Women, Earmarks, and Substantive Representation

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate women's substantive impact on government by examining the earmark requests of the US House representatives. Women representatives are hypothesized to make more funding requests for women's issues than male representatives. Through use of OLS statistical analysis, women's issue earmark requests, as reported by the 111th congressional House members for the fiscal year 2010, serve as the dependent variable. Gender is a significant predictor of earmark requests even when controlling for the ideology, partisanship, and racial minority status of a House member. This finding is evidence of women's substantive representation in the form of earmark requests.

Women’s Issues and Their Fates in the US Congress

“…21 Perhaps most importantly, one may be concerned that these findings are driven by the large numbers of minority party women in recently highly polarized Republican Congresses. If, as suggested by Frederick (2009) and others, this increase in polarization has corresponded with a decrease in the number of moderate Republican women, one wonders whether ideological shifts among female legislators correspond with changes in the types of policies that women advocate, or whether they continue to advocate for policies that are traditionally associated with women's issues, as Schultze (2013) suggests. Moreover, are some women's issue policy areas, themselves, more polarizing or divisive, perhaps accounting for some of their reduced success rates?…”

The Influence of Women Legislators on State Health Care Spending for the Poor

“…This variable is measured using the percentage of a state's population that is younger than 18 living in poverty (for CHIP) and the percentage of a state's population that is 65 or older living in poverty (for Medicaid home health, personal health, and hospital care spending for the elderly and disabled). 9 …”

“…In order to account for differences in outcomes being explained by party affiliations [28,37,76], like the tendency of Democrats to favor greater spending, we gauge state Democratic legislative control using an updated version of 8 For more information about the particular elements of these programs, as well as the role of intergovernmental transfers, see Marton and Wildasin [68]. 9 The original data clumps together Medicaid spending benefiting both the elderly and the disabled so distinctions between the two groups are unable to be explored.…”

“…While politicians can represent their constituents in many different ways and be responsive to their needs through a variety of actions, from enacting policies to allocating resources addressing constituent need [1,2], simply having more like-minded women in office does not automatically translate into the effective implementation of responsive policies. Although much research has documented divergent attitudinal positions and behavioral distinctions between women and men legislators (see for instance [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]), the extent to which policy outcomes are affected by having women in positions of power remains ambiguous. Some scholars find that having women in office influences the types of policy outcomes enacted by governments (see for instance [4,8,11]), while the research of others suggests a complicated or null relationship [12][13][14].…”

Women Matter: The Impact of Gender Empowerment on Abortion Regulation in 16 European Countries between 1960 and 2010

“…When more women are directly represented in the (decisive) decision-making bodies, the chances are higher that their interests will be advanced and finally pushed through (by taking them into account on all stages of the decision-making process). In that regard, a “critical mass” argument is often raised, meaning that reaching a certain numerical threshold is a prerequisite for effective female interest representation at all the stages (e.g., Celis 2006; Schulze 2013; Swiss, Fallon, and Burgos 2012; also Johnson 2001, but see Lovendusky 2001 for a critical assessment).…”