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.

Women's representation in elected and appointed positions is often seen as a matter of justice and equity (Burrell 1997). Beyond symbolic representation, many believe that a greater presence of women in institutions that have traditionally been controlled by men can facilitate the attention to issues that disproportionately affect women (Dahlerup 1988; Dodson and Carroll 1991; Kanter 1977). As the election of women has grown in the past decade, researchers have shown a renewed interest in understanding under what conditions women's descriptive representation can produce more effective substantive representation of women's interests. A number of feminist scholars argue that increasing the descriptive representation of women in legislatures is essential to remedy existing inequalities suffered by women (Mansbridge 1999). But electoral practices aimed at increasing women and minorities in office, such as majority-minority districts or gender quotas throughout European and Latin American countries, have produced varied results concerning the substantive representation of women and minority interests. Understanding the electoral and institutional features that strengthen or attenuate women's representation, therefore, merits further study.

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.