Abstract
Councillor retention is an issue that has been largely neglected in recent academic literature despite being a present concern for policymakers in the field and those involved in the practice of local politics. This article utilises original data to consider the dropout patterns of councillors in greater detail, particularly with regard to sex. It confirms the finding of the existing literature that women are more likely to drop out of local politics than men and then goes further than previous work to examine reasons as to why this might be the case and to introduce data looking at the future political intentions of councillors after they have stood down. Evidence is found that, having stood down from their council duties, women councillors are less likely to want to remain politically involved than their male colleagues.
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Notes
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the PSA Women and Politics Specialist Group One Day Workshop held at Birkbeck, University of London in February 2011 and at the ‘Studying Women’ panel at the 2011 PSA Conference, London. The author thanks all participants for their feedback.
The author would like to acknowledge the sex-gender distinction at this point, recognising that these concepts are not the same and to show awareness of the debates around the terms (Lovenduski, 2005, pp. 20–21). The article will primarily use the term ‘gender’, as it is social-based trends that are being discussed rather than a biological distinction, but ‘sex’ will be used when looking at data that uses variables distinguishing directly between men and women.
Following the 2010 general election, women constitute 22 per cent of the 650 MPs in the House of Commons (Ashe et al, 2010, p. 457) compared with 30.6 per cent of local authority councillors in England (Evans and Aston, 2011, p. 5).
The study was piloted on two London councils (selected by virtue of being the first two on a list of London's councils in alphabetical order) and allowed for the testing of the software being used to administer the survey as well as providing an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the questions in the survey. Following the pilot study, a small number of minor changes were made to the survey, none of which were significant enough to cause incomparability with the questions included in the full survey, and, as such, the responses of the pilot were incorporated into the overall sample detailed above.
This offer was taken up by only one councillor.
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Allen, P. Last in, first out – Gendered patterns of local councillor dropout. Br Polit 8, 207–224 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2012.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2012.24