At the Intersection of Gender and Party: Legislative Freedom

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231191780
• Author: Amy Friesenhahn
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(1) 59–75

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231191780

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At the Intersection of Gender and Party:

Legislative Freedom

Amy Friesenhahn

1



Abstract

This paper examines the conditional effects of legislator gender, party, and key district-level characteristics on patterns of

roll-call votes. I propose and test a theory of legislative freedom conceptualized as a member of Congress’s ability to

defect from their party in roll-call votes. I argue that women members of Congress (MCs) will be more able to exercise

legislative freedom in women-friendly districts. I expect both Democratic and Republican women MCs represen ting

women-friendly districts will be more likely than those representing districts that are less women-friendly to defect from

party and that the women-friendly district effect will be stronger for Republican women MCs. To test these hypotheses, I

use roll-call voting data, women-friendly district data (Palmer and Simon 2006), and original data collectedon members of

the U.S. House beginning with the 103rd Congress. In this paper, I further explore the proposed theory of legislative

freedom to examine recent high-prof‌ile cases of women MCs defecting from the Republican party and the con ditions in

which they exercise this freedom.

Keywords

women, Congress, roll-call voting, legislative freedom, gender-conscious

Introduction

On January 13, 2021, when the U.S. House of Represen-

tatives voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump for

the second time, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney was

one of 10 Republicans to vote in favor of impeachment

(Chappell 2021). Congresswoman Cheney made the choice

to vote this way, against the wishes of Republican Party

leadership, despite being the third-ranking House Republi-

can at the time. We know now that this vote and her con-

tinued condemnation of the former president eventually cost

Rep. Cheney her leadership position and her seat in Con-

gress (Beavers and Montellaro 2022),butatthattimeher

defection from the Republican Party sent an important

signal. When Representative Cheney made the choice to

defect from her Party by voting to impeach the President, she

was exercising what I call legislative freedom. Similarly,

when the Trump administration-backed plan to repeal the

Affordable Care Act went to the Senate f‌loor on July 28,

2017, Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), John McCain (R-

Arizona), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) were the only

three Republicans who voted against the bill (Caldwell

2017). In doing so, these three Republican Senators exer-

cised legislative freedom by defecting from their Party in the

now historic vote.

When members of Congress (MCs) make choices

about their legislative behavior, there are many factors

constraining their choices, and perhaps the most powerful

of these factors is their political party. MCs exercise

legislative freedom when they defect from their party in

some form of legislative behavior (i.e., one-minute

speeches, bill sponsorship, committee markup and vot-

ing, legislative debate, roll-call voting, etc.). How MCs

vote on a piece of legislation is, for many reasons, one of

the more high-prof‌ile forms of legislative behavior.

Members of the public can easily look up how MCs voted

on a bill. Even when voters do not take the time to look up

MC votes on bills, it is typical voters will hear about MC

votes through the media. Then, MC’s votes are often

subject to public scrutiny when they run for re-election or

for higher off‌ice. As stated by Swers, “members of

1

Department of History and Political Science, Centenary College of

Louisiana, Shreveport, LA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Amy Friesenhahn, Department of History and Political Science,

Centenary College of Louisiana, 2911 Centenary Blvd, Shreveport, LA

71104, USA.

Email: afriesenhahn@centenary.edu

Congress recognize that a single vote potentially has the

power to make or break their careers,”(2002, 113). We are

witnessing this in real-time as evidenced by the Repub-

lican Party’s purging of Representative Cheney. In this

paper, I focus more specif‌ically on examining when

women MCs exercise legislative freedom through roll-call

votes. While all MCs operate under many constraints

when seeking re-election, gender and politics scholars

have noted how women face even more obstacles (Dolan,

Deckman, and Swers 2018;Huddy and Terkildsen 1993;

Kahn 1994;Sanbonmatsu and Dolan 2009), are disad-

vantaged by outside group ad campaigns (English et al.

2022), and must be more qualif‌ied than their counterparts

who are men when running for off‌ice and for re-election

(Barnes et al. 2017;Fulton 2012,2014;Pearson and

McGhee 2013). Starting from this observation that

women in Congress face more challenges, one could

expect that it may be even harder for women MCs to

exercise legislative freedom than it is for their colleagues

who are men. This leads to my investigation of whether

women MCs who represent “women-friendly districts”

(Palmer and Simon 2006) are more able—and so, more

likely—to exercise legislative freedom by defecting from

their Party in roll-call votes than women MCs repre-

senting districts that are less women-friendly or men MCs

who represent similar districts.

1

This project contributes to gender politics and repre-

sentation literature by better linking the legislative be-

havior of MCs to the characteristics of their district.

Beyond simply asking whether and how women in

Congress represent women’s interests, I argue that the

demographic characteristics of districts in which women

are more likely to run and win public off‌ice also put

women representing those districts in Congress in better

positions to substantively represent women’s interests

through public policy. This paper tests whether and how

the district-level factors involved in the women-friendly

district index might allow women MCs to vote on leg-

islation that matches their preferences even if those

preferences on certain issues do not align with their party’s

agenda. The research questions to be tested in this paper

are the following. Do women-friendly districts give

women MCs, once in off‌ice, more legislative freedom

than other, less women-friendly districts? Are women

MCs, particularly Republicans, more able and more likely

to defect from the Republican party in roll-call votes on

women’s issues?

Gender and Representation

Women MCs claim they feel an obligation to represent the

interests of women as a particular constituency group

(Carroll 1994;Carroll 2002;Dittmar, Sanbonmatsu, and

Carroll 2018;Dovi 2002;2007). This obligation that

women MCs feel to their women constituents can be

viewed as a gender-conscious homestyle. Existing liter-

ature also demonstrates there are greater differences in

public policy preferences within the Republican party

than there are within the Democratic party (Poggione

2004). Seminal research shows moderate Republican

women MCs are more likely to defect from party line than

Republican men when given the opportunity (Swers

2002). This paper provides an additional test of these

f‌indings by incorporating the district-level demographic

factors specif‌ically captured by the women-friendly dis-

trict index.

Women make up over half of the world’s population,

and that of the United States, and now hold a record high

number of seats in the U.S. Congress at only 28-percent

(Center for American Women and Politics [CAWP ]

2023). Therefore, women around the country are not

descriptively represented by our legislators. Mansbridge

def‌ines descriptive representatives as “individuals who in

their own backgrounds mirror some of the more frequent

experiences and outward manifestations of belonging to

the group”(1999, 628). Pitkin summarizes the argument

made by advocates of descriptive representation stating,

“true representation…requires that the legislature be so

selected that its composition corresponds accurately to

that of the whole of the nation; only then is it really a

representative body”(1967, 60). Additionally, Swain

notes “descriptive representation has its own value”

(1995, 217). So, for women around the country to be

descriptively represented by the legislative branch, ad-

vocates for descriptive representation argue there should

be more women in Congress, and therefore, more MCs

with the shared identity and lived experiences as women.

However, “the primary function of representative de-

mocracy is to represent the substantive interests of the

represented”(Mansbridge 1999, 630). The Constitution

was designed with the intention that the members of our

legislative branch would substantively represent the in-

terests of their constituents through public policy. I argue

there is an important link between descriptive, identity-

based, representation and substantive, action- or policy-

based, representation of constituents. Increasing women’s

presence in Congress should increase both descriptive and

substantive representation for women (Thomas 1994;

Carroll 1994;Carroll 2002;Swers 1998;Dovi 2007).

When MCs prioritize women’s issues, they devote limited

time and resources to policy areas related to women and/or

women’s interests. Swers (2002) def‌ined women’s issues

broadly as those aimed to achieve equality for women,

those related to women’s special needs (women’s health,

childcare, etc.), and those addressing women’s traditional

roles as caregivers. In Swers’(2002) seminal work on the

legislative behavior of women in Congress, she catego-

rized feminist, anti-feminist, and social welfare bills all as

60 Political Research Quarterly 77(1)