Laurel Elder - The Partisan Gap: Why Democratic Women Get Elected But Republican Women Dont

The Partisan Dynamics of Womens Representation

There are many compelling reasons to be concerned about womens underrepresentation in elective political office. Women compose slightly more than 50 percent of the population in the United States but remain dramatically underrepresented in all types of elective political office, from state legislatures, to Congress, to governorships. The United States has yet to elect a woman as president. Many believe American democracy would be healthier and stronger if its elected officials were a more accurate reflection of the public.

Having women descriptively represented in political office allows women and girls to see people like themselves in positions of power and lends legitimacy to the political system.

For those who value womens representation and believe that our democracy would be stronger if women were represented proportionally, the past several decades have been frustrating. Womens representation in political office has increased only at a very slow rate. In fact, in some years, the number of women in the US House of Representatives and in state legislatures actually went down, challenging the assumption that progress toward equal representation by gender might be slow but would inevitably happen.

The 2018 elections marked a departure from this glacial progress as women smashed existing records for political office holding. The 116th Congress (20192021) has within it a record-breaking 26 women in the Senate and 101 women in the House of Representatives.

Behind the good news about womens increased representation in elected office is another story, one about the political parties and the different experiences women are having within them as office seekers and members of the party-in-government. While womens representation in elective office is at an all-time high, the size of the partisan gap between the representation of Democratic women and Republican women is also record-breaking. Today, an overwhelming majority of women in elective office are Democrats, while Republicans form a small and, in many cases, shrinking portion of women in elective office.

An overwhelming 83 percent of the women in the 116th Congress are Democrats, while just 17 percent are Republicans. Put another way, there are more than four times as many Democratic women in Congress than Republican women. A large partisan gap also characterizes womens representation in state legislatures. Democratic women compose 68 percent of women state legislators, while Republican women form less than one-third. While women in society overall are somewhat more likely to affiliate as Democrats than Republicans, the partisan gap among women elected officials far exceeds the partisan gap among women in the electorate. The magnitude of the partisan gap among women in Congress and state legislatures is all the more dramatic considering it is a relatively new feature of American politics. Until the 1990s, women in elected office were equally likely to be Republicans and Democrats.