Role Models or Partisan Models? The Effect of Prominent Women Officeholders

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Cory Manento ◽  
Marie Schenk
Keyword(s):  
Role Models ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
The Political ◽  
Original Dataset ◽  
Prominence Effect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Office

Abstract Women remain underrepresented in electoral politics compared to their share of the population. Using an original dataset spanning 1975–2019, we examine whether the presence of women in prominent political office leads to an increase in the number of women serving in state legislatures. We define prominence in two ways: the total number of women elected to statewide office and the length of a state’s history of electing women. We find that the prominence effect diverges by party. The election of prominent Democratic women leads to an increase in the proportion of Democratic women state legislators, while the election of Republican women leads to a decrease in the proportion of Republican women state legislators. Rather than serving as role models for women of both parties to enter the political pipeline, electing more women to prominent office is contributing to a greater representational gap between the parties in state legislatures.

Growing Tea With Subnational Roots: Tea Party Affiliation, Factionalism, and GOP Politics in State Legislatures

2021 ◽  
pp. 1532673X2110411
Author(s):  
Stella M. Rouse ◽  
Charles Hunt ◽  
Kristen Essel
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
State Level ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Party Affiliation ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Original Dataset

Most research has examined the influence of the Tea Party as a social movement or loose organization, but less is known about its influence within legislative party politics, especially at the state level. In this paper, we argue that in this context the Tea Party is primarily an intraparty faction that has caused significant divisions inside the Republican Party. Using an original dataset of legislators across 13 states for the years 2010 to 2013, we examine legislator and district-level characteristics that predict state legislators’ affiliation with the Tea Party. Our results reveal that in some respects legislators affiliated with the Tea Party are a far-right wing of the Republican Party. However, by other measures that capture anti-establishment political sentiment, Tea Party affiliated legislators comprise a factional group attempting to transform the Party in ways that go beyond ideology. These findings have important implications for the future prospects of the GOP.

Introduction to Faith in State Legislatures

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
Front Line ◽  
United State ◽  
Party Control ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Change State

This chapter introduces the complex history of the relationships among faith, politics and culture in state legislatures. Each of these concepts is explored by organizing them into three themes: separation, demography and polarization. The direction and content of public policies across the United State are influenced by these elements contributing to either the support or opposition to social change. State legislators are on the front line of these ideological divides. These variations by region contribute to the increase in single party control and have generated pronounced policy differences.

Party as Gatekeeper

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy J. Schiller ◽  
Charles Stewart
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
Washington State ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
The Political ◽  
Senate Elections ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Pressure State

This chapter analyzes the role of the party as a gatekeeper to running for U.S. Senate and delves more deeply into the role of the political party as an organization in the state legislature. It measures the function of partisanship in structuring the organization of state legislatures as well as examines how partisanship influenced the dynamics of Senate elections. It explains the role of party caucuses in the nomination and election stages of indirect elections; shows how party leaders identified and rallied around Senate candidates; and identifies the set of incentives that party leaders used to pressure state legislators to back their preferred Senate candidate. Furthermore, it discusses how candidates for U.S. Senate tried to consolidate support among key party leaders, and how regional party factionalism made that task more difficult. To illustrate these behaviors, the chapter includes case studies from a range of years and states, including New York, Kentucky, Washington State, Florida, and Illinois.

Redemption and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Harper
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Political Power ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
The Political ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Organized Violence ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Self Defense

This chapter offers a in-depth case study to describe how black southerners reconciled their hopes forged at emancipation with the collapse of Reconstruction. After a brief moment of political power and progress, black leaders in North Carolina watched as their political enemies regained control of state legislatures and used organized violence to suppress black voting and education. Across the South, black Protestants turned to different biblical narratives to make sense of these setbacks while still maintaining a belief that emancipation foreshadowed God’s plans for a coming era of racial justice. In 1870, North Carolina’s black state legislators used Queen Esther’s story of Jewish persecution in exile to interpret their setbacks as temporary and to suggest specific strategies, including armed self-defense, for living as a minority in a hostile land. Without paying attention to the particulars of these exile stories, historians misinterpret the political aims of black leaders.

From Bullets to Bureaucracy

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-86
Author(s):  
Casey Marina Lurtz
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
History Of ◽  
Physical Spaces

Order and progress have long defined both the ambitions and achievements of governments across Latin America at the turn of the century. This chapter demonstrates how local actors also put those ideas into play, working around political violence by engaging with state bureaucracy. In parallel to the political history of popular liberalism, this chapter traces a popular history bureaucratic liberalism. Beginning with the history of a local cacique’s rise to the state governorship, it then traces his decline through the gradual reworking of the apparatus and physical spaces of state institutions into places where producers could work around the cacique’s arbitrary exercise of power. This sidestepping of political authority set the stage for local control over the implementation of reform, even after the cacique’s death. Administration substituted for electoral politics, but administration itself became a means of local assertions of self-governance.

scholarly journals Institutional Variation and Political Career Patterns: A Look at the Influence of Chamber Size in State Legislatures

2008 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 49-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Winburn
Keyword(s):  
State Legislatures ◽  
Term Limits ◽  
The State ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ambition ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Institutional Variation ◽  
State Legislative ◽  
Chamber Size

State legislators routinely run for the state Senate after having served in the state House; however, this rarely occurs in the other order. Do members simply look to move up based on the conventional view of the political ambition ladder? Alternatively, do institutional reasons exist that make the Senate the preferred chamber? I examine the differences between the state legislative chambers and discuss institutional reasons why members may prefer the Senate to the House. Overall, I find chamber size is an important intra-institutional variable in explaining this variation along with the professionalism of the legislatures and term limits.

We would rather be leaders than parliamentarians: women and political office in Ghana

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Gretchen Bauer ◽  
Akosua K. Darkwah
Keyword(s):  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Democracies ◽  
Political Ambition ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
Political Office ◽  
Emerging Democracy

Ghana, an emerging democracy, lags far behind in women’s representation in Parliament. This article, based on interviews with delegates, aspirants, candidates, Members of Parliament and potential female presidential candidates, suggests that women are dissuaded from standing for Parliament by the exorbitant ‘cost of politics’, humiliating ‘politics of insult’ and keen appreciation of Parliament’s limitations. Still, women may be eager to hold appointive office. Until new democracies are established with electoral systems devoid of costly and insulting electoral politics, and with elected offices in which women may accomplish important goals, women will not exhibit the political ambition to participate in those spaces.

Introduction to Faith in State Legislatures

2020 ◽  
pp. 2173-2189
Author(s):  
Karla Drenner
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
Front Line ◽  
United State ◽  
Party Control ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Change State

This chapter introduces the complex history of the relationships among faith, politics and culture in state legislatures. Each of these concepts is explored by organizing them into three themes: separation, demography and polarization. The direction and content of public policies across the United State are influenced by these elements contributing to either the support or opposition to social change. State legislators are on the front line of these ideological divides. These variations by region contribute to the increase in single party control and have generated pronounced policy differences.

Contents and Contexts the Rhetoric of Oral Traditions in the ɔman of Sefwi Wiawso, Ghana

Africa ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Boni
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Office

AbstractThis article examines political oral traditions in the Sefwi (Akan) area of Ghana. Two types of narrative are studied: negotiations over the political status of stools within the kingdom and the claims to succession of matrilineal branches within stools. Narratives are analysed in relation to their claims to historicity, to the political conflicts in which they are generated and to their correspondence to legal criteria of attribution of ‘traditional’ political offices. It shows that pre‐colonial dynamic norms concerning stool status and succession turned into a fixed legal corpus in the twentieth century. Contenders’ histories have been used as evidence to judge ‘traditional’ stool disputes. Narrators have thus constructed narratives presenting ideal pasts considered worthy of legal attribution of ‘traditional’ political office. Narratives have consequently legalised narrators’ claims with reference to ancient history. The study of the context of the emergence of oral traditions—hostility between particular stool holders, national politics’ influence or conflicts over the sharing of stool revenue—shows that narratives and political conflicts have a history of their own which is carefully omitted from the narration.

Gendered Polarization and Abortion Policymaking in the States

The Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Abigail A. Matthews ◽  
Rebecca J. Kreitzer ◽  
Emily U. Schilling
Keyword(s):  
State Legislatures ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
Women's Issues ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Count Model ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Abortion Rights ◽  
Original Dataset ◽  
Policy Representation ◽  
The U.S

AbstractWidening, asymmetric polarization is evident in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. Recent work unveils a new dimension to this polarization story: newly elected Republican women are driving this polarization. Women are more likely to legislate on women’s issues than men, yet women’s shared interest in representing women doesn’t preclude their identity as partisans. In this article, we explore the effect of today’s political climate on state legislators’ policy representation of women’s issues. We ask what effect does gendered polarization have on women’s issues? To test this, we evaluate bill sponsorship in the states on the quintessential “women’s issue” of abortion. Our research design focuses on bill introductions and uses on an original dataset of pro- and anti-abortion rights bill introductions, which we analyze using an event count model. We find that overall polarization leads to the introduction of fewer restrictive abortion bills, but as polarization between women lawmakers grows, legislators are more likely to introduce anti-abortion rights legislation. Gender polarization has consequences on the types of bills legislators introduce and for how scholars should study polarization.

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