Incumbents

Political Disadvantages for Women

• social norms in genders, hierarchy men seen as stronger leaders

• traditionally, women are in the private sphere and men are in the public sphere

• women on average feel they need an invitation to run for public office to be in politics

• double edged sword → women not assertive = weak, women assertive = bitch/bossy

28% of congress are women → 29% of house are women, 25% of senate are women

• More women in the US than men

Systematic Barriers for Women

• incumbent v challenger

  • incumbent advantage is why women are systematically disadvantaged

  • congress is primarily men

• 90% chance of being reelected in congress (92% chance in house and 86% chance in senate)

Incumbent Advantage

• Pork → more federal funding, many members of senate take home the money, appropriation of govt spending for localized projects secured solely or primarily to direct expenditures to a representative’s district

• constituency → people residing in their state or district

• Service strategy → using staff in ways that benefit constituents, incumbents respond to their constituents requests

• frank → pot of money congress members get that pays for their travels from home state and back from Washington DC

  • con send out correspondents to constituents, gets their name recognized, they start out with more money then new challengers

  • chunk of votes that are not rational and people will vote for names they recognize only

• Incumbents raising money for → reelection, mailers, ads on tv, newspaper, telephone calls, billboards, yard signs

• Incumbents have and easier time raising money and winning because they have run before and show that they can win (“bet on the winning horse”)

House of Reps on the theme of incumbency

Reapportionment → proportion of seats each state gets changing after a ten year census, process of deciding how many seats house gets after census

• “one person, one vote” number of people in each congressional district must be mostly the same

• Wisconsin has 8/435 seats in congress

Redistricting → redrawing district lines after reapportionment to make sure numbers stay the same

Gerrymandering → when redrawing lines, it’s drawing it so one party has an advantage over another

Divided Govt → exists when more than one party controls the house, senate, and presidency (Unified govt is when all three are the same)

Order of succession to the presidency

1. vice president

2. speaker of the house

3. president pro tempore

4. secretary of state

5. cabinet agencies in the order that they were created