Gendered Candidate Turnover? (Joint with Mayuko Toba)
Abstract
Female representation depends on female legislative turnover: no matter how many women enter parliament, the level of representation remains low unless they continue their legislative careers. We seek to theorize and analyze the relationship between legislators’ gender and turnover, focusing on those newly elected with little political experience (“novices”). Specifically, we analyze reelection bids of novices of “La Republique en Marche!” (LREM) in the 2022 election for the French National Assembly. We find that female novices are as likely to rerun as male ones and that this result holds conditional on their ideology and motivation. While there is an accumulation of research on legislators’ gender and turnover, most existing works ignore the heterogeneity among female legislators. Our research shows that female newcomers are as likely to seek reelection as their male counterparts in a balanced environment, implying that level playing fields could promote female representation in the long run.