive races: a poorly-polling running mate might be avoided for fear of costing the otherwise winnable election. Competitiveness may then have non-linear effects, with women less often nominated for close races than for blowouts in either direction. Allowing this sort of effect with a quadratic term on margin of victory does not noticeably affect the coefficients of interest; nor does it come up significant itself.

  7. It may not always be clear whether the opposing party or parties will nominate female candidates (e.g., if parties have simultaneous primaries), but even there front-runners offer some information about the likelihood of females being selected.

  8. State fixed effects force the exclusion of New Jersey, which has only had female major-party candidates in its short history of having a directly elected lieutenant governor.

  9. Using year fixed-effects gives virtually identical results, but odd years often drop from the analysis because the few elections often feature lieutenant-governor candidates all of one gender.

  10. Though by no means definitive, the similar results argue against the possibility that the results here reflect candidate supply rather than demand—i.e., that women may be less likely to put themselves forward as candidates for office when women are also running for other offices.

  11. This is a noisy measure. Many resignations see a sitting governor leaving office a few days early to enter Congress, leaving very little time for the ex-lieutenant governor to attain authority.

  12. These include eight in Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the Seychelles, and Tanzania), four in Asia (Indonesia, the Maldives, the Philippines, and Taiwan), one in Europe (Bulgaria), and 15 in Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay) along with the United States.

  13. The sex of vice-presidential candidates is unknown for one slate in Honduras in 2001 and another in the Seychelles in 1998. In both cases, the presidential nominee was male, so even if the vice-presidential candidates were male, reported results would change relatively little.

  14. Countries have concurrently had female presidents and vice-presidents (Nicaragua 1996–1997, Switzerland on multiple occasions), but the women involved did not face the electorate jointly.

  15. OLS and penalized-likelihood models can cope with Table 4 distribution of observations. Multivariate regressions of both types, featuring controls for region, time trend, and a binary variable indicating leftist parties (Schmidt 2009), had coefficients with larger magnitude and t statistics than did the analogous bivariate regressions without controls. Though not definitive, this suggests that Table 4 results are not a spurious consequence of its lack of control variables.

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  1. Morningside College, Sioux City, USA

    Valerie M. Hennings

  2. Iowa State University, Ames, USA

    R. Urbatsch

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Correspondence to Valerie M. Hennings.

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Hennings, V.M., Urbatsch, R. There Can Be Only One (Woman on the Ticket): Gender in Candidate Nominations. Polit Behav 37, 749–766 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-014-9290-4

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