Nevertheless, He Persisted: White Men and the Links Between Incumbency and Group Descriptive Representation

Abstract

Descriptive representation is shaped by more than the number of seats group members win—it is also informed by how group members hold on to seats long after election day. Drawing from the literatures on women of color, women, and minorities in politics, this study argues that the relationship between incumbents and descriptive representation is different among groups that hold distinctive political positioning and power. To uncover those differences, the article introduces a new measure called descriptive maintenance, which accounts for a group’s ability to retain descriptive representation in a seat across unique group members and elections. This multidimensional approach expands current conceptualizations by treating incumbency and descriptive representation as interrelated, group-level, phenomena. This framework is tested using nearly 60,000 observations of state elections data in an analysis focused on a group of state legislative incumbents that has rarely been explicitly examined, and yet outnumbers all others: white men.