We investigate the Twitter activity of all congressional candidates leading up to the 2012 U.S. House elections to assess whether there are significant differences in the tone and content of the tweets from male and female candidates. We argue that the electoral environment will have a significant effect over whether candidates engage in negative tweeting, address political issues, and discuss so-called “women’s issues” on Twitter. We find that gender has both a direct and contextual effect on candidates’ communication style on Twitter. Female candidates tweet significantly more “attack-style” messages than their male counterparts, discuss policy issues at a significantly higher rate, and women representatives focus more on “women’s issues.” We also find strong contextual effects in races with more female candidates: There is significantly more tweeting about political issues as well as significantly more negative attack-style tweets. However, with more female candidates, the number of tweets about “women’s issues” declines.

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This article examines the factors that influence whether members of Congress tweet about the #MeToo movement. Whereas social-identity theory suggests that congresswomen would be more likely to tweet about #MeToo, congressional research argues that increased polarization has resulted in congresswomen bucking gender stereotypes and embracing more partisan behavior than might otherwise be expected (Pearson and Dancey 2011). We examine how gender, partisanship, and ideology shape the Twitter activity of members of Congress surrounding the #MeToo movement using an original dataset of their tweets since October 2017 when the #MeToo movement gained prominence on Twitter. Our findings show that gender and ideology are the strongest predictors of whether Congress members tweet about the #MeToo movement. Liberals—particularly liberal women—are leading the charge in bringing prominence to the #MeToo movement on Twitter.

We argue that state legislative politics is qualitatively different from national congressional politics in the extent to which it focuses on localized and geographically specific legislation salient to subconstituencies within a legislative district. Whereas congressional politics focuses on casework benefits for individual constituents, state legislative politics is more oriented to the delivery of localized benefits for groups of citizens in specific areas within a district, fostering a geographically specific group connection. A primary way to build such targeted geographical support is for members to introduce particularistic legislation designed to aid their specific targeted geographical area within the district. We argue that this is primarily a function of electoral rules. Using original sponsorship data from U.S. state houses, we demonstrate that greater district magnitude and more inclusive selection procedures such as open primaries are associated with more particularism. Our findings provide strong support for a voter-group alignment model of electoral politics distinct from the personal vote/electoral connection model that characterizes U.S. congressional politics and is more akin to patterns of geographically specific group-oriented electoral politics found in Europe and throughout the world.

This research examines how severing the electoral connection influences legislative behavior. Unlike previous studies of legislative shirking, we argue for a more nuanced conceptualization that takes account of members' electoral circumstances (beyond a dichotomous measure of term limited/ nonterm limited) as well as the nature of the votes under consideration. This enables us to incorporate expectations of party influence into our model of legislative shirking. Our research demonstrates shirking among legislators leaving public office as they are no longer susceptible to party pressure, while those who face term limits and are seeking another public office may remain adherent to the party on votes most crucial to the party (i.e., procedural votes). Moreover, we find evidence that legislators who are no longer constrained by elections also exhibit a greater level of roll call abstention, although only those leaving public office demonstrate significant increases in abstentions on procedural votes. Thus, we may find very different shirking patterns among term-limited members depending on their future political ambition (or lack thereof) and also depending on the nature of the votes that we are examining.

Procedural cartel theory states that the majority party exerts influence over legislative outcomes through agenda control. This research tests predictions from the party cartel theory in five state legislatures. I assess party influence through comparison of term‐limited and nonterm‐limited legislators. I argue that term‐limited legislators (who are not seeking elective office) are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect means to determine the existence of party influence. The results demonstrate that party influence is present in these legislatures. I find that party influence is magnified on the procedural, rather than final‐passage, voting record which is precisely where procedural cartel theory predicts. I find lower levels of ideological consistency and party discipline among members for whom the party leadership offers the least—those leaving elective office. These results provide support for party cartel theory, demonstrating further evidence of how parties matter in modern democracies.

Roll-call data have become a staple of contemporary scholarship on legislative behavior. Recent methodological innovations in the analysis of roll-call data have produced a number of important theoretical insights, such as understanding the structure of congressional decisionmaking and the role of parties and ideology in Congress. Many of the methodological innovations and theoretical questions sparked by congressional scholarship have been difficult to test at the state level because of the lack of comprehensive data on various forms of state legislative behavior, including roll-call voting. The Representation in America's Legislatures project rectifies that problem through collection of comprehensive state legislative roll-call votes across all 99 state legislative chambers for the 1999–2000 and 2003–04 legislative sessions. In this article, we describe the data available through this project as well as our data acquisition procedures, including Stata and Perl programming and OCR of paper documents, with suggestions about how to use these methods to collect a wide range of state-level data.

In early work on women in Congress, scholars consistently identified a tendency among women legislators to be more liberal roll‐call voters than male copartisans. Recent changes in Congress point to the polarization of women, where Democratic women remain more liberal than Democratic men but Republican women are no different from, or more conservative than, Republican men. We use newly available state legislative roll‐call data to determine whether women state legislators are more liberal or polarized than male copartisans. We find that while Democratic women state legislators remain consistently more liberal than male copartisans in most state chambers, Republican women legislators are growing more conservative. Thus, women state legislators are increasingly polarized in most U.S. states. Legislator replacement and increasing polarization among state legislators in office contribute to this effect. We argue that polarization among women legislators has implications for the representation of women in the states.