We Can Make It If We Run: Local Politics, Electoral Competition, and Descriptive Representation in the United States
Open AccessLocal governments collectively are responsible for trillions of dollars of annual spending and the provision of public services which touch the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans. Local office also represents the first professional step for many citizens interested in pursuing a life of public service, with broad implications for representation across the country. Despite the normative importance of local political offices, however, scholars know surprisingly little about the elections which select representatives to them. While scholarship on local general elections has grown in recent years, scholars still know only the most basic information about local primary elections.This dissertation addresses two fundamental questions relating to local primaries utilizing a novel dataset of primary elections to county legislatures across the United States. The dataset is the first of its kind, encompassing nearly 14,000 candidates in almost 400 counties over a 40-year timeframe. First, how competitive are local primary elections? I find that local primaries are significantly more competitive than corresponding general elections, given both the tendency of counties towards political homogeneity and the historic role of primary elections in injecting competition into such environments. Primary elections therefore promote accountability and democratic governance and serve as the locus of consequential electoral decision-making in the local political arena. Second, how do candidates' identifiable characteristics affect their performances in county primaries? I find that traits such as candidate gender or ethnic/racial identity take on increased significance in the low-information environment of local primaries in which voters are unable to rely on the heuristic of partisanship. Female Democrats, on the one hand, experience an electoral boost in local primaries relative to male Democrats or Republicans. Non-White candidates, on the other hand, perform generally worse than White candidates but particularly so in Republican primaries. These new insights ultimately bear significant theoretical and normative consequences for how political scientists understand elections, representation, and local politics in the United States.
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