Women Candidate Groups and Political Parties in the US States

Increasingly, research points to informal party norms and recruitment practices as a primary reason for the lack of women’s representation in legislatures - what Bjarnegard and Kenny (2015) call the “secret garden” of recruitment. In the US states, many groups have been created as alternatives to the party structure to locate, train, recruit, and fund potential women candidates. These Women Candidate Groups (WCGs) exist in all 50 states, but until now, no one has assessed their number, tactics, and most importantly, their effectiveness as a mechanism to bring more women into legislatures. Once WCGs find, train, and even fund potential women candidates, will the political parties allow and support them as candidates for state legislatures? Using our assessment of the entire population of groups, the first of our knowledge, in the U.S. states, we have conducted two surveys to learn more about these groups. The first survey, in 2018, strongly suggested that parties ignore WCGs, and so these candidates, once trained, do not have party support to run as candidates in state elections. Here, we will present the results of our second survey, set to run in January 2024. We expect will will learn more about the party interaction with WCGs and the degree to which parties control access to nominations and campaign money in a way that the WCG structure cannot crack. With our work, we hope to expose the ways in which the unknown norms of American party recruitment limit women candidates’ access to the ballot. We expect, particularly, that women of color in the US and Republican women will face unique challenges to overcome party expectations and limits. We expect that women of color and conservative women will have less access to WCG training and fewer opportunities to run because of stronger party gatekeeping efforts in state legislative districts. The benefit of studying the US state context is that we can assess over 300 WCGs,over 7000 state legislative districts, and significant numbers of Black and Latina potential women candidates.