Margaret S. Williams

Incentives for Personal Votes and Women's Representation in Legislatures

To explain the gender gap in legislatures, scholars have identified several socio-economic, political, and cultural factors that undermine women’s representation. One explanation focuses on electoral institutions. Proportional representation systems with higher district magnitudes have been shown to increase the percentage of women in legislatures.The authors contend that solely concentrating on district magnitude ignores other critical electoral rules that will affect women’s representation. To better understand electoral system effects, scholars must understand how electoral rules beside district magnitude create incentives for candidates to obtain personal votes.The authors argue that those systems with weak incentives for personal votes (party-centered systems) increase women’s representation in comparison with systems that feature strong incentives for personal votes (candidate-centered systems). Using a data set of 57 countries between 1980 and 2005, the authors show that party-centered systems are more conducive to women’s representation.

Ambition, Gender, and the Judiciary

With the work of scholars like Fox and Lawless (2004) and Sanbonmatsu (2002), the discipline of political science began to understand individual-level explanations for womens representation in state legislatures. Such analysis, however, has not been extended to other branches of government, including state judiciaries. To examine individual-level explanations for representation on state courts, this article examines the results of a survey of Texas attorneys. The results of this research suggest that running for the judiciary is somewhat different from running for other office, and future research needs to explore the variation in ambition across types of offices.

Women's Representation on High Courts in Advanced Industrialized Countries

Recent scholarship increasingly considers the representation of women in cross-national legislatures, often examining how the characteristics of the countries in a particular region affect the representation of women in these elected bodies. No studies have examined the representation of women on the high courts in a cross-national context. We attempt to fill this void by collecting an original data set of women’s participation on high courts in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 2006 to 2007. Using this data, we examine how institutional choices of judicial selection and structural factors within the country affect women’s representation. We find that the variation in women’s participation on these courts, from 0% on some to 60% on others, is affected by the prestige of the court, the method of selection, and the tradition of and importance placed upon women’s participation within the country. Our results suggest that choices made during the design of high courts can influence the representative nature of the institution.

Nuclear Fallout: The Senate’s Cloture Threshold and Nomination Votes

Abstract In November of 2013, Majority Leader Harry Reid and his Democratic colleagues employed a series of parliamentary steps to change the precedent for cloture with respect to presidential nominations. This so called “nuclear option” reduced the threshold for cloture on presidential nominations (except for those to the US Supreme Court) to a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes necessary in the past. The paper examines how this change affected senators’ voting behavior on both cloture and confirmation of presidential nominations, using the 113th Senate as a natural experimental setting. We find that Republican senators are significantly more likely to vote against cloture in the wake of this change, presumably as symbolic votes of protest against the Democrats’ reversal of longstanding precedent. On the whole, the Republican conference votes against cloture, even when they vote overwhelmingly in favor of the nominee on the final confirmation vote. This suggests that cloture may not represent a sincere objection to the nominee in the post-nuclear Senate.

Gender & Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter by Sally J. Kenney

In Gender & Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter, Sally J. Kenney sets out a provocative argument for gender scholars: Stop looking for difference; it does not help achieve equality. The next eight chapters lay out the support for this point in a rich and detailed description of women and the judiciary at all levels. By examining the literature on judicial selection, judicial decision making, and jury service, Kenney’s book is a comprehensive review of the existing scholarship on gender and the judiciary and makes a compelling case for moving from discussions of difference to one of democratic participation. As Kenney rightly notes, there is not a lot of empirical support for the idea that women judges decide cases differently from men judges. Moreover, the assumption that men are the baseline (and women the deviation from that baseline) is both insulting and dangerous. The vast majority of the studies examining difference use sex as a proxy for all the variation in women’s experiences that might inform decision making and implicitly suggest that if women are not different, something is wrong with the analysis. As Kenney notes, this very assumption of difference could lead those who do not support women’s participation to argue if there is no difference for women, then excluding them does not matter. As a result, Kenney would focus on using sex where it can be an informative variable—showing women are disproportionately excluded from participation under certain selection systems or underrepresented relative to their numbers in the pool of potential judges. With these exceptions noted, Kenney herself eschews the use of sex as a variable in empirical scholarship to focus more on the contextual use of gender and how it informs our understanding of women and the judiciary. Her analysis of the careers of Chief Justice (CA) Rose Byrd and Justice (MN) Rosalie Wahl, along with an exploration of judicial appointments under the Carter administration show that it is gender, not sex per se, that influenced the career paths of women judges in the 1970s. While Wahl served as a symbol for women in Minnesota, Byrd became a target in California. These two chapters, along with the discussion of the Carter years, explore the nuance that women in public office must show as they talk about their experiences as women while not suggesting they are different.

Repeat Players in Federal Multidistrict Litigation

Abstract In Mass Torts in a World of Settlement, Richard Nagareda noted the importance of the highly specialized bar in creating the existing multidistrict litigation (MDL) landscape. In fact, Nagareda argues that mass torts “accentuate the role of lawyers as agents” who make and enforce a “grand, all-encompassing peace” (2007, p. ix). The influence this bar wields is so great that much of the book is dedicated to discussing potential limits on these administrators. Similarly, the emergence of a specialized segment of the bar is noted by several scholars of MDL, but there has been little systematic research. Using social network analysis, we look to address this issue by examining clusters of plaintiff attorneys over time. We find that the bar is really broken into two groups: generalists, working in several types of MDL proceedings, and specialists, those who tend to focus on a single type of MDL. These findings suggest not all types of proceedings operate in the same way. Moreover, we find that there is significant variation among proceedings in the pace at which specialized lawyers join the litigation.