Abstract
AbstractDecades of research has debated whether women first need to reach a “critical mass” in the legislature before they can effectively influence legislative outcomes. This study contributes to the debate using supervised tree-based machine learning to study the relationship between increasing variation in women's legislative representation and the allocation of government expenditures in three policy areas: education, healthcare, and defense. We find that women's representation predicts spending in all three areas. We also find evidence of critical mass effects as the relationships between women's representation and government spending are nonlinear. However, beyond critical mass, our research points to a potential critical mass interval or critical limit point in women's representation. We offer guidance on how these results can inform future research using standard parametric models.
Highlights
Decades of research has debated whether women first need to reach a “critical mass” in the legislature before they can effectively influence legislative outcomes
Our inductive, data-driven approach provides guidance for future research on the consequences of women’s representation, including its predictive power in explaining government spending, where potential breakpoints might exist in the data, and what functional form these relationships might take across various contexts
The relationship could take on a more complex form than previously theorized, such as one with two breakpoints (Figure 1e). We suggest this relationship could be reflective of a critical mass interval, wherein the effect of women’s representation is only significant between the two breakpoints
Summary
There is growing evidence that increasing women’s legislative representation influences the allocation of government expenditures, leading to greater spending in areas that concern women. Greater representation increases spending on issues that have mattered to women historically, such as social welfare, healthcare, and family benefits (2018) (Bolzendahl 2011; Chen 2013; Park 2017; Clayton and Zetterberg, 2018), and decreases spending on issues historically more important to men, including the military and defense (Koch and Fulton, 2011; Clayton and Zetterberg, 2018). These findings are echoed in studies of subnational governments. Women’s presence on city councils has been found to influence government spending (Bratton and Ray, 2002; Svaleryd, 2009; Chen, 2013; Braendle and Colombier, 2016; Funk and Philips, 2019)
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