Leveling the Playing Field: Understanding Gender Disparity in Gubernatorial Elections and Policies to Combat It

Abstract

Women have traditionally been underrepresented as governors across the U.S., although their vote shares have been increasing on average since the early 1990s. This paper shows that efforts to increase female electoral performance and participation through public campaign finance laws may be misguided. On the other hand, increasing the frequency of open elections via term limits has the potential to raise female vote shares and boost female enrollment in primaries. Compared to head-to-head elections against incumbent men, females perform at least 8.3 percentage points better when facing non-incumbent men. This result supports claims made about open elections in previous research.