Shames, Shauna, Rachel Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Teele. 2020. Good Reasons to Run. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 

After the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a large cohort of women emerged to run for office. Their efforts changed the landscape of candidates and representation. However, women are still far less likely than men to seek elective office, and face biases and obstacles in campaigns. 

In this edited volume, Shauna Shames, Rachel Bernhard, Dawn Teele and I assembled a wide set of contributors to consider the reasons why women run—and do not run—for political office. 

The essays in Good Reasons to Run ask not just who wants to run, but how to activate and encourage such ambition among a larger population of potential female candidates while also increasing the diversity of women running for office. 

The book can be purchased from Temple University Press, Amazon, or Powells

Farris, Emily M and Mirya R Holman. 2024. The Power of the Badge Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Across the United States, more than 3,000 sheriffs occupy a unique position in the US political and legal systems. Elected by voters—usually in low-visibility, noncompetitive elections—sheriffs oversee more than a third of law enforcement employees and control almost all local jails. They have the power to both set and administer policies, and they can imprison, harm, and even kill members of their communities. Yet, they enjoy a degree of autonomy not seen by other political officeholders.

The Power of the Badge offers an unprecedented, data-rich look into the politics of the office and its effects on local communities. Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman draw on two surveys of sheriffs taken nearly a decade apart, as well as election data, case studies, and administrative data to show how a volatile combination of authority and autonomy has created an environment where sheriffs rarely change; elections seldom create meaningful accountability; employees, budgets, and jails can be used for political gains; marginalized populations can be punished; and reforms fail. Farris and Holman also track the increasingly close linkages between sheriffs and right-wing radical groups in an era of high partisanship and intra-federal conflict.

The book can be purchased from Chicago University Press or Amazon

Bernhard, Rachel and Mirya R Holman. Gendered Jobs and Local Leaders: Women, Work, and the Pipeline to Local Political Office. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Elements Series. 

Men from business are overrepresented in local politics in the United States. We propose a theory of gendered occupations and ambition: the jobs people hold---and the gender composition of those jobs---shape political ambition and candidate success. We test our theory using data on gender and jobs, candidacy and electoral outcomes from thousands of elections in California, and experimental data on voter attitudes. We find that occupational gendered segregation is a powerful source of women's underrepresentation in politics. Women from feminine careers run for office far less than men. Offices also shape ambition, such that candidates with feminine occupations run for school board, not mayor or sheriff. In turn, people see the offices that women run for as feminine and less prestigious. Our work provides a rich picture of the pipeline to office, the ways this favours men, and how occupational gender segregation limits women's access to political power.

Holman, Mirya R. The Hidden Face of Local Power: Local Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 

Every city in the United States uses appointed boards, but we know little about their functions or the consequences of these commonplace governing mechanisms. Why do cities create these boards? What do these appointed boards do? And are these boards good for democracy? I develop a ‘strong boards, weak boards’ framework for understanding how cities use appointed boards and commissions. Cities create, fill, and support boards strategically to provide the appearance (but not the substance) of democracy. For cities, strong boards generate policy, consolidate power, and make choices that defend the interest of business, the wealthy, and white residents. These boards decrease accountability by obfuscating who is making unpopular and inequality enforcing decisions in policy spaces like pensions, planning, police, and development. Weak boards are used not to generate policy, but to pacify agitation from marginalized groups, including racial minorities and poor, to give the appearance of inclusivity and redistributional policymaking, and to engage in deliberation, but not decision making.

Using the construction, design, and maintenance of boards, I determine that political elites have long used boards as mechanisms to control policy, reinforce the status quo, and retain power. In doing so, these boards are not a path to saving local democracy, but instead represent a primary obstacle to the accountability that rests at the heart of democracy. Weak boards allow cities and political leaders to appear as if they are responding to constituent demands and democratizing the voices of political participants. Strong boards allow cities to bypass democratic accountability, pushing controversial decisions out of the public eye, and consolidating the power and policymaking of economic elites.