Since the 1960s, increasing numbers of women have won the highest office in the world’s democracies despite clear gender effects in gaining office. But does reelection show the same gendered effects? Recent research suggests that compared to male leaders, women leaders often come to high office in more difficult conditions; enter with lower approval ratings; and experience more rapid decline in ratings over time. We know little, however, about the conditions that affect their odds of reelection. Does the type of office—president or prime minister—matter? Do economic and political conditions during their tenure affect their odds of success? We analyze gender and leader reelection across electoral democracies in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia,1960–2023. We show that among leaders eligible to run, men and women have roughly equal odds of winning. We also find that women run somewhat more often than men.

How does the introduction of mayoral re-election shape organized crime’s efforts to collude with local officials? While re-election can provide voters with a critical mechanism to hold elected officials accountable, I show that the positive benefits of re-election do not extend to high-crime areas. Where organized crime is powerful and deeply entrenched in local illicit economies, re-election can provide groups opportunities to collude more closely with mayors, engaging in more electoral violence to deter challengers and benefiting from access to state protection. Exploiting variation in the introduction of mayoral re-election in Mexico using a difference-in-differences design and a novel dataset on violence against local politicians, I show that criminal groups disproportionately killed rival candidates in places where incumbents could run for re-election, maintaining the status quo and keeping incumbents in power. Further, re-electable mayors in high-crime areas were more likely be found to engage in corruption following the introduction of re-election. This letter highlights the unintended consequences of institutional reforms in high-crime areas, emphasizing the need for tailored guardrails by policy makers to reduce these collateral effects.

It is often argued that when legislators have personal vote-seeking incentives, parties are less unified because legislators need to build bonds of accountability with their voters. I argue that these effects depend on a legislator’s ability to cultivate a personal vote. When parties control access to the ballot and the resources candidates need to cultivate personal votes, they can condition a legislator’s access to these resources on loyalty to the party’s agenda. I test this theory by conducting a difference-in-differences analysis that leverages the staggered implementation of the 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform. This reform introduced the possibility of consecutive reelection for state legislators, increasing their incentives to cultivate personal votes. I study unity in position-taking and voting behaviour of Mexican state legislators from 2012 to 2018. To analyze position-taking, I apply correspondence analysis to a new dataset of over half a million legislative speeches in twenty states. To study voting, I analyze over 14,500 roll-call votes in fourteen states during the same period. Results show that reelection incentives increased intra-party unity, which has broad implications for countries introducing electoral reforms aiming to personalize politics.