Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer

An Integrated Model of Women's Representation

The concept of representation, as developed in Hanna Pitkins seminal work, is a complex structure, whose multiple dimensions are hypothesized to be closely interconnected. Most empirical work, however, ignores the integrated character of representation and examines its several dimensions in isolation. The picture of representation that results is not so much incorrect as incomplete. This research tests an integrated model of representation linking formal, descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. Data on the representation of women in 31 democracies confirms the interconnections among the several dimensions of representation. The structure of electoral systems exerts powerful influences on both womens descriptive representation and symbolic representation. Descriptive representation, in turn, increases legislatures’ responsiveness to womens policy concerns and enhances perceptions of legitimacy. The effects of substantive representation, however, are much less than theory anticipates.

Making Quotas Work: The Effect of Gender Quota Laws On the Election of Women

Gender quota laws are intended to increase the number of women elected to legislatures, but initial evidence suggests that many laws have had little effect. I present a cross-national, statistical test that analyzes how three key dimensions of candidate quota laws affect women’s representation. My results show that quotas that require more women to be on party ballots lead to the election of more women, independent of placement mandates and enforcement mechanisms, but rules governing where female candidates are listed on the ballot and sanctions for noncompliance amplify that effect. Candidate quotas can increase women’s representation, but the quotas’ effectiveness depends on their design. Women’s representation in national legislatures around the world has nearly doubled in the past 30 years. Yet the world average for women legislators in 2007 was still only 18%, far less than parity, and the percentage of legislative seats held by women varies widely across countries (IPU 2007). Explanations for women’s underrepresentation stress cultural, socioeconomic, and, perhaps most important, institutional differences in political systems. Specifically, electoral rules, such as those defining the type of electoral system and district magnitude, have been found to affect women’s representation because these rules determine how votes get translated into seats. Despite the benefits that certain institutional arrangements provide for increasing the number of women in legislatures, women continue to be underrepresented in most countries. In an effort to change this trend, many countries have adopted gender quotas—“fast track” mechanisms for increasing women’s representation. While quotas are intended to increase women’s representation, the extent to which they do so varies significantly across countries. For this study, I examined why some types of gender quotas have been more effective than others at increasing women’s representation. I looked specifically at national candidate quota laws, which have been

Engaging citizens: The role of power-sharing institutions

Drawing on established theories of comparative political institutions, we argue that democratic institutions carry important messages that influence mass attitudes and behaviors. Power-sharing political institutions signal to citizens that inclusiveness is an important principle of a country’s democracy and can encourage citizens to participate in politics. Applying multilevel modeling to data from the World Values Survey, we test whether democratic institutions influence political engagement in 34 countries. Further, we examine whether underrepresented groups, specifically women, are differentially affected by the use of power-sharing institutions such that they are more engaged in politics than women in countries with power-concentrating institutions. We find that disproportional electoral rules dampen engagement overall and that gender gaps in political engagement tend to be smaller in more proportional electoral systems, even after controlling for a host of other factors. Power-sharing institutions ca...

Voter Turnout in Presidential Democracies

Numerous studies indicate that political institutions play an important role in explaining variation in voter turnout across countries. The nuances of institutions unique to presidential elections have been largely overlooked, however, despite the different incentives they offer for voters to participate in elections. This article examines the effect that four presidential institutions had on voter turnout in presidential elections between 1974 and 2004—the timing of elections (whether concurrent or nonconcurrent), the power of the presidency, presidential electoral rules (plurality or majority runoff), and reelection rules. To isolate the effect of presidential institutions, this study controls for other likely influences on turnout, including the economic environment and the wider political context. It finds that (a) runoff elections dampen turnout whereas incumbency spurs it and (b) more powerful presidencies and elections, when held concurrently with legislative elections, have little effect on voter participation.

Women Who Win: Social Backgrounds, Paths to Power, and Political Ambition in Latin American Legislatures

Research on women in Latin American politics in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s showed that very few women ran for and won political office and that those who did often did not fit the mold of the typical legislator. Yet significant cultural, social, and political changes have occurred over the past 30 years, and few studies have reexamined the types of women who win political office in the region today. In this article, I examine the social backgrounds, paths to power, and political ambition of women and men elected to national legislatures in Argentina, Colombia, and Costa Rica. I argue that women and men are likely to be more similar than different, given the tight constraints imposed on legislative candidates in democratic elections, and empirically examine this hypothesis with data from an original survey of legislators conducted in 2001–2. I find that, indeed, women and men are quite similar on an array of characteristics. Women who win elected office in Latin America today do so by playing the traditional, male-defined, political game.

Candidate Gender and Electoral Success in Single Transferable Vote Systems

The proportion of those elected to national legislatures who are women varies widely, with most countries falling far short of gender parity. In the average parliament, only 18 per cent of the members are women, but some countries have nearly obtained gender parity while others have no women at all in office. Most of the comparative, cross-national work on women’s representation tries to explain differences in the percentage of seats held by women using aggregate-level factors, such as socio-economic development, political culture or electoral institutions. While this answers an important question about women’s descriptive representation, its dominance has nearly precluded research on other equally essential and related questions. We examine two of these questions in this research note: once a prospective candidate has decided to enter a race, does the candidate’s gender systematically work against (or for) her? And do the individual-level, party-level and district-level characteristics that typically determine electoral success work differently for male and female candidates? To answer these questions, we adopt a novel approach to studying women’s representation. We approach it from the level of the individual candidate and use multilevel modelling to test hypotheses about how individual, party and districtlevel factors affect the election of women. We do this in three national settings – Australia, Ireland and Malta. When the election of women is addressed with a single observation taken at the level of the national legislature, it is impossible to tease out how individual, party and district-level factors condition the election of women. By making the unit of analysis the individual candidate, we can examine questions that have not received much attention in cross-national research. Candidate-level research in comparative politics is rare because of the demands of data collection and statistical modelling. Collecting candidate-level data across countries and over time is difficult and time-consuming. Most studies of gender’s effect on vote choice focus on one country and only one or two elections. We observe fifteen elections across three countries with more than three thousand individual candidates running under the banners of more than one hundred parties in almost seventy distinct electoral districts. What is more, modelling data where covariates are measured at multiple levels requires methodological tools that have become widespread in political

Gender Turnover and Roll-Call Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives

A number of studies suggest that the gender of a legislator affects his or her congressional ideology. We argue that these studies may have produced misleading results because of insufficient controls for constituency influences. To better account for constituency effects, we use a longitudinal research design based on electoral turnover, which holds constituency constant while allowing gender and party to vary. We apply ordinary least squares regression to data from the 103d, 104th, and 105th Houses of Representatives and estimate the effect of gender turnover on changes in DW-NOMINATE roll-call voting scores. We find that, when we sufficiently control for both party and constituency influences, gender is not a determinant of the liberalness of a representatives roll-call voting behavior.

Legislative Power and Women's Representation

Womens representation in national legislatures varies widely around the world. In 2012, only Rwanda and Andorra had achieved parity in womens representation in the national parliament, with 56% of the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies being female and exactly half the Andorran General Council represented by each sex. In many other countries, women still have little representation in the national legislature, despite being almost 50% of the population. A large body of research has emerged to try to explain the wide variation across countries, with most of it focusing on cultural, socioeconomic, and electoral explanations (e.g., McDonagh 2002; Norris 1985; Reynolds 1999; Rule 1987; Tripp and Kang 2008). Recent scholarship, however, has suggested that the legislature itself is a gendered institution that marginalizes women and argues for greater attention to understanding exactly how legislative institutions affect womens representation (Beckwith 2005; Chappell 2006; 2010; Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1995; Hawkesworth 2003; 2005; Krook and Mackay 2011; Schwindt-Bayer 2010).

The Role of Rules in Representation: Group Membership and Electoral Incentives

Existing research shows that the election of members of previously underrepresented groups can have significant consequences for policymaking. Yet, quotas, reserved seats, communal rolls, and race-conscious districting make it difficult to distinguish whether it is group membership, electoral incentives, or a combination of the two that matters. It is argued here that lawmakers who are members of underrepresented groups will stand out as defenders of their group’s interests only when electoral rules incentivize them to do so. This is demonstrated empirically using data from New Zealand, showing that MA ori Members of Parliament systematically vary in the extent to which they represent their ethnic group as a function of the three different sets of rules under which they were elected.

Citizen responses to female executives: is it sex, novelty or both?

ABSTRACT Women increasingly have been elected to executive office – both at the national and subnational level – in countries throughout the world. Yet, we know little about the effects that the election of a woman to executive office has on citizen attitudes, political engagement, or political participation. In this paper, we argue that the election of a woman to an executive could have effects through the presence of a woman in the executive, the novelty of a woman assuming executive office, or both. We test these hypotheses with a survey experiment conducted in Brazil that focuses on the election of a hypothetical female governor. This project sheds light on how citizens respond to female executives with a causal analysis in an important region for gender and executive politics.