Teacher Political Candidacy and the Gender Composition of State Legislatures

Abstract

In this article, we examine the extent to which women teachers ran for state legislative office in 2018, where they won, and the degree to which they contributed to the surge of women representatives elected in state legislatures around the country. We engaged in a comprehensive effort to collect information on all of the teacher candidates who ran for seats in state legislatures during the 2018 midterm elections. We found that 430 teacher candidates ran for a state legislative office. These candidates were fairly evenly split between men (51%) and women (49%), and tended to reflect the racial demographics of the teaching profession. Most teacher candidates ran as Democrats (69%) and 33% came from the six states that experienced teacher walkouts during spring 2018. We found that men and women teacher candidates were similarly likely to win the general election, but due to the higher proportion of women teacher candidates running relative to the men-dominated composition of state legislatures, the teacher candidates contributed to the increase in the descriptive representation of women in state legislatures after the 2018 midterm elections. Women teacher candidates won 61 seats in the 2018 midterm elections, which represents about 3% of the 1839 seats won by women in state legislatures in 2018. Although our work focuses on only a single election cycle, if teacher candidacy is a growing trend, then political engagement from the women-dominated profession of teaching may create new growth in the number of women lawmakers in the United States.