Multimember Districts and the Substantive Representation of Women: An Analysis of Legislative Cosponsorship Networks

Abstract

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.

How MPs ties to interest groups matter for legislative co-sponsorship

“…'Legislators are more prone to co-sponsor the work of other legislators when they share some characteristics, such as ethnicity (Bratton and Rouse, 2011), gender (Clark and Caro 2013), constituency (Alemán and Calvo 2013;Baller 2017) or committee membership (Kirkland and Gross 2014;Baller 2017).' Various types of homophily were assessed in existing research on legislative co-sponsorship networks.…”

Gender, Party, and Presentation of Family in the Social Media Profiles of 10 State Legislatures

“…If there is an effect of gender on support for bills, it may be indirect, mediated by those factors (Clark & Caro, 2013).…”

Network patterns of legislative collaboration in twenty parliaments

“…To our knowledge, such network approaches to legislative cosponsorship have so far been conducted on a limited range of country cases. e literature that we reviewed includes numerous studies of both Congressional houses of the United States, pioneered by the work of Fowler (2006a;2006b), as well as studies of its state legislatures (Bra on & Rouse, 2011; Clark & Caro, 2013;Kirkland, 2013). We also located studies of legislative cosponsorship networks in the parliaments of Argentina (Alemán & Calvo, 2013;Micozzi, 2014), Chile (Alemán & Calvo, 2013) and a subset of the Romanian parliament (Chiru & Neamţu, 2012).…”