Women Legislators Research Articles

Public Opinion and Policymaking in the States: The Case of Post‐Roe Abortion Policy

Whether public opinion should be expected to play a role in the shaping of abortion legislation in the states is a debatable question. Representation is a difficult task, especially if legislators receive mixed cues from the public, activists, and the political parties. In this study, we find that grass-roots activism and public opinion tend to match, and both are reflected in state abortion policy. In addition, more Pro-Life policies are found in states with a tradition of conservative policies in other areas, Republican majorities in the state legislature, more Catholic residents, and fewer women legislators. These patterns hold true for a composite index of abortion policies and for the specific policy area of government funding of abortions. Slightly different patterns occur for parental consent law, though these statutes also tend to reflect general preferences on abortion and interest group activity in a state.

Women in the Legislatures and Executives of the World: Knocking at the Highest Glass Ceiling

This article reports the results of a survey of women in legislatures and executives around the world as they were constituted in 1998 (N = 180). The chief hypotheses regarding the factors hindering or facilitating women's access to political representation were tested by multivariate regression models. The regression models juxtaposed a cocktail of institutional, political, cultural, and socioeconomic variables with the following dependent variables: (1) the percentage of MPs who are women and (2) the percentage of cabinet ministers who are women.A number, although not all, of the cited hypotheses were statistically confirmed and more finely quantified. The socioeconomic development of women in society has an effect on the number of women in parliament but not in the cabinet. A country's length of experience with multipartyism and women's enfranchisement correlates with both the legislative and the executive percentage. Certain electoral systems are more women friendly than others. The ideological nature of the party system affects the number of women elected and chosen for cabinet posts. And last, the state's dominant religion, taken as a proxy for culture, also statistically relates to the number of women who will make it to high political office. However, other long-held hypotheses were not proved. The degree of democracy is not a good indicator of the percentage of women who will make it into the legislature or the cabinet, nor is the dichotomy between a presidential or parliamentary system.

Gender Quotas, Electoral Laws, and the Election of Women

Gender quotas represent a commonly advocated method by which to address the severe underrepresentation of women in the world's legislatures. This study analyzes the effect of gender quota laws on the election of women legislators. It also examines the extent to which other electoral rules can influence the effect of quotas on the election of women. Argentina's provinces employ a wide variety of electoral law arrangements for the election of their provincial legislatures, thereby providing a unique population with which to explore the effect of quotas. The use of a gender quota law is found to have a significant positive impact on the percentage of women elected to the Argentine provincial legislatures. At the same time, the type of party list used is found to have a potent influence on the efficacy of gender quota laws in increasing the percentage of women elected. The study provides considerable support for the position of gender quota advocates. It also suggests that reformers must pay close attention to the institutional environment in which a quota law is being implemented.

Support for Women's Interests in the 103rd Congress

ABSTRACT During 1992, the widely acclaimed “Year of the Woman,” 48 women were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Since research at the state level finds women legislators more likely to advocate women's interests than their male colleagues, this influx of women offers an opportunity to investigate whether congressional women provide similar policy responsiveness to American women. Using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression on roll-call data for the 103rd Congress, 1 find that women members of Congress are more likely than their male counterparts to vote for women's interests on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Change and Continuity in the Relationship Between Private Responsibilities and Public Officeholding: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

National surveys of state legislators conducted by the Center for the American Woman and Politics between 1977 and 1988 suggest that women's presence within state legislatures has increased despite the persistence of gender differences in the connection between public roles and private responsibilities. Mothers (but not fathers) of young children are substantially underrepresented among state legislators, and marriage continues to bring more advantage to men's than to women's political careers. Women continue to reach the legislative rung on the political ladder later than men, and women legislators are less likely than their male colleagues to hold extralegislative employment. While structural changes may reduce the incumbency advantage that some suggest have disadvantaged women, so long as gender differences in the compatibility of legislative service and private roles persist, fewer women than men at any given time will be positioned to take advantage of new opportunities, thereby making improvements in descriptive and substantive representation elusive and difficult goals to accomplish.

Analyzing Roll-Call Voting Tools for Content

Abstract The roll-call voting tools most frequently used by legislative scholars are not equally useful for all. Roll-call votes selected for traditional measurement tools systematically exclude issues determined to be important to women legislators. Those who study women in politics are unable to employ roll-call voting tools with the assurance that they are using valid measures for their research. After analyzing the content of widely used voting tools and discovering that votes from controversial bills of interest to women were often excluded, I outline suggestions for employing alternative methodological approaches. Further, I add to a growing criticism of roll-call voting statistics by identifying another limitation to their use.

Gender and race in the state house: The legislative experience

Women and minorities are now an integral part of state legislatures throughout the country. The results from surveying a nationwide sample of 230 state legislators show that women and black legislators differ from their male and white colleagues in their perceptions of the legislative experience. Women and blacks believe they must pay close attention to women's and minority concerns while at the same time demonstrating policy breadth. Black women legislators are especially keen to the roles of both women and minorities. White male legislators see little difference between their own experiences and those of their female and minority colleagues.

Democratization, Electoral Systems, and Women's Representation: A Comparative Study of Women's Legislative Participation in South Korea and Taiwan

Democratization, Electoral Systems, and Women's Representation: A Comparative Study of Women's Legislative Participation in South Korea and Taiwan

The Recruitment of Women Cabinet Ministers in the Canadian Provinces

Although there have been several studies of women in legislatures in Canada, a cabinet position is a much stronger position from which to wield power in an executive‐centered and party‐disciplined parliamentary system. In the past decade, the increase of women's share of legislative seats, for majority parties as well as others, has led to more women being appointed to cabinet portfolios. This article utilizes data from the ten Canadian provinces over an 18‐year period, from 1976 to 1994, to assess patterns of such appointments by province, party, percentage of women in the governing party, and percentage of women in the legislature. The proportion of women in the governing party far outweighs other variables in its impact on the percentage of women in the cabinet, in contrast to a previous study of West European cabinets which found that more women in the legislature was of greater importance. Although a high level of multicollinearity indicates caution in attempting to distinguish between the impact of these two variables, the differences in these studies may be due to Canadian provinces having single‐party majority governments while West European cabinets are often coalitions.

NIST and ATP: Creating a New Relationship between Government and Industry

No abstract available.

Assessing the Importance of Party and Gender in Legislators’ Policy Preferences

In recent years much has been written about what factors influence the policy preferences of legislators in general and women legislators specifically. This analysis explores the relative importance of a member's sex, party, locality and tenure on policy preferences in the 71st Texas House of Representatives with its low levels of professionalism and party influence. The members were surveyed for their views on the four most pressing issue areas they faced: education reform, judicial selection reform, workers' compensation insurance reform and abortion. Surprisingly, party is important in explaining policy preferences on education reform, judicial selection reform and workers’ compensation reform. Being a woman is of less importance in these areas, but is more important in the area of abortion rights.

Women Legislative Caucus and Leadership Campaign Committees

The purpose of the research presented in this paper is to start assessing what campaign activities women legislators are involved in in order to promote the interests of women in state legislatures. Analysis of women legislators' campaign transfers and discussions held with a number of women legislators resulted in some interesting findings. Women legislators' campaign activities included both campaign contributions and other nonmonetary assistance such as campaigning and assistance in fund raising. The campaign activity of women legislators was, in part, clearly aimed at improving the representation of women through supporting women candidates and male candidates who were deemed supportive of women's policy priorities.

THE POLITICS OF WOMEN STATE LEGISLATORS: A SOUTH/NON‐SOUTH COMPARISON

As a result of the 1992 elections, women now make up 20.4 percent of the elected representatives in United States state legislatures nationwide, yet women comprise only 13 percent of southern legislators. The literature supports several theories as to why women in the South are less likely to seek and win office than women outside the South. What has yet to be examined, however; is what difference these factors make in the kind of woman that is ultimately successful in winning a legislative seat in a southern state. Based on an original survey and a representative sample of over 600 women serving during the 1991–1992 legislative session, we find that southern women legislators are in fact significantly different from non‐southern women legislators in both attitudes and behaviors; that regionalism exerts a powerful influence on women state legislators' attitudes toward themselves, their job, and their behavior once elected. These findings are important in exploring the diversity of women serving at the state level, particularly as their numbers continue to grow.

The election of women under proportional representation: The case of Malta

It has often been noted that women's opportunities for a legislative career are enhanced in countries using proportional representation. But in Malta, which uses a variant of proportional representation, there are fewer women in parliament than in any other Western democracy. A detailed analysis of voting data shows that what accounts for the paucity of women legislators in Malta is not a shortage of ballot positions; nor a lack of qualified women candidates; nor significant voter prejudice against female candidates. Rather, Malta's exceptional performance results from the unwillingness or inability of party elites to recruit a substantial number of women candidates, even though voting patterns create an incentive for political parties to maximize the number of candidates. Since the cause of this failure to mobilize more women candidates can be ascribed neither to the workings of the electoral system nor to voter behaviour, it will have to be sought in contextual factors that still work to stifle women's ...

The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity

The entrance of women into the political arena and the ensuing passage from an exclusively male political universe to one in which both men and women participated raise neglected questions of general historical significance. These changes still wait to be incorporated into a comprehensive analysis of the transformation of American democracy between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1920s. Women's acquisition of suffrage in 1920 cannot be considered as simply the extension of voting rights to individuals who were previously denied them. Such an approach would be inconceivable in any serious investigation of the advent of universal male suffrage in theJacksonian age or of subsequent extensions of citizenship rights to immigrants and former slaves and, in the 1960s, to disfranchised southern blacks. Historical common sense considers these events epochal turning points in the property, ethnic, and racial bases of politics that substantially changed local, regional, and national public life. Such changes had dramatic visible effects. They produced vivid images that are still with us: the storming of the White House by a democratic crowd at the 1829 presidential inauguration; the birth of popular political parties in the 1830s; the invention of ethnic and immigrant-based urban politics; the dramatic emergence of emancipated slaves as legislators during black Reconstruction; the breakup of the lily-white Democratic South and the emergence of a new Republican party after the civil rights revolution. Apparently nothing like that happened with women in the 1920s: no storming of symbolic locations by crowds of women, no building of new-style political organizations, no women-dominated machines, no sudden upsurge of women legislators, no partisan realignments. And yet it seems reasonable to suppose that the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the long journey to get it, by upsetting the gender base of politics, had important implications (invisible because unexplored as well as unexplored because invisible) for the whole political system.

Power and Influence in State Legislative Policymaking: The Interaction of Gender and Position in Committee Hearing Debates

There is an implicit assumption behind advocating for more minorities or women in elected office, namely, that these officials will bring a new power and influence to their underrepresented groups. However, for women, this idealized viewpoint ignores the social dynamics that subordinate women's words and actions even in “well-balanced” male and female group interactions. Using transcribed verbatim transcripts of 12 state legislative committee hearings, this research analyzes the conversational dynamics of committee members, witnesses, chairs, and sponsors. Sex differences among committee members are highly significant, even after accounting for political factors and structural features of the hearing. In addition, male and female chairs do not conduct hearings in the same way, and these differences affect the behavior of witnesses and committee members. The findings suggest that as the proportion of women increases in a legislative body, men become more verbally aggressive and controlling of the hearing. Women legislators may be seriously disadvantaged and unable to participate equally in legislative policymaking in committee hearings.

Ambition, Activist Role Orientations, and Alienation among Women Legislators in Taiwan: The Impact of Countersocialization

Confucian societies have a well-deserved reputation for possessing patriarchal cultures which confine to subordinate roles and almost entirely exclude them from the public sphere. In Taiwan, however, have done quite well by international standards in winning legislative elections. This paper applies countersocialization theory to explain women's growing role in Taiwan's electoral politics. It finds that the careers of politicians in Taiwan are strongly conditioned by their exposure to countersocialization, primarily in terms of their adult family environments. These findings are quite consistent with the arguments based on socialization theory that women's entrance into public life depends upon an individual psychological reorientation in which political women reject traditional cultural norms that limit them to subservient and privatized roles. Such a reorientation can be stimulated by a variety offactors to which an individual woman might be exposed-a mother's role model proving that can have broader horizons, social and generational change legitimating more active roles, and (most importantly in our data) an adult family and spouse encouraging and supporting her empowerment in public affairs.

The Case of the Failed Nomination: Subtexts in a State Legislature

Just nine days after what was to have been a routine confirmation hearing, John S. Arnick, a 23-year member of the Maryland House of Delegates, withdrew his name from consideration for a position on the Baltimore County District Court. Arnick became the first gubernatorial nominee for a judgeship since 1968 who did not receive confirmation. This event touches upon a number of underlying subtexts of interest to political scientists, especially those who follow state legislatures and their processes—judicial confirmation procedures at the state level, prevalence of “insider-vs.-outsider” mentality within a state legislature, persistence of sexism in the environment of a state capital, impact of women legislators on the political culture and procedures, citizen attentiveness to the political process, and the consequences of the growing use of radio shows and telephone calls to influence the actions of elected officials.

Paths to power of women legislators in Costa Rica and Nicaragua

Women are underrepresented in national legislatures, but in recent years the proportion of women in Costa Rica and Nicaragua has increased. Based on in-depth interviews with women representatives in the national legislatures of these two countries, this article explores the factors associated with increased representation for women. The political history of each country, including the development of women's legal rights, certain characteristics of the electoral system, the role of the state as an actor in gender politics, women's political activity, and important international bodies and events were found to influence the number and types of women elected. It appears that there are multiple paths that women may pursue to gain representation in national legislatures.

Do women legislators matter? Female legislators and state abortion policy.

This study evaluates the impact of women state legislators on state abortion policies. Two dimensions of state abortion policy were identified and it was found that women state legislators, once they reach a critical mass within the legislature, can affect state policies on regulations concerning parental notification of abortions, but not public funding. But women legislators, and especially women Democratic legislators, can affect state abortion policies in other ways that are less well understood. Through an analysis of post- Webster abortion bills it was found that women representatives secure committee assignments that allow them to block pro-life legislation. This is especially pronounced in states with few women legislators and states most likely (according to other studies) to support policies restricting choice.