Suchergebnisse

Women in political office outperform men in legislative activity and constituent services. Scholars have identified two potential explanations for this overperformance: women are higher quality candidates when they run for office and women face elevated voter expectations to win elections. We use the presence of term limits to examine how these two justifications for women's overperformance produce downstream effects. While designed to strike a blow to entrenched systems of power, term limits reduce the time that legislators spend on constituent service and legislative output, including bill sponsorship, votes, and committee work. We use the effects of term limits as a tool for understanding the two paths to women's overperformance, using data on over 6000 legislators serving in term‐limited states. We find more evidence for the quality candidate hypothesis than the voter expectations hypothesis. While term limits degrade men's performance in office, women officeholders continue to overperform even under this institutional constraint. Our findings that women's overperformance is more likely due to their higher quality have implications for efforts to increase the representativeness of political bodies, the quality of representation in state legislatures, and the gendered consequences of institutional reforms.

Women have organized around their gendered identity to accomplish political goals both inside and outside legislatures. Formal and informal institutional norms shape the form this collective action takes and whether it is successful. What, then, are the favorable conditions for organizing women's caucuses inside legislatures? Using an original dataset and employing an event history analysis, we identify the institutional conditions under which women's caucuses emerged in the 50 US states from 1972 to 2009. Within a feminist institutional framework, we argue that women's ability to alter existing organizational structures and potentially affect gender norms within legislatures is contextual. Although we find that women's presence in conjunction with Democratic Party control partially explains women's ability to act collectively and in a bipartisan way within legislatures, our analysis suggests that institutional-level variables are not enough to untangle this complicated phenomenon. Our work explains how gender and party interact to shape legislative behavior and clarifies the intractability of institutional norms while compelling further qualitative evidence to uncover the best conditions for women's collective action within legislatures.

Black women in elective office in the United States have demonstrated how descriptive representative transforms democratic institutions. This transformation is most evident in previously uncrystallized interests, those new to the agenda or not yet owned by specific political groups (Mansbridge 1999), articulated in legislative communication and action. For instance, Black maternal health is an issue that addresses the disproportionately poor health outcomes among Black women, who face systemic barriers to equitable care (Crear-Perry et al. 2021). Congresswoman Lauren Underwood's (D-IL) 2021 Momnibus legislation included 12 bipartisan bills to address racial and ethnic disparities faced by mothers, children, and individuals who birth. Indeed, the creation of the Black Maternal Health Caucus (BMHC) demonstrates the legislative agency of Black women to form identity- and issue-based coalitions that suit the needs of Black women—needs often overlooked by Black men and white women.