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

Dodson, Debra L.

doi:10.1111/j.1541-0072.1997.tb00042.x

Cited by 20 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Partisan control also matters: Caucuses have a stronger positive effect on women's cosponsorship in Democratically‐controlled chambers. Our findings thus build upon scholarship on how women's strategy and influence is a function of women's presence, partisanship, and institutional features (Barnes ; Dodson ; Osborn ; Swers ).…”

supporting

confidence: 64%

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Women's Collaboration in US State Legislatures

Holman

Mahoney

2018

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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Collaboration plays a key role in crafting good public policy. We use a novel data set of over 140,000 pieces of legislation considered in US state legislatures in 2015 to examine the factors associated with women's collaboration with each other. We articulate a theory that women's collaboration arises from opportunity structures, dictated by an interaction of individual and institutional characteristics. Examining the effect of a combination of characteristics, we find support for an interactive view of institutions, where women's caucuses accelerate collaboration in Democratic‐controlled bodies and as the share of women increases. Collaboration between women also continues in the face of increased polarization in the presence of a caucus, but not absent one. Our findings speak to the long‐term consequences of electing women to political office, the importance of institutions and organizations in shaping legislative behavior, and the institutionalization of gender in politics.

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confidence: 64%

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Women's Collaboration in US State Legislatures

Holman

Mahoney

2018

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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“…An oft-mentioned consideration is that women's roles as wives and mothers take precedence over or create obstacles to their political ambitions. 8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17 Others have argued that the perpetual scarcity of women at elite levels suppresses ambition because potential women candidates lack role models. 18,19,20,21 For those women who run and hold office, familial obligations do seem to weigh heavily in their calculations about their potential political careers.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender, risk assessment, and political ambition

Sweet-Cushman

2016

Polit. life sci.

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ABSTRACT. In the United States, women have long held the right to vote and can participate fully in the political process, and yet they are underrepresented at all levels of elected office. Worldwide, men's dominance in the realm of politics has also been the norm. To date, scholars have focused on supply-side and demand-side explanations of women's underrepresentation but differences in how men and women assess electoral risk (the risk involved in seeking political office) are not fully explained. To fill this gap, I explore how evolutionary theory offers insights into gendered differences in political ambition and the evaluation of electoral risk. Using the framework of life-history theory, I hypothesize that both cognitive and environmental factors in human evolution, particularly as they relate to sexual selection and social roles, have shaped the psychology of ambition in gendered ways affecting contemporary politics. Cognitive risk-assessment mechanisms evolving in the hominid line came to be expressed differently in females and males, in women and men. These gendered expressions plausibly reflect differentiable environmental pressures in the past and may help explain behaviors in and barriers to women's electoral political activity in the present. If so, then the success of efforts to increase such activity -or, regressively, to suppress it -may be better understood.Key words: Political ambition, gender differences, evolutionary theory, electoral risk assessment M ale officeholders are the norm in political representation both worldwide and in the United States in particular. Across the globe, gender parity in political representation is unusual, and instances of women's overrepresentation are extremely rare. 1 In the United States, women make up slightly more than half of the population and earned the right to vote and participate fully in the political process many decades ago. Nevertheless, in recent U.S. history, less than a quarter of state legislators have been women; women have held few state executive offices; and women have comprised less than 20 percent of the membership of the U.S. Congress. 2 Proponents of greater gender equality in U.S. political representation continue to wonder why more women do not run for or hold political office when so many of the societal and structural barriers to their participation have diminished. The leading explanations tend to focus on candidate emergence and cultural doi: 10.1017/pls.2016.13Correspondence: Jennie Sweet-Cushman, Department of History, Political Science, and International Studies, Chatham University, 0 Woodland Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15232. Email: jsweetcushman@chatham.edu and psychological factors that contribute to men and women having different levels of political ambition. 3,4 However, these theories do not address what I consider to be critical questions: What role does electoral risk play in political ambition, and can evolutionary theory provide insight into gendered differences in risk assessment and political ambition? I argue that the ...

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“…Women lawmakers had a willingness to support and work for women's rights issues, as well as legislation dealing with traditional areas of concern, such as health care and education (Carroll, Dodson, and Mandel 1991). These findings have been supported by research showing that women in state legislatures are more likely than their male colleagues to give priority to issues involving women, children, and families (Dodson 1997;Thomas 1994). Kathlene's study (1998) of state legislators and attitudinal constructs suggests that women conceptualize some issues and formulate policy differently from men, attending to a broader range of information sources than do their male colleagues.…”

Section: Women Legislators and Women's Healthmentioning

confidence: 92%

Women Lawmakers, State Mandates and Women's Health

Tolbert

Steuernagel²

2001

Women & Politics

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This research examines whether states with higher female representation in the legislature will be innovators in women's health policy. The issue of health policy was chosen due to increasing state legislative activity in health care, especially in response to citizen dissatisfaction with HMOs and PPOs. We use nine health policies to create an index of women's health mandates for the fifty states and Ordinary Least Squares Regression to test a number of explanations for policy adoptions. Previous research suggests women state legislators play an important role in placing policy issues of concern to women on the political agenda. Contrary to the literature and our expectations, female representation and leadership in state legislatures, the presence of a women's caucus, women chairs of health care committees, and the pace at which women have been elected to state legislatures over the past four decades were not related to policy adoptions. Similarly, the growth and size of the managed care industry did not explain the pattern of policy adoptions. What did seem to matter was the size of the medical establishment and Democratic party control. While women's interest groups may be critical in increasing awareness of the issues, findings of the empirical study suggest women's health policy is widely supported by both men and women state lawmakers. When the policies were disaggregated by type, the percentage of women in leadership positions was associated with the adoption of specific women's health policies with a univer-

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

Cited by 20 publications

References 31 publications

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Women's Collaboration in US State Legislatures

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Women's Collaboration in US State Legislatures

Gender, risk assessment, and political ambition

Women Lawmakers, State Mandates and Women's Health

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