No abstract

Candidate dropouts are a crucial and understudied population; they represent a significant source for increasing women's candidacies and addressing the gender imbalance in office. Survey evidence demonstrates that women are discouraged from running in districts in which their party is strong, while men are discouraged from running in districts in which their party is weak. Are women more likely to drop out of an election race than are men? If so, why? Using election records and an original survey, this article examines the experiences of all declared candidates for the state legislature in Florida in 2000 and 2002. The sample includes candidates who won office, who lost their races, or who dropped out along the way. Evidence here shows that women are no more likely to drop out of a state legislative race than are men. Among dropouts, however, women are disproportionately likely to drop out from districts in which their party is strong. The results offer support for the contention that political elites continue to value men's political leadership more than women's, and that increasing the number of female officeholders may require efforts to support declared women candidates in the earliest stages of their candidacies. W omen hold a minority of seats in every state legislature in the United States. That is true today and has been true every day since the first legislature was organized in 1619 in what would become the United States. While many ethnic, religious, and social groups are underrepresented in political office, few can match the disproportionate level or the persis-A previous version of this research was presented as a paper at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. My thanks to Kira Sanbonmatsu for helpful comments on this study. 1. Other entities, such as the media (Niven 2005) and campaign contributors (Theilmann and Wilhite 1989) have come under scrutiny, but they are generally not seen as the most significant impediments to women's representation.

In the ongoing quest to understand and potentially improve voter turnout, many analysts have focused their attention on political mobilization effects. Some scholars suggest that the failure to engage in widespread personal mobilization efforts has contributed to declining turnout and that a recommitment to mobilization by parties, candidates, and others would reverse the trend. This research explores the effects of face-to-face mobilization efforts in select precincts in a 2001 Boynton Beach, Florida municipal election. Controlling for their past voting history, the face-to-face mobilization effort did increase turnout by about five points. The results suggest that face-to-face mobilization efforts increase turnout-at a huge cost in hours worked-but do so mostly by encouraging intermittent voters to go to the polls.

During the 2000 national election season, there was unprecedented attention paid by the media, and by presidential campaigns, to the political content of late night comedy shows such as the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and the Late Show with David Letterman. Focusing on the more than thirteen thousand jokes about U.S. political figures from 1996 to 2000 on late night comedy talk shows, this study explores the choice of targets and subjects of political humor. The authors find that late night humor is heavily centered on the president and top presidential contenders, that the various late night shows tend to exhibit the same patterns in their choice of targets, and that the humor is generally devoid of issue content.