Data to Diversity — Electeds 2023

Executive Summary

Several thousand elected officials represent the interests of the citizens of New Jersey at the local, county, state, and federal levels. To date, a scarcity of available data has made it difficult to know how closely those officials reflect the demographics of the state’s population. Recent legislation attempts to address this knowledge gap by mandating the collection and analysis of the demographics, specifically race/ethnicity and gender, of the state’s elected officials. In this report, we provide details on what led to the legislation, how we developed and implemented the data collection process, and what we found. Among those data findings is evidence of persistent underrepresentation of women and significant disparities in representation among various racial/ethnic groups. Finally, we offer recommendations towards creating a model for the sustainable collection of this data over time, as well as practical interventions aimed at diversifying the pool of the state’s elected leaders. 

Introduction

In a representative democracy, elected officials wield tremendous power over the communities they serve. They set policy agendas and determine legislative priorities, vote on legislation or ordinances, are responsible for state, county, or city budgets and contracts, and oversee allocation of public resources and services. They also appoint members of the public to important advisory and regulatory commissions and boards. A truly representative government requires governing bodies that are reflective of the population they serve. In New Jersey, many public leaders, researchers, activists, journalists, democracy experts, and others have long sought to measure and better understand the demographics of the state’s elected leadership and craft solutions to address representation gaps.

Over 3,700 elected positions exist in New Jersey from the municipal level through federal congressional offices. To gain a clearer picture of how closely these officials mirror the state’s population, we must measure the demographics of those who currently serve. Defining the problem is critical to finding a solution. These data provide the foundation for studying and analyzing trends, illuminating disparities in representation, and offering insights for potential interventions in problem areas.

Unfortunately, demographic data collection is challenging. While some can be sourced from publicly available information and datasets, a significant amount of demographic data – especially data about race, ethnicity, and gender identity or expression – is gathered through self-reporting. This type of data collection is typically labor-intensive and expensive when conducted independently of other established collection methods (for example, via government forms individuals are required to complete for other reasons). Moreover, it relies on voluntary participation and reporting of personal demographic identities by public figures via surveys and personal outreach. For all these reasons, in-depth demographic data about New Jersey’s elected officials has neither been available consistently nor comprehensively.

In January 2022, P.L. 2021, c.414. S4004 – passed nearly unanimously by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor – directed the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) and the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling (ECPIP) at Rutgers University to design and execute a survey that would collect demographic background information of state appointed officials (excluding judges) and elected officeholders (excluding school boards). The explicit goal of the legislation was to build a database of the state’s elected and appointed officials by gender, race, and ethnicity. Implicit goals of the legislation were to gain better clarity about demographic representation of the state’s government leadership and to offer party leaders and others a tool to help develop practical interventions for diversifying New Jersey leaders whose decisions affect the lives of the state’s citizens. Peripherally, the establishment of this database may also help spotlight for the general public the importance of elected and appointed leaders and inspire more citizens to serve their communities by seeking public leadership roles. While this project is specific to New Jersey, this report provides clarity on both the hurdles and opportunities for this type of data collection and representation assessment, which could be useful in other states exploring this type of study of their own elected leaders.

Finally, in an era when public trust in government institutions is eroding and in which strengthening democracy is more critical than ever, government should work to ensure citizens have access to more information about their public leaders. This project is a model of how data can help illuminate problems related to representation in policymaking, provide useful context for decision-making, and offer tools to increase diversity in civic participation.

Background

Obtaining demographic data on New Jersey’s public officials has been a priority for some state legislators, activists, journalists, and scholars for many years. In 2018, in an effort to codify the collection of demographic data on elected officials into state policy and make it publicly available for analysis, New Jersey Senator Ronald Rice and Assemblymembers Shavonda Sumter and Verlina Reynolds-Jackson, along with co-sponsor Senator Shirley Turner, sponsored S358/A4587, which required “the Division of Elections in the New Jersey Department of State [to establish] a database containing the contact information for every elected public official in the state, including the gender identity or expression and race of the elected public official.”1 While the legislation was laudable, adequate resources were not available for effective implementation, and administrators encountered similar challenges, such as low response rates and decentralized contact information, faced by the researchers on this study, which are discussed in the process findings section of this report.

Legislators and community advocates for women’s representation in public office had also long pushed for data on the gender balance of state boards and commissions. CAWP manages the New Jersey Bipartisan Coalition for Women’s Appointments (BCWA), a statewide, bipartisan group of prominent women and organizations who work to ensure the placement of women in key appointed positions throughout state government. BCWA first convened in 1981. Many of the individuals who have served on BCWA have also individually and with other organizations pushed for greater representation of underrepresented groups on state boards and commissions, including women.   

In 2021, then-New Jersey Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, along with Senator Linda R. Greenstein and Assemblymembers Shavonda Sumter, Daniel Benson, and Verlina Reynolds-Jackson (with co-sponsors Senator M. Teresa Ruiz and Gordon Johnson, and Assemblymembers Yvonne Lopez, Clinton Calabrese, and William Moen) sponsored S4004/A5950,  which read: “The Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, The State University, shall establish and maintain two databases that contain for every person appointed to a State board, commission, authority, or other multi-member entity, and for every elected public official in this State, excluding school boards, the name of the individual, the title of the office held, the term of office, the race and the gender identity or expression of that individual, and the appointing authority.” Senator Rice agreed to have his earlier bill on elected officials rescinded to allow for this project to continue under a unified umbrella.

The bill directed the Eagleton Institute to transmit a survey form to all elected public officials to collect this information. Notably, the original legislation passed by the legislature included this language regarding the creation of the elected officials’ database: “The Secretary of State shall cooperate with the Institute for the survey and shall sign the request to complete the form.” During a conditional veto, Governor Murphy struck “and shall sign the request to complete the form” from the legislation. This change created a major challenge to data collection (pertaining to response rates) which is elaborated on in the findings and recommendations section of this report.

The legislation specifically named the Eagleton Institute’s Center for American Women and Politics in partnership with its Center for Public Interest Polling to collect this information; the expectation was the two Centers’ expertise in data collection and analysis would be helpful in the creation of the databases and in codifying a process that could be sustained long-term. CAWP is nationally recognized as the leading source of scholarly research and current data about women’s political participation in the United States. Since its inception, CAWP has been collecting demographic data on women officeholders and candidates nationwide. This data is used by scholars, researchers, and the media and is heralded for its use of self-identification in regard to determining race codes. With its legacy of data collection in this area, CAWP researchers managed and provided the infrastructure for this project by creating the lists of elected public officials, building out the public database, and synthesizing results for a public audience. ECPIP is the oldest university-based statewide survey research center in the United States. ECPIP conducts scientifically rigorous survey research, often in collaboration with government agencies, non-profit organizations, and university faculty and staff. For this project, ECPIP was tasked with implementing the survey to the elected public officials in the state. This included email and phone outreach as well as research into alternative contact information.

This report focuses specifically on the elected officials’ data project; simultaneously, CAWP and ECPIP collected data on the state appointees, and a second report on those findings is forthcoming in the fall of 2023.

• 1

  (The bill excluded those elected to a position in a special district, on a board of education, or on a board of fire commissioners.)  

Findings

Download NJ Elected Officials Public Dataset (2022)

The findings for this project are two-fold. Primarily, the findings include data on the gender makeup of elected officials in New Jersey, as well as the racial makeup of officeholders at the congressional, state legislative, and county levels. Unfortunately, and this speaks directly to the second finding in this report, data collection limitations resulting from inadequate support for this effort forced us to exceed the mandate of the legislature in order to produce any meaningful results.

Secondly, the process of creating these datasets yielded important findings about the efforts to conduct this type of data collection and analysis about the population of elected officials in a state. These findings are useful for researchers and government administrators exploring the concept of demographic data collection on government officials.

Data Findings: Demographic Representation of New Jersey's Public Officials

Gender Diversity

Women are underrepresented at every level of office in New Jersey. Across all levels of office, women comprise 29.5% of officeholders in New Jersey. This mirrors similar proportions nationally, with women’s representation across most levels of office hovering under a third of officeholders. The New Jersey congressional delegation is at the bottom of national rankings for women’s representation with women comprising only 14.3% of the delegation (two of 14 members.) A total of seven women have ever served as members of Congress representing the state of New Jersey, of those women, only one is a woman of color (Bonnie Watson Coleman). The New Jersey legislature had the highest proportion of women’s representation of all levels, with women comprising 34.2% of its membership. Following closely were county offices at 33.8% and municipal offices at 29.1%. Among mayors of cities with populations over 30,000, the gender disparity grows even wider, with women holding only 15.4% of these positions.

Racial Diversity

White men are by far the most overrepresented group at every level of office in New Jersey. Among other groups, only Black men and Black women are represented in some elective offices near or barely above their representation in the population. Asian American/Pacific Islander and Latino women and men in New Jersey face the greatest disparities between representation in government and representation in the population.

Overall, white men account for 52.6% of New Jersey officeholders at the congressional, state legislative, and county levels. According to 2021 U.S. Census population estimates, white men account for 27.0% of New Jersey’s population, signaling a vast overrepresentation (25.6%) in officeholding.

White men are the only demographic that are significantly overrepresented in the state’s 14-member congressional delegation. White women are 27.8% of New Jersey’s population while only 7.1% of the delegation. The representation of Black men and Black women is near or slightly exceeds their population in the state. Latinas, Asian American/Pacific Islander women, and Native American/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian men and women are completely absent at this level of office, leaving nearly a fifth of New Jersey’s population without representation in our nation's capital.

At the state legislative level, once again, only white men are significantly overrepresented. At the municipal level, race data is only available for mayors of cities with populations over 30,000. This level has the highest overrepresentation of white men at 66.7% versus the state population of 27%. It should be noted that 49% of New Jersey’s citizens live in cities over 30,000.

There are also significant partisan differences by race and gender. Across levels for which we have race data, white men and women combined make up well over half (59%) of all Democratic officeholders and over 90% of Republican officeholders. At the state legislative level, 96% of Republican legislators are white. In comparison, more than a quarter (27%) of Democratic state legislators identify as Black, 12.9% identify as Latino/a, and 8.6% identify as Asian American/Pacific Islander. Across all levels of office, 39% of Democratic officeholders and 27% of Republican officeholders are women. In the state legislature, women comprise 40% of the Democratic caucus and 28% of the Republican caucus. 

Coding for race in this project follows CAWP’s current method for race data collection. Officeholders who identify as more than one race/ethnicity are included in each group with which they identify. As a result, percentages may not add up to 100% across levels. While these numbers do include mayors of cities with populations over 30,000, they do not include other municipal officeholders in these cities, as expert coding was not possible at this level and the response rate was too low to report findings.

Process Findings: Creating a Model for State Elected Officials' Demographic Data Collection

As the project developed, it became clear that this study would become as much about how the data is collected as it is about the data itself. For this reason, we are including this section on process findings.

Compulsory Participation

One key obstacle in creating this dataset was a low survey response rate, and a major contributor to the low response was that officeholders were not legally compelled to participate. In addition, the original version of the legislation passed by the legislature required the secretary of state’s office to sign the request to complete the survey, thus giving the request the weight and authority of the state government. This portion of the legislation was deleted by the governor’s office in a conditional veto. While this provision did not compel officeholders to participate, it did provide an endorsement of the survey that would have likely improved the response rate.

Without the full-throated endorsement of the data collection by the state or, ideally, compulsory participation by elected officials, a self-report approach to collecting demographic information on officeholders will yield insufficient data to fully analyze the diversity of elected officials.

While we are grateful to the many elected officials who replied to our survey and voluntarily provided their information, the participant response rate for officeholders was just 16.1%. By level, response rates varied, with the lowest being at the congressional level (7.1%). The highest response rate by far was among state legislators at 53.3%.2 There are several factors that can account for these differences; for example, responses from state legislators could have been higher because the legislature was the body of government responsible for the legislation that made the survey possible.  

Response rates also varied by gender. Of the women surveyed, 21.9% filled out the questionnaire with their demographic information. Conversely, only 13.5% of men did the same, accounting for an 8.5% gender gap in completed surveys.

• 2

  Response rate in this section is calculated using the number of respondents that provided demographic information in their survey response and does not include partial or incomplete surveys. These calculations also do not include the 15.9% of officeholders who did not have sufficient contact information and therefore never received a survey. 

Limitations of Surveys and Need for Proxy Coding

Another limitation of the existing legislation is its reliance on a survey alone. Surveys are an excellent tool utilized to gather information about various populations, but they also have some practical disadvantages. As noted, survey response rates are typically low, which can create flawed results when used on a finite population such as elected officials. Because participation was voluntary, response rates were low, and CAWP researchers had to employ expert proxy coding – collecting data through public statements, direct contact, and other means – to determine gender codes at all levels and race codes at most levels. Demographic information determined via survey accounts for 13.5% of the total dataset. Expert coding became necessary when it was determined that the response rate for each level would have resulted in an overly weighted sample. For example, if only survey responses were utilized in these findings, then New Jersey’s congressional delegation would be 100% white women. A requirement for and/or guidance on this type of expert coding was not included in the legislative language.

Proxy coding allowed us to report far more extensively on the demographics of New Jersey’s elected officials. While proxy coding is feasible, it is both time-consuming and labor intensive. In addition, this type of coding for personal identity data increases the risk of misidentification. Self-reporting of gender and racial identity is preferred.

Contact Lists

In the absence of requiring self-reporting of demographic data, the state can increase the feasibility and sustainability of this data collection by maintaining up-to-date and accurate contact information for all elected officials.

A major challenge in conducting a study like this is the dearth of readily available officeholder contact information in list form. The legislation directed the secretary of state’s office to provide election results. While the secretary of state’s office was helpful and shared what was available, centralized lists of those who currently serve in elected office do not exist at a governmental level in New Jersey. To compile a complete list of all elected officials and their contact information, researchers must source several individual lists, utilizing both government sources and data services companies, and combine the lists, as was done in this project. This is easy at the federal and state legislative levels but becomes much more difficult at county and municipal levels due to the lack of readily available lists and the sheer number of elected officials. The data service company utilized for this study only had information for municipalities with populations of 10,000 and above. Information for smaller municipalities needed to be hand collected by going to each municipality’s website or contacting their town hall.

Additionally, individual contact information for public officials is spotty at best. Existing lists from data service companies and other sources often do not have complete personalized contact information for each officeholder, requiring individual data collection to fill in gaps in the information, assuming it is available. For example, at the municipal and county level, contact information is routinely the same for every member on the council/board of commissioners (such as a council- or commission-wide shared email or one phone number for the entire governing body), or the only electronic contact avenue is a webform, which is incompatible with survey software and makes the dissemination of personalized survey codes impossible. Moreover, individual contact information for municipal officeholders was difficult to collect and, in some cases, not possible. Of the municipal officeholders, 17% had unusable contact information. This was due to a lack of publicly available individual email addresses or phone numbers. For long-term, ongoing sustainability of this project, a centralized database of elected official contact information along with personalized email addresses and phone numbers is necessary.

Data Collection Methodology

To meet the expectations of the legislation, CAWP and CPIP identified and surveyed all 3,700 elected officials in New Jersey (this number does not include school board members) about their office title, term of office, ethnicity, race, and gender (note that term of office is not included in the data set as explained below). We recognize there are many demographic criteria that would provide a deeper understanding of the officeholder population, such as age, education levels, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and parenthood status, among others. For this project's purposes, we hewed to the directive in the legislation regarding which criteria to include. We do, however, believe that broadening the survey instrument to include more criteria would be valuable.

Before conducting the survey, CAWP created a contact list to reach this population of elected officials based on who was serving in 2022. We supplemented our existing dataset of women officeholders at the congressional, state legislative, and municipal levels with a list of elected officeholders purchased from KnowWho, a data services company specializing in contact data for governmental officials and employees. Email, phone, and mailing addresses were mostly available at the congressional, state legislative, county, and municipal level for incorporated cities with populations of 10,000 or above via KnowWho’s datasets. Research assistants used publicly available sources to acquire contact information for municipal officeholders in municipalities outside of this threshold through local government websites. This hand collection accounted for over 34% of municipal officeholders.

The complete list of New Jersey elected officials included members of the U.S. Congress (N=14), the New Jersey State Legislature (N=120), county officials (N=207), and municipal officials (N=2883).

Using this list, ECPIP proceeded with survey design and distribution. The online survey instrument that elected officials received was pre-populated with known data already in the contact list, such as name, office currently held, government office mailing address, government email address, and government telephone number. Respondents were first asked to verify or revise this information. Then, they were asked when they first started serving in their current position and the length of the term of office. Finally, respondents were asked their ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation. The estimated time to complete the survey was three to five minutes.

The survey was fielded between September 2, 2022 and June 14, 2023, with data collected in multiple waves that employed a mixed-mode recruitment design – including emails, phone, and text messaging – in an effort to increase response rates.3 A limited number of face-to-face paper surveys were collected at the New Jersey League of Municipalities Annual Conference held in November 2022. The number of surveys completed from among valid email and cell phone contacts are reported as the number of responses received (N) and the corresponding response rates in the table below for each office jurisdiction within the panel.

• 3

  After an initial wave of direct email recruitment, ECPIP contacted the members of Congress and the state legislature at their district offices. ECPIP also acquired names of members’ chiefs of staff or legislative aides and emailed and called these contacts in a prenotification effort of an email wave. Their direct assistance in forwarding the survey to their members was requested.  For county and appointed officials, ECPIP recruited through email only. Given the part-time nature of most municipal officials, the sample frame was appended with personal contact information which included home address, landline phone number, and cell phone number. Overall, ECPIP located personal contact information for approximately 82 percent (N=2266) of the municipal panel, of which 48 percent (N=1098) included cell phone numbers. An additional mode of recruitment was conducted by texting cells with a push to the web survey for those municipal officials with listed cell phone numbers. The sample frame (N) represents the total number of officials in the panel who were recruited by two to four waves of email. Municipal officials were also contacted by one round of text with a link to the survey. The contact information represents the number of valid emails and corresponding contact rates. Response rates would be higher if surveys could be mailed to the home address of elected officials, or if officials could be reached via text. As noted above, part-time officials often do not maintain public offices or retain full-time staff which makes it much more difficult to contact them.  Among the municipal non-responders, the response rate was increased by 10 percent when we recruited these officials by text.

Post survey, several measures were taken to fill in demographic information not sourced directly from survey responses. These measures included utilizing existing CAWP datasets, expert coding, conducting direct outreach to officeholders or their staff contacts, and verification using publicly available sources (such as officeholders’ official biographies or news coverage about the officeholders). Further gender and party verification occurred via public online sources at the municipal level to ensure data accuracy. More information about the proportion of data collected directly from survey responses versus data collected from proxy sources is available in the findings section.

Finally, it is not possible to track updates created by elections or to track officeholders who left or entered office outside elections. Absent direct involvement from state government, the best-case scenario is a database that provides a “point in time” snapshot of representation. Because of this, the “term of office” variable included in the bill language becomes difficult to track as term end dates change with every election. For this reason, it was not included in this data set.

Recommendations

To help ensure long-term sustainability of this data project, CAWP recommends the following:

• Legislative intervention:  The legislature should pass updated legislation specifically mandating the collection of this demographic information about candidates and officeholders through state administration and requiring the demographic data be made publicly available. Ideally, this information should be part of the candidate filing process, in the same way name and address are required, as is done on notice of candidacy forms in the state of Louisiana. If this is not possible, every elected official should be required to respond to the survey within a certain period after being sworn into office.
• Administrative effort: Parallel to legislative efforts to mandate this data collection, state government administrators must create mechanisms for official contact information and demographic data on elected officials to be collected and transmitted to a secure database that is user-friendly and publicly available. Funding should be allocated to the department(s) responsible for the data collection and maintenance. Specifically, the state should invest in its technical capacity to house the collected demographic data in a public-facing database that is updated regularly.
• Utilize expertise: Outside organizations with data expertise should be contracted by the state to consult on the database structure, functionality, and security. In addition, organizations with expertise, such as CAWP, should be tasked with providing context and analysis of the data, including releasing an annual report on the demographic status of New Jersey’s elected officials. The process will be significantly easier if a sustainable model for data collection is established through internal state processes, as noted above.

Practical interventions will be necessary for long-term success in diversifying the state’s elected leadership. To that end, CAWP recommends:

• Candidate recruitment:  Having data about representation is the first step to the intentional work of recruiting, running, or nominating members of underrepresented groups for elective office. Stakeholders in candidate recruitment, including party leaders and current elected officials, should make a conscious effort to recruit diverse pools of candidates to run. A deeper understanding of the demographics of those who already serve will give stakeholders perspective on shortfalls in representation and help them adjust their recruitment strategies to broaden the field of potential candidates.
• Advocates for democratic processes should press for continued transparency on data about the state’s elected representation. The data must be regularly updated as new people are elected and those serving step down or lose elections. Without continual tracking, there is no way to measure progress or to flag backsliding.

Conclusion

Transparency, participation, and accountability are the hallmarks of open government. Citizens should have clarity in understanding who represents their interests at every level of government. Access to more information about the demographics of public officials will encourage more citizens to serve their communities by seeking public leadership roles. This demographic data is also an important tool for party leaders who seek to diversify the pool of candidates for elective office. In addition, a commitment to transparency and codified mechanisms that meet this standard of transparency – for example, requiring government to collect and share demographic information about its public leaders – are crucial building blocks of good government.

Our findings serve as a roadmap for scholars, activists, and government officials both here in New Jersey and in other states who may want to replicate these efforts, highlighting what is possible and what obstacles need to be addressed to make databases such as these, whose information is invaluable, a reality. Uniformity and efficiency are critical to achieving the legislation’s goal: to be able to measure and track over time the gender and racial/ethnic diversity of the state’s elected officials. Finally, the data collection process should ultimately be housed within state government with sufficient infrastructure provided for ongoing maintenance. The state must take responsibility for ensuring this data is collected and create mechanisms for doing so and be accountable for reporting this information on an ongoing basis.

CAWP looks forward to continuing to collect, as best as possible, and analyze this data in 2023-2024 in order to provide a solid baseline of information on the gender/race/ethnicity of elected officials in the Garden State. Our hope is that, during this time, more can be done to institutionalize the collection of this information within state government in the future.

Acknowledgements

This project is made possible by the generous support of the New Jersey Legislature.

About CAWP

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is nationally recognized as the leading source of scholarly research and current data about women’s political participation in the United States. Its mission is to promote greater knowledge and understanding about the role of women in American politics, enhance women's influence in public life, and expand the diversity of women in politics and government.

About ECPIP

The Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling’s (ECPIP) mission is to provide scientifically sound, non-partisan information about public opinion. ECPIP conducts research for all levels of government and nonprofit organizations with a public interest mission, as well as college and university-based researchers and staff. ECPIP makes it a priority to design opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to learn how to read, analyze, design, and administer polls.

New Jersey Elected Officials Public Dataset (2022)

Click below to download the dataset referenced in the findings section. Data was collected and is as of Spring 2022 and includes congressional, state legislative, county, and municipal officials.

Download Database