Are Women Legislators Less Effective? Evidence from the U.S. House in the 103rd-105th Congress

The Influence of Women Legislators on State Health Care Spending for the Poor

“…Thus, without the presence of women, individuals benefiting from these categories of health care spending will see less money, implying that women legislators are crucial for increases in spending to occur. 15 On the whole, the results suggest that our initial inconclusive findings, as well as those within the literature, can likely be attributed to failing to consider the influence of aggregate need upon the responsiveness of institutions in allocating resources to select populations. When we include this dynamic in our statistical model through interacting the size of the beneficiary population with the degree of women's descriptive representation, we find significant and meaningful relationships.…”

“…Future research is necessary to determine conclusively what underlies the aggregate-level findings. 15 It should be noted that the main effects of percent of women and percent of poor kids give the effect when the variable is at its maximum value, while the other is at its minimum value. There are no cases in the data, however, where the proportion of the recipient group is at its maximum value while the percentage of women in the legislature is zero, and vice versa.…”

“…Some scholars find that having women in office influences the types of policy outcomes enacted by governments (see for instance [4,8,11]), while the research of others suggests a complicated or null relationship [12][13][14]. Still others observe that differing institutional environments, like holding leadership positions, heading committees, or having seniority best explains which representatives may be better able to affect endorsed policies [13,15,16].…”

Is Peace a Missing Value or a Zero?

“…First, a strong case can be made that the actual outcomes obtained from the 2PM provide a tighter conceptual fit to the analytical objectives pursued by a wide range of political science studies, including investigations of federal domestic outlays (Jeydel and Taylor, 2003), military conflict (Koch andGartner, 2005, Peterson andGraham, 2011), arms exports (Blanton, 2005), foreign direct investment (Jensen, 2003), and refugee flows (Moore and Shellman, 2006). Second, while it is never possible to identify the true data generation process, several methodological studies summarized in Puhani (2000) point to the superiority of the 2PM over the Heckit based on Monte Carlo evidence.…”

The priorities and accomplishments of Kentucky legislators : is there a gender difference?

“…The term problematically suggests that the work of women legislators is narrow. In reality, female legislators, like males, form preferences and influence the legislative process on a range of issues for a variety of reasons (Jeydel and Taylor 2003).…”