One of the Few or One of Many? Women’s Behavior in Varied Legislative Contexts

• In Event: Intersectional Approaches to Elections and Institutions

Abstract

Although women, both white and women of color, have been gaining seats in state legislatures, their representation is still rather uneven across U.S. states. In Nevada, women now hold a clear majority at 60%, while in West Virginia, only 11.9% of the legislators are women (CAWP 2023). Out of the 2,420 women legislators, about 71.2% are white, 15.8% identify as Black, 7.9% are Latina, and even fewer identify as Asian American, Native American, or Middle Eastern (CAWP 2023). Our literature examining the behavior of women legislators is rich, and we have become more adept at disentangling racialized and gendered behavior through intersectional lenses. As a scholarly community, we have identified women’s representational and legislative behavior as related to their policy goals and outcomes, their institutional demeanor and performance, and their legislative effectiveness. However, much of our understanding of women has been constrained by women’s relative minoritized and marginalized position in legislatures. We have not had much opportunity to examine differences between women who serve in legislatures where most legislators share their gender identity. As a result, we have focused primarily on women’s social identity as women. I argue that context matters, and following Kanter (1977), I expect that women who serve among a majority of women behave differently from the women who serve in “tokenized” minority positions, i.e. where they are one of very few or perhaps the only one. Based on previous work that showed that the institutional proportion of one’s identity affected self-reported legislative behavior, such as hours worked, bills sponsored, and constituency service, I seek to examine differences in bill sponsorship and legislative effectiveness based on gender, race, and ethnicity in the context of the proportion of legislators with a shared identity.

This project proposes an analysis of the legislative behavior of women state legislators as a function of the gendered, racialized, and institutional context they work in. Ultimately, this project asks whether the proportion of other women, or other women of the same racialized group, affects the legislative behavior of individual women? For this study, I will utilize data from OpenStates, which includes bill sponsorship and passage information for all proposed bills across U.S. states from 2017 to 2022. The project aims to reveal patterns in bill sponsorship, voting behavior, and overall legislative effectiveness of minoritized women legislators in comparison to their counterparts who serve in more balanced legislatures. By adopting an intersectional lens, the study aspires to provide nuanced insights into the intertwined dynamics of gender, race, and legislative decision-making, offering valuable contributions for understanding the representation and effectiveness of minoritized women in state legislatures.

Author

• Julia Marin Hellwege, University of South Dakota