Christina Wolbrecht
For Christina Wolbrecht, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and director of the Rooney Center Washington Program, the path to studying women in politics began with a politically engaged upbringing and a formative semester in Washington, D.C. Realizing early that she preferred analyzing politics to practicing it, she built a career focused on women’s representation, voting behavior, and leadership pathways.
With support from the Hesburgh Women of Impact Fund, Wolbrecht is leading new research on women’s political ambition at the local level—an early but often overlooked stage of civic life. She serves as Co-Principal Investigator, alongside economist Lakshmi Iyer and political scientist Mirya Holman, on a major research project for The Appointments Project, a national initiative of the nonprofit United WE that helps women secure appointments to local boards and commissions.
This partnership led the scholars to develop a large-scale survey examining why some women pursue appointed roles, others run for elected office, and many do not consider political participation at all. Hesburgh Women of Impact Fund support made this survey possible. “Local boards and commissions are often where people begin their public service,” Wolbrecht notes. “We want to better understand what draws women to these roles and how they might serve as springboards to broader political careers.”
While scholarship has long emphasized congressional and presidential ambition, Wolbrecht’s project turns attention to local pathways such as library boards, zoning committees, and health commissions. These bodies make decisions with immediate impact and often offer women a more accessible entry point than electoral politics.
The initiative will produce a short, peer-reviewed book to be published by Cambridge University Press and designed for both scholars and practitioners like local officials and community leaders. The 30,000 word volume is intended to meet academic standards while informing real-world practice.
Wolbrecht emphasizes that institutional support has been transformative throughout her career. The Hesburgh Women of Impact Fund, she says, enables her team to ask deeper questions about how ambition develops and how to create a more inclusive pipeline for women’s leadership.
As the five-year collaboration with United WE concludes, the project is expected to generate new insights into how local political participation shapes women’s representation, from city boards to state legislatures and beyond.
