PIPE* Workshop: Danielle Thomsen, UC Irvine

To diminish gender disparity in candidates, women have to be far more likely than men to run for office.

The leading explanation for this under-representation of women is that women are less likely to run for office than men, but scholars have given less attention to the gender makeup of the pipeline to elected office. We examine the gendered pipeline to power across three different potential candidate pools:

• individuals in lower-level office,
• those named in newspapers as likely candidates,
• and lawyers who made political contributions.

Danielle Thomsen is assistant professor of Political Science at University of California, Irvine. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University in 2018-2019. Research interests include American politics, U.S. Congress, political parties, and gender and politics. Her book, Opting Out of Congress: Partisan Polarization and the Decline of Moderate Candidates, examines the rise of partisan polarization in Congress.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to limited space, priority for seating will be granted to students and faculty.

*Political Institutions and Political Economy

The PIPE Collaborative holds scholarly interdisciplinary workshops which bring together USC faculty and graduate students from Price, Gould, Marshall, Dornsife (the Political Science and Economics Departments) who have an interest in political institutions and political economy. The workshop will provide a regular forum for PIPE scholarship and create an environment for new collaborations to develop.