Demographics of New Jersey Officeholders

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, has released a new report that provides a demographic overview of elected officials serving in New Jersey. In From Data to Diversity: The Demographics of New Jersey’s Elected Officials, completed in coordination with our colleagues at the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling (ECPIP), CAWP takes the first step in collecting and organizing a publicly accessible database of all New Jersey elected officeholders with information about their gender and race/ethnicity.

This first-of-its-kind report is the product of legislation passed by the New Jersey Legislature and signed into law by Governor Phil Murphy, which seeks to provide clarity on a question of longstanding concern here in New Jersey and around the country: is our government reflective of the population it serves? The demographic data gathered in this project sheds light on disparities in representation and provides a roadmap for crafting interventions to remedy them.

From Data to Diversity provides demographic data on New Jersey officeholders (federal, state, county and municipal), analysis of this data (particularly regarding comparisons to population demographics), a description of challenges collecting this information, and recommendations to ensure the sustainability of this project moving forward. Full descriptions of the data collected for this project, with detailed data visualizations, are available at the From Data to Diversity report page.

Key to the data findings in this report, and illustrative of persistent political inequities in the state, white men are by far the most overrepresented group in New Jersey’s political offices. While making up just 27% of the population, white men hold half or more of elected positions at every level of office for which we collected race data. Among mayors of cities with a population over 30,000, white men hold nearly 7 in 10 offices.

Because of the extreme overrepresentation of white men, women and people of other racial and ethnic groups remain significantly underrepresented in New Jersey politics. Across all levels of office for which we have race data, people of every gender and race/ethnicity combination besides white men are underrepresented in at least one level of office. Asian American women and Latinas are underrepresented at all levels of office. Women as a whole are likewise underrepresented at every level of office in New Jersey.

These disparities are considerably more stark when accounting for partisan status. Across levels for which we have race/ethnicity data, white men make up 42.4% of Democrats, but they are 68.9% of Republicans. White men and women combined make up more than half of all Democratic officeholders, but they are over 90% of Republican officeholders.

“These numbers lay bare the troubling reality of politics in New Jersey: our government does not look like our people,” said CAWP Director Debbie Walsh. “Only when our representative democracy reflects the full diversity of our state can it be responsive to the needs of all of its citizens. This vital project is a diagnosis. The cure must come from political power brokers in the state opening the door to all New Jerseyans and activists and citizens working to identify and support a diverse pool of candidates and officeholders.”

CAWP is further committed to improving the process of this data collection by creating a roadmap for the project’s sustainability. Chief among our recommendations is formally including a short set of demographic questions on candidate filing papers.

“Efforts to collect this kind of demographic data are essential for measuring and evaluating both progress and setbacks in representation. In an era when strengthening democratic participation is critical, this project is a model of how data can help illuminate representation gaps and inform strategies to increase diversity in public leaders,” said CAWP Associate Director Jean Sinzdak. “We are grateful to the New Jersey Legislature for their commitment to the goal of making government more transparent and accountable to its citizens and look forward to working with the legislature to strengthen this vital project moving forward.”

From Data to Diversity: The Demographics of New Jersey’s Elected Officials is the initial report of an ongoing project to enhance the transparency of New Jersey government and provide a clearer picture of the representativeness of our democracy. In November, CAWP will release a second report devoted to a demographic picture of officials serving in certain of the state’s appointed positions. The legislature has committed additional resources that will support two more rounds of data collection, providing a three-year baseline of data on the demographics of New Jersey’s elected and appointed officials.