Legislative Career Length Differentials between Men and Women

In the last decades, a burgeoning literature has delivered new insights into the factors that foster descriptive gender representation, including what helps in getting women nominated or elected. Yet, while this literature has focused on women's entry into parliament, we know significantly less about their legislative career lengths and their exit from parliament. This paper, combining macro- and micro-level approaches, develops a number of hypotheses on contextual factors affecting career lengths, and on individual-level reasons for parliamentary exit. Using data from ten democracies, we show that electoral systems, party ideology and quotas are correlated with gendered career differentials. Additionally, hand-collected original data on parliamentary exits from the German Bundestag (1949-2021) reveal gendered dynamics with respect to failing reelection and renomination, contingent on the type of mandate in the German mixed-member system, as well as crucial downstream effects for office attainment. Our findings have consequences for descriptive and substantive representation.

How do MPs in Germany leave the Bundestag? We find a gender-mandate dynamic, in that list-elected female MPs are more susceptible to failed renomination than men or district-elected women. The figure shows the predicted survival probability of remaining in parliament over time when careers end in re-nomination failure, i.e. their party did not renominate them again. The underlying information that allows us to distinguish re-nomination failure from retirement is based on extensive archival and newspaper article research on each individual German MP.