Kristin Kanthak

The diversity paradox : political parties, legislatures, and the organizational foundations of representation in America

Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1: Diversity Dilemmas in Democratic Representation Chapter 2: Internal Valuation in Political Organizations: Political Parties and Gender-Based Group Dynamics in the U.S. House of Representatives Chapter 3: A Unified Theory of Colleague Valuation in Political Organizations Chapter 4: Testing the Unified Theory of Colleague Valuation in the U.S. House of Representatives Chapter 5: Coordination Dilemmas and the Critical Mass Problem: Differentiating Colleague Valuation Between Incumbents and Challengers in the U.S. Senate Chapter 6: Can Organizational Mechanisms Solve Minority Group Coordination Problems? Logic, Lessons, and Evidence from Legislative Caucuses in the American States Chapter 7: The Organizational Foundations of Democratic Representation References

Top-Down Divergence

Although the traditional Hotelling—Downs—Black (Hotelling, 1929; Downs, 1957; Black, 1958) spatial model of voting predicts candidate convergence, several empirical studies show that convergence in actual elections is rare. In response, researchers have designed models that produce the more empirically tenable candidate divergence outcome. While most of these models rely on assumptions about the election or the electorate to derive divergence predictions, I show that divergence is possible based on assumptions about institutional power seeking among legislators. More specifically, I assume that ideological proximity to political parties within the legislature determines how much power over policy outcomes an individual legislator receives. Given this assumption, I find that candidates competing for seats in legislatures with two parties virtually never converge, because their parties pull them in different directions and away from their districts’ median voter ideal point. Party divergence within the legislature, then, creates candidate divergence at the electoral level.

Coordination dilemmas and the valuation of women in the U.S. Senate: Reconsidering the critical mass problem

We offer a model of colleague valuation to illuminate the coordination challenges women legislators face. Our model predicts that women members’ strategies depend upon whether they value women colleagues as much as men do, or instead value fellow women colleagues more highly. We test these predictions by analyzing leadership PAC campaign contributions U.S. Senators made to incumbent and challenger women during the 105th—108th Congresses. We find that women Senators value fellow incumbent women colleagues less highly than do men Senators, whereas they value women challengers more highly than do men. Attaining a critical mass of women in legislatures is thus not sufficient for creating a successful working environment, but instead creates a coordination problem that supplants the previous token minority problem.