Objectives. Conventional wisdom about the link between campaign contributions and roll call votes is that contributions rarely matter because groups tend to give to like-minded legislators. This meta-analysis examines the conventional wisdom by analyzing published research on this topic. Methods. More than 30 studies are pooled to produce more than 350 individual tests of the contributions-roll call link. Extending meta-regression (Stanley and Jarrell, 1989), a logit meta-analysis is conducted to summarize the literature and assess the importance of various modeling choices. Results. We find that some, but not all, model specifications have an impact on whether significant results are present. Models that control for friendly giving by including a measure of legislators' ideology and that include more than one contributions variable are less likely to produce significant results. Conclusions. After considering the impact of model choice on study results, we conclude that one-third of roll call votes exhibit the impact of campaign contributions.Since the Federal Election Commission began collecting campaign finance data three decades ago, much research has investigated the possibility that contributions influence how elected representatives vote on proposed pieces of legislation. As the cost of financing electoral campaigns has increased, many observers of American politics have become concerned that interest groups are buying the roll call votes of elected officials. However, political scientists who have examined whether such a link exists have tended to downplay these suspicions. In fact, over time a conventional wisdom, culled from an overview of the literature, has developed that asserts PAC contributions rarely exert an independent influence on roll call votes. Although legislators often cast roll call votes congruent with the interests and preferences of those groups that contributed to their campaigns, this correlation does not reflect influence but rather the tendency of interest groups to donate to like-minded legislators. When properly modeled, it is argued, analyses show that campaign contributions seldom change the votes of n

The lack of female politicians has been attributed to a lack of female candidates for office. However, the reason why there are so few female candidates is not clear. The author examines whether differences in fund-raising perceptions and effort between female and male state legislative candidates contribute to the lack of female candidates. The results indicate that women do tend to be more concerned about fund-raising, as is evidenced by greater effort devoted to this campaign function as compared to their male counterparts. Women use more techniques and rely on more sources to secure funds for their campaigns. This suggests that part of the reason women are reluctant to run for office may be due to the fact that they will have to devote more effort to a task candidates generally find distasteful.

To assess the relative impact of party and ideology on legislative behavior, I utilize survey-based measures of legislator ideology to examine voting in five state legislatures. The results suggest that, although party and ideology both influence voting, the impact of party is greater. The magnitude of this impact varies, however, from chamber to chamber. The activity of parties in the electoral arena explains part of this variance, with more active parties having more influence. Thus, research on legislative behavior should focus on the context surrounding the decision-making process in order for us to understand the influences on voting.

Conventional wisdom holds that the #MeToo movement increased awareness of sexual harassment and drove sympathizers, particularly women, to increased participation in the 2018 midterm elections. In this paper, we assess whether #MeToo increased awareness of sexual harassment, as well as whether #MeToo increased self-reported interest in various forms of political participation. Using an original dataset from October 2018, we find that although the #MeToo movement increased awareness and concern about sexual harassment and sexual assault, it did not affect interest in political participation among most Americans. We also find that the people most likely to report being aware of and mobilized by the movement were Democrats, those with high levels of political interest, and those who have personally experienced sexual harassment in professional settings. Surprisingly, in most of our models, women were no more likely to report that #MeToo increased their interest in participating than men. The results suggest that the primary effect of #MeToo may have been increasing the salience of sexual harassment and interest in political participation in 2018 among those who possessed the resources to participate and who were ideologically predisposed to support the movement’s goals from the beginning.

Objective. Research has established that female legislators act differently than their male counterparts in state legislatures. But the effect of gender on roll call voting is less clear, due in part to the fact that research has not properly differentiated between the multiple ways gender can influence roll call voting. Methods. In order to better understand the relationship between gender and roll call voting, structural equation modeling is used to examine roll call voting in numerous issue areas in five state legislatures. Results. Gender rarely exerts a direct influence on roll call voting. Instead, the influence of gender is manifested through ideology and party. Conclusion. The primary effect of gender on roll call voting is that it leads female legislators to make different choices in ideology and partisanship as compared to their male counterparts.