Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections

Abstract

Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections advances an intersectional account for why the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in elected office has proven so persistent. Using an original dataset encompassing nearly every state legislative general election from 1996 to 2015, and interview and survey data from 42 states, the book demonstrates that factors in candidate emergence that have long been treated as exclusively “racial” or “gendered” in political science are, in fact, shaped by race and gender simultaneously. Focusing on women and men from the two fastest-growing racial groups in the United States—Asian Americans and Latina/os—the book shows that prevailing conceptions of the utility of majority-minority districts and the importance of individual-level concerns like ambition in explaining representation on the ballot require revision. The intersectional model of electoral opportunity presented in the book argues that overlapping and simultaneous structural factors play a previously underappreciated role in shaping who runs for office—and who does not. At the national level, the distribution of majority-white populations across most districts sharply constrains the number of realistic opportunities for nonwhite women and men to get on the ballot. At the local level, within districts and communities of color, the scarcity of viable opportunities to run exacerbates informal processes and institutions that tend to push women of color further from the candidate pipeline. These interactive features of the landscape of electoral opportunities produce a systemic absence of competition for descriptive representation in most state legislative elections.