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.
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.
3After 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.