Why Women Don't Run: The Critical Contextual Factors in Women's Legislative Recruitment

OMEN'S political recruitment, like men's, is largely dependent on a / number of critical contextual factors. Each of the three phases of the recruitment process eligibility, selection, and election is affected.1 A potential candidate's decision to seek office depends upon the political culture which limits or offers opportunity for persons with the appropriate eligibility attributes. A potential candidate must calculate whether or not to risk nomination by taking into account the closed or open nature of the particular political structure. In turn, election or defeat at the polls is related to voters' expectation of candidates' stands on issues, which as Key2 noted, must not deviate markedly from a prevailing modal consensus. The purpose of this article is to determine the critical sociopolitical contextual factors associated with limited or expanded opportunities for women's recruitment to legislative office. This article seeks to explain the effect of aggregate contextual patterns and processes on female recruitment.3 Therefore biographical data on women legislators (collected by the author4) are not included, since they are not theoretically pertinent to this contextual analysis.5 Our objective is to ascertain the environmental elements associated with the varying proportions of women recruited to political office. Thus, for example, women's recruitment to U.S. state legislatures varied from 1 percent in Georgia to 22 percent in New Hampshire, with an average representation of 6 percent in 1974. Women's recruitment to the U.S. Congress,