Over the past several decades women's lives in the public sphere have increased dramatically, providing women with more political resources than they have ever had before. Yet the gap between men and women's level of political engagement in a number of key areas of political life has persisted. This suggests that political or contextual factors, rather than resources or socialization, may be key in understanding these differences. One contextual factor that may be important to female political engagement is competitive female candidates. The hypothesis that visible and competitive women matter to female citizens is tested by examining the relationship between various political attitudes and behaviors and the presence (or absence) of a viable statewide female candidate. The models indicate that there is overwhelming support for the hypothesis that women citizens in states with competitive and visible female candidates increase their political engagement. These results suggest that descriptive representation matters in important ways.In the area of political behavior, early research predicted that the changing roles of women, from predominantly homemaker to worker, would lead to an increase in female political activity such that female levels of political engagement would eventually equal that of men (Poole and Ziegler 1985;Rapoport 1981). In a number of areas of political life women have increased their political engagement, actually surpassing men in voter turnout and equaling men's level of activity in attending political rallies, wearing buttons, working in campaigns (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993), and canvassing and attending protests (Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995). With the exception of voting, 1 however, many of these activities are rather gladiatorial in nature with very few citizens, either male or female, participating at this activist level. Engagement at this level may depend more on personal characteristics and taste than on mobilization efforts by parties or candidates. In other more accessible forms of political engagement women 1 Voting is a very accessible, but distinct form of participation. It is distinct because it is a private activity, highly valued in a democracy, and a very cheap form of participation. Because it is cheap and highly valued, citizens often participate out of a sense of responsibility or duty for the political system and therefore may not have the kind of skills or attitudes necessary to participate in other forms of political engagement.

We compare vote choice in senate and gubernatorial elections from 1986 and 1990 with two retrospective voting hypotheses: the national referendum hypothesis and an economic retrospective hypothesis. Despite the similarities between the office of U.S. senator and governor (same constituency, high levels of campaign spending, highly visible candidates, etc.), we find that different types of retrospective evaluations are used with respect to vote choice. As members of the national legislative branch, senators' fortunes are linked to the success or failures of the president. In contrast, governors, as state executives, are held accountable for perceived state economic conditions, while senators escape unscathed from the same general economic evaluations. These findings shed some light on the nature of vote choice in a political system complicated by federalism and separation of powers.

This study tests the hypothesis that collective descriptive representation has important benefits for strengthening and legitimizing democratic society. Specifically, we test whether increased proportions of collective female descriptive representation in the statehouse and the presence of a female state executive are important to female citizens' attitudes toward government responsiveness, or external efficacy. We hypothesize that an increase in female collective descriptive representation in the legislative and state executive branches of government will increase female citizens' external efficacy but will be unimportant to males. We pooled American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1988 to 1998 and used ordered probit techniques to test the hypothesis. In addition to our main independent variable of interest, our model includes state political culture, dyadic descriptive representation, dyadic substantive representation, sociodemographics, political participation, strength of partisanship, and electoral dummy variables as controls. Our results confirm that higher levels of collective female descriptive representation promote higher values of external efficacy for female citizens, suggesting that collective female descriptive representation has important benefits to a democratic society. E xternal political efficacy is the individual perception that governmental authorities and institutions are responsive to citizen influence

Federalism sprang to the forefront in public debates about the response to Hurricane Katrina as officials from the national, state, and local government sought to shift blame to other levels of government. Our analysis shows that attempts by national political actors to frame the response as the fault of state government actions were successful, but the size of the effect was conditional on predispositions. Those who were more attentive to coverage were more likely to believe that state failure to call for help had a great effect on the length of time it took for national government to provide aid to New Orleans.The effect was strongest for Republicans, however, suggesting that predispositions mediate acceptance of elite frames that transfer blame.

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