Women State Legislators and Representation

Abstract

Research on women legislators in the U.S. states has made significant progress toward understanding how women legislators affect public policies. We still lack, however, a clear picture of how variation in legislative structure affects such policy making. Through control of the legislative process and ideological structure, political parties can enhance or constrain women legislators’ efforts. Institutional configurations such as women’s caucuses and women’s power in committee leadership also affect the types of policies women legislators create. By examining these legislative variations, researchers and practitioners can understand more thoroughly the legislative conditions under which women’s representation of women’s issues is most effective.

Keywords

women state legislators representation political parties women’s caucus

Despite well-publicized gains in the number of women in the U.S. Congress, women’s representation in U.S. state legislatures has been frustratingly stagnant. Since the 1999–2000 legislative session, the total percentage of women in state legislative office has fluctuated between 22.4 and 24.2 of all legislators (Center for American Women and Politics [CAWP]). This trend in sheer numbers of women state legislators is puzzling and also frustrating, especially compared to the steadier upward trajectory of women’s representation in the U.S. Congress and the more numerous representation of women in legislatures abroad (Interparliamentary Union 2014). On the surface, the underrepresentation of women in legislatures undermines democratic legitimacy and stifles the presence of diverse interests in the legislative process (see Phillips 1995). Below the surface, however, more than just the number of women legislators in a state chamber matters for the representation of women’s interests in the U.S. states.

Many theorists and empiricists over the last forty years of women and politics research have attempted to define, explain, and quantify the effect of women’s physical presence in the legislative chamber. That is, researchers wish to know whether, and to what extent, electing women to serve in the legislature improves not only democratic legitimacy but also how women constituents’ interests are presented, discussed, and ultimately addressed through public policies by the legislature. This endeavor is of particular importance in the U.S. states, where federalism dictates that many policies directly affecting women’s lives, such as abortion, family law, domestic violence, and antidiscrimination policies, are made. Women in politics have different interests due to gender socialization (Thomas 1994; Gilligan 1982), and they also bring distinctive interests to legislative debate because of their gendered life experiences (Mansbridge 1999). States vary greatly in how well their current policies address women’s interests and needs (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2013). Research at the aggregate level, however, demonstrates that simply adding more women legislators to a state does not necessarily yield a greater number of policies of women’s issues (Cowell-Meyers and Langbein 2009; see also Childs and Krook 2006).

Thus, instead of focusing on the sheer numbers of women alone, researchers increasingly turn to how the following institutional configurations affect women state legislators’ ability to promote policies of women’s issues:

The role of political parties in the legislative process;

Women’s positions as institutional leaders;

Cooperation among women in a legislative women’s caucus.

Given these research challenges, scholars in women and politics should continue to specify how these three partisan and institutional variations affect the representation of women’s interests. Practitioners in state legislative politics and women’s policy can apply knowledge about partisan and institutional contexts to craft more effectively public policy solutions to women’s problems.

Parties: How Much Do They Matter?

Even from simple political observation, it is no surprise that women legislators of opposing parties may differ in whether, to what extent, and how they approach representing women’s issues. Unfortunately, we know surprisingly little about how parties affect women’s representation. There are two important questions regarding parties: first, how does party control of the legislative process inside the chamber matter; and second, how does party ideology structure the alternatives women legislators present to women’s issues policy problems?

Party Control of Legislatures

Scholars of women in the U.S. Congress (on which much research on partisanship is focused) find that party control of the legislative process has significant implications for women’s representation. For instance, both Swers (2002) and Dodson (2006) demonstrate that party control—the ability of the majority party to control resources (e.g., campaign money and committee assignments) and the legislative agenda (decide which bills are heard and which are ignored)—affects strategically how women choose to pursue policies, women’s issues in the U.S. House (Cox and McCubbins 1993). For example, Swers (2002) shows that under Democratic House control in 1993–1994, moderate Republican women supported bills that would benefit feminist concerns. However, when Republicans took control of the House in the 1995–1996, these moderate Republican women became less likely to support these issues because of the fear they would be punished for stepping outside of party lines. Based on these extraordinary sessions of the U.S. House (as 1993–1994 was the “Year of the Woman” Congress and the 1995–1996 session saw the strong Republican takeover of the House), the results of these studies are only suggestive for state legislative politics.

Party control also affects women legislators and women’s policy issues in the state legislatures. Saint-Germain (1989) shows that in the Arizona legislature, as the number of women in office increased so did the number of “women’s issues” bills on the agenda (see subsequently for an extended discussion of women’s issues), because women legislators are disproportionately interested in the legislation of women’s issues (Thomas 1994). Subsequent state research demonstrates these relationships are contingent on party control in the state legislature, however. For example, Tolbert and Steuernagel (2001) found that Democratic party control (measured simply as a Democratic majority), and not the number of women legislators, explained health policy adoption in the states. Bratton (2002) argues that both legislative diversity (the number of African American and women legislators) and party control matter in the states. She finds that under Republican majorities, backlash against diversity can actually reduce women’s representation by blocking women and African American legislators’ bills, even if the minority Democratic delegation is diverse—that is, diversity only generates more bills for underrepresented groups under Democratic control. Finally, Osborn (2012) examines whether women state legislators in ten state houses (AR, CA, CO, GA, IL, MI, SD, TX, WA, and WI) introduced more women’s issues bills under Republican or Democratic majorities. In the Republican states (CO, MI, SD, WA, and WI), women legislators (in either party) introduced significantly higher numbers of women’s issues bills than men legislators did, only in two of the five cases; in the remaining Democratic states, they introduced significantly more women’s issues bills than men in all five states. Republican women generally introduced many fewer women’s issues bills than Democratic women in every state, although their introductions of these bills increased under their own party’s control. This evidence certainly suggests that party control via a legislative majority has an effect on agenda control and, therefore, an effect on whether women’s issues bills are likely to get out of committee, onto the floor, and through a final vote. The existing research, therefore, supports the idea that party control of the legislative process affects how easily women legislators can get women’s issues bills through the legislative process.

Party Ideology and Defining Women’s Issues

The party ideology of women legislators is a second avenue through which parties affect how women legislators represent women’s issues. Simply stated, how much does a woman legislator’s chosen political party, with its platform, issue ownership, electoral pressures, and ideological span, shape the ideas and possibilities she has about how to represent women? Early work on women legislators’ ideology focused often on similarities among women legislators rather than ideological differences between women partisans—for example, women’s interests in representing women’s needs (Carroll 2002; Thomas 1994) or their tendency to be more liberal ideologically than men (Welch 1985). Partisan differences emerge in these studies, however, particularly in recent work. Democratic women consistently express more liberal viewpoints than their male copartisans (Osborn 2012; Epstein, Niemi, and Powell 2005; CAWP 2001). Republican women, though, may be more moderate than male Republicans but are more conservative than Democratic women and men (Osborn 2012). The empirical evidence for this second point is less consistent. Historically, researchers have identified Republican women as more liberal than Republican men (see CAWP 2001, also Poggione 2004; Welch 1985). However, in more recent work, Republican women appear to be very ideologically similar to Republican men (e.g., Osborn 2012; Epstein, Niemi, and Powell 2005), and even more conservative than Republican men in a few studies (Frederick 2009 in the U.S. House; Hogan 2008 in the state legislatures).

The case for why women legislators’ ideology matters for how women represent women’s issues is made most effectively by considering Swers’ analysis of the U.S. House (Swers 2002; Swers and Larsen 2005). In her comparison of the 1993–1994 and 1995–1996 U.S. House sessions, the Republican women legislators most willing to “defect” to Democratic positions were those moderate Republican women who most shared the ideological space of the Democratic women (or at least approached the same ideological space). With the election of more ideologically conservative Republican women in the 1995–1996 sessions and beyond, however, new ideological variation created different “archetypes” of Republican women representatives. Some used their moderate ideology as a tool to cooperate with Democratic women to pursue women’s issues legislation, given a conducive partisan environment in the House (i.e., depending on party control of the legislative process). Others, however, did not view their ideology as consistent with representing women regardless of which party controlled the legislative process. In the states, we know little about these relationships between women’s ideology and representation, even given that state political ideology varies significantly across states (Erikson, Wright, and McIver 1993; see also Berry et al. 1998). Democrats in some states are more conservative ideologically than Republicans in others (Shor and McCarty 2011).

Another approach to the problem of understanding party ideology and women’s representation has been trying to define whether there is a group of “women’s issues” on which women legislators, regardless of party ideology, might work together due to their shared gendered interests. Again, this focus on common women’s interests typically disregards explicitly addressing where parties fit into this concept. Typically, “women’s issues” are either women’s rights issues (e.g., antidiscrimination legislation; Wolbrecht 2000), issues related to women’s traditional roles in the private sphere (e.g., children, education, health care, or other “ethic of caring” issues; Thomas 1994; Gilligan 1982), or other issues that disproportionately affect women constituents (reproduction, domestic violence, etc.; e.g., Swers 2002; Reingold 2000). The problem that derives from this definition for party ideology, however, is whether both Democrats and Republicans would consider these categories to be the ones under which their women’s issues policy alternatives are subsumed. Many of these issue categories tend to be ones that the Democratic party “owns” or has an associated advantage in for voters (Petrocik 1996), and so Republican women legislators particularly may consider other categories to contain women’s issues. However, if neither political party sees electoral salience in these issues, women of either party may feel these categories could contain an array of ideological alternatives to women’s issues problems (see Sanbonmatsu 2002). Interestingly, women legislators of both political parties report in surveys that they legislate for women (e.g., CAWP 2001; Thomas 1994), yet evidence of legislative activity does not always show a strong effort among Republican women to legislate on women’s issues (e.g., Bratton 2002; Osborn 2012). Perhaps this disparity reflects problems across studies in defining women’s issues on partisan terms.

Furthermore, several scholars of women legislators contend that in order to represent women, a woman legislator must pursue not just women’s issues, but feminist policy alternatives to these women’s issues. Conversely, antifeminist policy alternatives, they argue, cannot be considered “representation” of women’s interests (see Swers 2002; Bratton 2002; Dodson 2006; Reingold and Swers 2011). The issue with equating feminist policy alternatives with women’s representation is not that this definition is wrong, per se, but rather that this definition arguably omits how many Republican, and even some Democratic women, would possibly represent women’s interests through their party identity. For example, consider the abortion debate. The liberal feminist policy alternative in this debate would be policies that protect access to abortion. Alternatively, a Republican woman, given her party identity, might propose a bill limiting access to abortion, such as a parental notification requirement. Is this Republican woman representing women with this policy alternative? If one wanted to understand how party identity shapes a legislator’s approach to representing women, perhaps; but, if one wanted to understand how women state legislators advance women’s rights through a liberal feminist lens, it is not (see Swers 2002 for a discussion of this debate as it pertains to Congress). The research solution to this problem is not necessarily to criticize one’s definition of women’s representation. Rather, it is to balance the desire to define women’s representation in feminist terms with the necessary scope of public policy alternatives to capture partisan interpretations of women’s policy. For practitioners in state politics, the entanglement of feminist and women’s issues may be an even more immediate problem. Advocates of feminist policies in the states may find that women legislators do not agree with their definition of women constituents’ best interests.

How Do Institutions Matter?

Institutional arrangements, which vary considerably among the states, can affect the ability of women to shape policy. For women in legislatures, however, two institutional variations have the potential to interact with the party influences as described previously, and thus, significantly affect women’s representation. First, the presence of and structure of a women’s caucus may influence the types of women’s issues policies passed in the chamber. Second, and perhaps in tandem, women’s leadership at the committee and chamber level has the potential to influence the character and flow of legislation. Both of these institutional features are common in the U.S. state legislatures. Additionally, women’s caucuses and women’s leadership relate most directly to efforts to pass women’s public policy; if women legislators can create institutional power for themselves through these means, they can open avenues to pass policies of relevance to women.

Women’s Caucuses

A women’s caucus is an organization that exists within the legislature to unite a subgroup of legislators, often from both parties. Women’s caucuses exist in roughly half the state legislatures; some have explicit policy agendas and some are more social organizations that promote informal ties between legislators (Mitchell Mahoney 2013). Prominent works on women state legislators and public policy (e.g., Thomas 1994; Reingold 2000) suggest that caucuses might overcome problems of coordination among women legislators from different parties so they can pursue common interests in women’s issues legislation. However, studies of women’s caucuses and American legislative caucuses generally illustrate examples of both caucus effectiveness and failure.

In the U.S. House, Gertzog’s (2004) history of the Congress women’s Caucus/Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues (CCWI) details such successes as the effort to extend the ratification period for the Equal Rights Amendment, increased focus on laws prohibiting violence against women and the hiring of more women in the federal government. Internal ideological disagreement and a lack of resources perpetually inhibited caucus activity, however. When in 1995 Gingrich’s Republican Party caucus slashed resources to many legislative entities, including the CCWI, it found itself unable to function. Similar mixed evidence of caucus effectiveness exists in the state legislatures. For example, Brown’s (2013) work on the women’s caucus in the Maryland House demonstrates how powerfully ideological disagreement can undermine a caucus’ agenda. On a bill expunging unfulfilled applications for restraining orders against accused perpetrators of domestic violence, older African American women representatives sided with the women’s caucus in fighting to keep the applications for protective orders on the records of the accused, even when the application was never completed. Younger African American women representatives, however, supported expunging these applications from legal records after a period of time. Brown argues that the feminist experiences of the older women with domestic violence led them to favor protecting victims, whereas the younger women’s legal backgrounds led them to protect the accused from having a partial protective order that might impact their ability to get a job. Caucuses can also have institutional repercussions beyond policy, such as increasing the number of women who serve as committee chairs (Kanthak and Krause 2012).

In recent work on the states, Mitchell Mahoney (2013) concurs with the argument that ideological disagreement and difficult partisan conditions can help women’s caucuses either succeed or fail, even in the formation process of the caucus itself. For instance, Mitchell Mahoney (2013) discusses the attempt in the Iowa state legislature to build a women’s caucus, which failed due to a lack of ideological cohesion between partisan women, opposition from strong parties in the chamber, and a lack of shared drive to see the caucus succeed among older and younger women legislators. Mitchell Mahoney (2013) suggests that women’s caucuses are more likely to exist when they are social, rather than policy oriented, in nature, and perhaps when women in the chamber are dissatisfied with how party caucuses address women’s needs. For representation purposes, these caucuses may not have a formal policy agenda, but they may engender bipartisan policy as a by-product of caucus-driven goodwill and interaction (Mitchell Mahoney 2013). Kanthak and Krause (2012) offer an additional condition for caucus success. They argue that caucuses are most successful, paradoxically, when the coalition of minority legislators is not too big or not too small. Caucuses that are too big again introduce ideological heterogeneity.

Women’s Leadership

Another way that women can increase their institutional power is through leadership of both committees and chambers. As leaders, particularly where leaders have significant powers (e.g., Clucas 2007; Mooney 2013), women can control policies that receive significant attention on the agenda and that might survive the bottleneck committee process where most legislation dies. For example, a committee led by a woman legislator passionate about a women’s issues policy will likely spend more time discussing that policy, and the bill itself could hold up better in the face of hostile amendments. In fact, Rosenthal (1998) argues women leaders in state legislatures have the potential to make not only a policy impact on women’s issues but to change the style of leadership within the legislature. She argues that women leaders bring an integrative and educative style of leadership, where members of committees learn more about the policy, focus less on zero-sum policy making, and participate more in the committee process.

Conversely, evidence suggests that when women do not hold leadership positions in legislatures, they are not fully integrated as lawmakers and have fewer opportunities to impact policy. For example, in Latin American legislatures, women legislators tend to be relegated to “women’s issues” committees where they have few opportunities to work with high-impact legislation. This committee isolation occurs despite higher numbers of women in office due to electoral quotas, largely because party leaders control committee assignments and choose to assign women to the dark corners of the legislative process (Heath, Schwindt-Bayer, and Taylor-Robinson 2005). Women can work through committees to affect the content of legislation, guarding the bill from unwanted content or inserting amendments to additional bills. Interestingly, Bratton (2002) also suggests that women’s integration into state legislative committee leadership is not in fact dependent on the proportion of seats they hold (i.e., whether they have reached a critical mass in the chamber). Even when they gain institutional power, women leaders of committees may face challenges from male committee members (Kathlene 1994). Thus, even achieving legislative power through leadership may not overcome the inherent masculinity of the legislative institution (Lovenduski 2005).

Where to Go Next: Assessing Political Parties and Institutions in Women’s Representation

It matters to elect women to office. However, once those women are elected, they do not legislate in a vacuum. When women legislators pursue women’s issues policies, they do so in a specific partisan and institutional configuration, so that a similar percentage of women in one chamber might legislate quite differently from a similar percentage of women in a different chamber (Reingold 2000; Osborn 2012). If we can systematically assess partisan and institutional variation across these legislative chambers, we can go a long way toward understanding the conditional effects of electing women to public office. Perhaps there in fact exists an ideal partisan and institutional configuration to maximize women’s representation inside the chamber. More likely, however, is that further research on partisan and institutional structure will allow us to understand more clearly the trade-offs between types of structures that affect women’s representation. For instance, a women’s caucus might help promote a centralized agenda on women’s issues, but only if the caucus can navigate effectively the party control of the legislature. Coupled with conditions external to the legislature, such as women’s interest groups in the states (Beckwith and Cowell-Meyers 2007), research on women in legislatures is best described as an attempt to negotiate several moving parts of the policy-making process to understand how women affect policy outcomes.

Several remaining challenges exist for women and legislatures research. First, we have very little systematic evidence of the influence of the effects of women’s leadership in the state chambers, with the notable exception of Rosenthal (1998). Most of our knowledge is of the distribution of women in leadership positions rather than the policy impact of leadership itself. Some chamber- or policy-specific examples exist in the states; for instance, Berkman and O’Connor (1993) argue that Democratic women in state legislatures used their committee positions to block pro-life legislation post-Webster. Systematic work across chambers is needed, however. Second, we need a clearer understanding of how party strength, and not just party majority control, affects policy. Party strength could be assessed in a number of ways, from capturing the effects of the wide variety of speaker and leader power in the state legislatures (see Clucas 2007 or Mooney 2013), assessing the resource differences between professional and nonprofessional legislatures (Squire 2007), or comparing the interparty ideological distance and intraparty homogeneity of legislative parties across state chambers (Aldrich and Rohde’s 2001; Shor and McCarty 2011). Finally, to make any of these comparisons possible, we need more complete data on state legislative chambers. Recent data projects have highlighted the comparability of the states on common measures of legislative power (Squire and Hamm 2005), amassed roll call voting data on all ninety-nine state chambers (Clark et al. 2009; Shor, Berry, and McCarty 2010), and even explored historical political party power in some states (e.g., Masket 2008). The fact remains, however, that questions which can be easily addressed in Congress—for example, whether Republican women in Congress more liberal than their male counterparts—pose significant data challenges when applied to the states.

Finally, challenges remain for legislative practitioners, too. In many U.S. states, organizations exist to promote the election of women to public office (see, e.g., the Ready to Run program at CAWP). While there are many important reasons to elect women to public office aside from policy, research on political parties and legislative institutions demonstrates that the relationship between electing women and women’s public policies is conditional rather than absolute. Legislative staff who wish to see a women’s issues policy enacted in a state legislature, then, may turn to a woman legislator who, in fact, may not support this policy or may not have the partisan and/or institutional position to effect policy change. Understanding these conditional effects also helps to explain the success or failure of other state agencies and interest groups that strive to create favorable women’s policies, such as women’s bureaus and commissions, domestic violence groups, or departments of health. Agencies can create guidelines but must turn to the legislature for funding and other legal changes, creating a symbiotic relationship possibly enhanced by women’s representation in the legislative chamber that researchers term the “triangle of power” (Stetson and Mazur 1995). Understanding how the legislature and its parts act as intermediaries between representatives and public policy creates stronger possibilities of crafting good public policy for women.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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