Abstract
Do women in local office have a more difficult time holding onto their seats, as some popular accounts suggest? While much research has considered the question of incumbency in national and state elections, little scholarly attention has been given to local races. The existing literature makes expectations in this area unclear. Incumbency appears to trump gender in national and state elections-that is, female and male officeholders win reelection at similar rates. However, the study most closely related to our own offered the striking finding that female incumbents were more successful than male incumbents in local elections. To address the gap in research on incumbency and local elections, we studied the electoral safety of male and female county supervisors in California beginning in the mid-1990s. Our research takes advantage of the relatively recently established California Elections Data Archive (CEDA). Unlike the previous analysis of city council races, but consistent with research on contests for state and national office, our study showed no significant differences in the electoral safety of female and male incumbents. Additionally, these findings may be applicable outside California given the extraordinary political diversity of counties in that state. We close by considering the practical implications for candidates, potential candidates, and future research. For example, our study implies that little reason exists to focus on gender in local election contests. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]