Tracy L. Osborn

Women and Representation: A Different View of the District?

In this article we measure the impact of gender on womens legislative behavior by utilizing a unique research design. We compare whether women and men of the same political party represent the same congressional district differently with respect to womens issues. Using bill sponsorship and floor remarks during the 104th to 107th sessions of the U.S. House of Representatives as measures of legislative behavior, we find that female legislators who replace men in the same district introduce more womens issues bills in Congress. Although our conclusion that women legislators represent womens issues more frequently in the House supports existing research, our results do so in a new and more effective way by controlling for the competing explanations of party identification and district opinion as factors determining a legislators behavior.

Gender and the Perception of Knowledge in Political Discussion

Differences in knowledge about politics between men and women have the potential to affect political discussion. We examine differences in the perception of political knowledge between men and women and the effects these differences have on how often men and women talk about politics. We find both men and women perceive women to be less knowledgeable about politics and men to be more knowledgeable, regardless of the actual level of knowledge each discussion partner holds. This perceptual knowledge gap could have ramifications for discussion as political participation, since people turn to those they perceive to be experts to gather political information.

Speaking as Women: Women and Floor Speeches in the Senate

Research on women as legislators contends that through their unique status as both women and legislators, women representatives have distinct policy interests that help them to substantively represent women as a group with their actions in the legislative chamber. We test this assertion using the floor speeches of women and men in the US Senate to determine if women senators as a group express different policy preferences in this aspect of Senate participation. Through content analysis of floor speeches in the 106th Senate (1999–2000), we find women do speak more about policy concerns with direct relevance to women, such as womens health and family issues. These findings indicate that women senators, previously understudied, do represent womens interests in this chamber.

Voter Mobilization and the Obama Victory

As with the other presidential elections from this decade, the 2008 election was followed by considerable speculation as to how new efforts to mobilize voters affected the eventual outcome. Although the conventional wisdom implies that “Democrats benefit from higher turnout,” previous research in political science demonstrates that such a conclusion applies to actual election results inconsistently. In this article, we outline the difficulties involved with assessing turnout effects within a particular election and proceed to test the hypothesis that the Obama campaign benefited from higher turnout using three different methods. The evidence suggests that the Obama campaign benefited substantially from voter turnout, particularly in comparison with the Kerry campaign in 2004, yet they also were successful in changing the minds of already mobilized voters. Although various data difficulties suggest the presence of some bias in our estimates, the consistency of the results across tests supports the general conclusion.

Representation in U.S. Legislatures: The Acquisition and Analysis of U.S. State Legislative Roll-Call Data

Roll-call data have become a staple of contemporary scholarship on legislative behavior. Recent methodological innovations in the analysis of roll-call data have produced a number of important theoretical insights, such as understanding the structure of congressional decisionmaking and the role of parties and ideology in Congress. Many of the methodological innovations and theoretical questions sparked by congressional scholarship have been difficult to test at the state level because of the lack of comprehensive data on various forms of state legislative behavior, including roll-call voting. The Representation in Americas Legislatures project rectifies that problem through collection of comprehensive state legislative roll-call votes across all 99 state legislative chambers for the 1999–2000 and 2003–04 legislative sessions. In this article, we describe the data available through this project as well as our data acquisition procedures, including Stata and Perl programming and OCR of paper documents, with suggestions about how to use these methods to collect a wide range of state-level data.

Women State Legislators and Representation The Role of Political Parties and Institutions

Research on women legislators in the U.S. states has made significant progress toward understanding how women legislators affect public policies. We still lack, however, a clear picture of how variation in legislative structure affects such policy making. Through control of the legislative process and ideological structure, political parties can enhance or constrain women legislators’ efforts. Institutional configurations such as women’s caucuses and women’s power in committee leadership also affect the types of policies women legislators create. By examining these legislative variations, researchers and practitioners can understand more thoroughly the legislative conditions under which women’s representation of women’s issues is most effective.

Two Become One? Spouses and Agreement in Political Opinions

Spouses who talk about politics with each other have long been considered aberrant cases of political discussion because of the frequency of their interaction and the high levels of agreement between them. Using the 1996 Indianapolis-St. Louis Election Study, we challenge these assumptions. We find that compared with other types of discussion dyads, married dyads are no more likely to agree about a host of policy issues, even though they do talk about them more frequently. In addition, we find even when spouses do agree about their presidential vote choice more often, they do not perceive this agreement to exist. These findings indicate that within the microfoundations of married political behavior, spouses may experience less political variety because of the frequency of their interaction, but this does not necessarily mean they experience lower levels of disagreement.

Pivotal Politics and Initiative Use in the American States

The direct initiative process, often referred to as a gun behind the door, provides an incentive for legislators to pass legislation more in line with voters’ wishes. Concomitantly, legislative procedures such as the filibuster and executive veto often impede the ability of the legislature to pass policies. We explore the tension between these two forces by incorporating legislative procedures and initiative proposal into a spatial model of the policymaking process. We find that the ability to propose initiatives sometimes breaks legislative gridlock, but that other times pivotal players may prefer the initiative outcome and therefore prevent the legislature from preempting a ballot measure. In particular, we show that initiative use increases with the distance between pivotal actors and the median voter. An empirical analysis of initiative use in the American states provides support for this prediction.