Investigating women’s political underrepresentation and identifying strategies for greater inclusion of elected women requires expanding the sites for study and explanation. In this paper, we “go local,” addressing a gap in existing literature and demonstrating the methodological and theoretical value of analyzing data at the municipal level. We argue that local politics are important for policymaking, as a pipeline to higher-level office, and as a source of institutional and geographic variation. We also challenge assumptions that women’s representation is higher at lower levels, urging more complex analyses of the cross-level variation in women’s political officeholding. Finally, we claim that the empirical challenges of collecting local-level data are less important than the opportunities these data provide to gender and politics research within and across states and countries.
Using the state of New Jersey in the United States as an exemplary case, we analyze the relationship between gender composition of local city councils and both sociodemographic and institutional variables. Our data include variables for municipal characteristics like urbanization, women’s labor force participation, and education, as well as institutional context like council size, district size, and partisanship, for New Jersey’s 565 municipalities. Contrary to research focused on one or the other, we contend that explanations for gender disparities and strategies for advancing women in politics are both social and institutional. Our findings contribute to cross-national debates over the “engineerability” of addressing women’s political underrepresentation, using local-level variation to determine the effectiveness and potential utility of electoral and societal engineering.
