Go ahead, run for office! An experimental study of gender bias in peer encouragement among local councilors

Local politics is frequently seen as a "stepping stone" in political careers, more inclusive than national politics. Thus, the students of political representation of women (and other underrepresented groups), should focus more on the very early stage of elite recruitment, namely the process in which aspirants to local political offices become candidates. The paper studies gender bias in one of the mechanisms of local elite recruitment, peer encouragement. The empirical part of the paper reports the results of a vignette experiment conducted in 2023 and 2024 on a sample of local councilors in several European countries. The paper investigates the effects of aspirant’s gender and experience on the encouragement to run expressed by the current local councilors. Preliminary results indicate that there is a gender bias in the positive feedback received from the "insiders": the aspirant’s experience influences the strength of the encouragement but only if the aspirant is a woman.