The Career Length and Service of Female Policymakers in the US House of Representatives

Abstract

Various studies have outlined the institutional (e.g. the existence of quota laws and the electoral system type of a country) and non-institutional factors (e.g. the political culture of a country) that account for variation in women’s representation, in general, and, in more detail, the low representation of women in the US Congress. However, no study has, so far, compared the Congressional career paths of men and women in order to understand whether this gender gap in representation stems from a difference in terms of the duration and importance of the careers of male and female policymakers. Using data on all US House elections between 1972 and 2012, we provide such an analysis, evaluating whether or not the political careers of women in the US House of Representatives are different from the political careers of their male counterparts. Our findings indicate that the congressional careers of men and women are alike and, if anything, women may even have a small edge over their male colleagues.

Physical attractiveness, voter heuristics and electoral systems: The role of candidate attractiveness under different institutional designs

“…In all three models, neither gender nor education significantly determines electoral success. This confirms the aforementioned notion that the gender gap in political careers has been closing in recent years (Praino and Stockemer, 2016;Tremblay and Stockemer, 2013). It does not necessarily mean however, that education does not play any role in the likelihood of candidates being elected.…”

What Are Good‐Looking Candidates, and Can They Sway Election Results?*

“…Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives are among the least competitive elections among Western democracies. In fact, the incumbency advantage guarantees reelection rates that stand around 90 percent in any given year (Cox and Katz, ; Gelman and King, ; Praino and Stockemer, , , ). For decades scholars have also been talking about the vanishing of marginal seats (Mayhew, ), that is, the fact that most congressional seats have become “safe” and guarantee comfortable reelection margins to incumbents.…”

Gender and Political Seniority: Three Measures

“…Some recent studies contradict the conventional assumption that there are gender differences in parliamentary survival rates. Praino and Stockemer (2018) find that, on average, men have a significantly longer tenure in the U.S. Congress than women, but they conclude that this difference is driven by a few men who have had very long careers. Consequently, they argue that the gender difference is caused by the fact that women have only recently started to enter Congress in larger numbers (Praino and Stockemer 2018, 447-48).…”

“…Some studies find that women have shorter careers and provide explanations why (Carroll 1985;Lawless and Theriault 2005;Lazarus, Steigerwalt, and Clark 2023;Mariani 2008;Vanlangenakker, Wauters, and Maddens 2013). Yet others document how men's and women's legislative careers in many countries are (surprisingly) alike in terms of average length of stay (Joshi and Och 2021;Praino and Stockemer 2018). These studies either use survival probabilities or averages of women's and men's career length, which are well suited for finding out whether women's careers end quicker than men's.…”