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Despite high success rates when they run for office, women are still underrepresented in federal, state and local elective office. Past research has explored factors that contribute to the scarcity of female candidates on the state and federal level, but little attention has been paid to the local level. This paper begins to fill that gap by exploring electoral and fundraising patterns in mayoral and council elections in seven cities. We find that, similar to state and federal elections, women do just as well as men when they seek office but fewer women run. Further, of the women who do mount campaigns their backgrounds are quite similar to male candidates. As for fundraising, female candidates receive contributions from the same sources as male candidates and in comparable amounts. In general, we found few differences between male and female candidates. These findings highlight the importance of self-selection in the decision to run for office and informs the body of research on why more women do not run for elective office. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores citizen participation in local politics to assess its potential benefits to policy making: when citizens participate, do they enhance the problem solving capacity of government by adding resources to the policy making process? To answer this question, I examine how citizens try to influence local policies in a mid-sized city (Santa Ana, California) over a 10-year period, analyzing what issues citizens try to influence and how they try to influence them. I argue that the benefits from participation are limited by citizens' choices concerning which policies they attempt to influence. Citizens had ample opportunities to participate in local policy making, and benefits (primarily in the form of information) did materialize as a result of their activity. Yet, citizen participants typically did not attempt to address major community problems; rather, they focused their attention on smaller, less complex issues. Complex and difficult issues, however, need the benefits that participation can bring the most; the simpler and clearer the issue, the more likely officials will be able to address the issue without the additional resources citizen participation can provide. The issues that generated the most participation were ones that least needed the additional resources that participation can bring. Citizens' preference to participate on simpler and clearer issues limits the benefit from their participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When candidates run for municipal office, from whom do they receive campaign contributions? While there has been some research that has explored the types of businesses that contribute and the characteristics of individual contributors, there has been no research on the geographic distribution of contributions. This paper attempts to close this gap by exploring fundraising networks in four central cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. The majority of campaign contributions to mayoral and city council candidates come from within their city. While the fundraising networks of central city candidates do extend into the suburbs, they only do so partially. In particular, they only extend to a handful of wealthy suburbs that are geographically close to the central city. Fundraising networks are not regional in scope, indicating that the flow of political money does not mirror the economic and policy interdependence that has been documented by new regionalists. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]