How Women Represent Women Political Parties, Gender and Representation in the State Legislatures

Author: Tracy L. Osborn
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
ISBN: 9780199845347
Published In: April 2012
Format: Hardback , 256 pages
Jurisdiction: U.S. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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First comparison of women's individual legislative behavior in almost all of the 50 states
Most comprehensive analysis of women's behavior in the U.S. state legislatures to date
First study to unpack how Democratic and Republican women represent women's issues

Though the number of women elected to the U.S. state legislatures has grown substantially in the last forty years, researchers still struggle to connect women's presence in the legislature to public policy outcomes that affect women. One reason for this struggle is that we lack a complete understanding of how political parties modify the relationship between women legislators' interests in representing women and the creation of public policies affecting women.

In How Women Represent Women: Political Parties, Gender and Representation in the State Legislatures, Tracy L. Osborn examines the two avenues through which political parties fundamentally affect the ways in which partisan women legislators pursue women's issues policies. She argues that political parties structure representation in two ways. First, women's party identities shape the types of policy alternatives they offer to solve women's policy problems. Second, parties organize the legislative process by holding majority control, to varying degrees, over agenda setting and policy creation, promoting some women legislators' policy proposals over others.

Osborn tests these two avenues of influence by comparing partisan women's legislative behavior toward the creation of women's issues policies across different party environments in the U.S. state legislatures. She uses original election, sponsorship, and roll call data in nearly all ninety-nine state legislative chambers in 1999-2000. She concludes that Republican and Democratic women offer different solutions to women's policy problems based on their party identities. Depending on which party controls the legislative process and how strongly they do so, this party control promotes one set of partisan policy alternatives over the other. Thus, political parties determine which women's issues policies become law. Ultimately, this book demonstrates how essential parties are to understanding how women elected to public office translate their interest in women's issues into substantive public policy.

Readership: Women and politics scholars and state politics scholars; upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in women and politics, state politics and legislative politics, Women and public policy, or state policy-making classes, Public Administration

List of Tables
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: How Parties Affect Gender and Representation
Chapter 3: Examining Party Identity and Institutional Partisanship
Chapter 4: Party Identity and Issue Preferences in the 1998 Election
Chapter 5: Party Identity and Institutional Partisanship in Agenda Setting
Chapter 6: Institutional Partisanship and Roll Call Voting
Chapter 7: Conclusion
Appendix A: NPAT Questionnaire and Additional Analyses from Chapter 4
Appendix B: Coding Scheme for Bills and Roll Call Votes and Additional
Analyses for Chapters 5-6
References
Index