Ideology and Polarization Among Women State Legislators

• Author: Jennifer Hayes Clark,Tracy Osborn,Rebecca J. Kreitzer,Emily U. Schilling
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12243
• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Date: 01 November 2019

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 44, 4, November 2019

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12243

TR ACY OSBO RN

University of Iowa

REBECCA J. KREITZER

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

EMILY U. SCHILLING

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

JENNIFER HAYES CLARK

University of Houston

Ideology and Polarization Among

Women State Legislators

In early work on women in Congress, scholars consistently identified a ten-

dency among women legislators to be more liberal roll-call voters than male co-

partisans. Recent changes in Congress point to the polarization of women, where

Democratic women remain more liberal than Democratic men but Republican

women are no different from, or more conservative than, Republican men. We use

newly available state legislative roll-call data to determine whether women state

legislators are more liberal or polarized than male copartisans. We find that while

Democratic women state legislators remain consistently more liberal than male

copartisans in most state chambers, Republican women legislators are growing

more conservative. Thus, women state legislators are increasingly polarized in

most U.S. states. Legislator replacement and increasing polarization among state

legislators in office contribute to this effect. We argue that polarization among

women legislators has implications for the representation of women in the states.

Over 30years ago, Welch (1985) found that women legis-

lators in the House of Representatives from 1972 to 1980 were

more liberal roll-call voters than men in their respective parties.

Because a typically feminist position on many women’s issues

policies coincides with the liberal end of the political spectrum,

this tendency among women legislators to be more liberal vot-

ers served as evidence that women of both parties might be more

likely to substantively represent women’s issues in Congress than

men. Though one could certainly hesitate to make a strong con-

nection between broad liberal-conservative voting patterns and

support for women’s issues in a number of ways, additional stud-

ies of women’s legislative voting patterns revealed a tendency for

© 2019 Washington University in St. L ouis

648Tracy Osborn et al.

women in Congress to be more liberal or support women’s is-

sues across par ty lines. Studies of women legislators’ candidacies

also revealed voters’ tendencies to evaluate women candidates of

both parties a s more liberal (e.g., McDermott 1997; Sanbonmatsu

and Dolan 2009). These studies reinforce the idea that a trend of

liberalism in women’s voting is both an expectation for women

legislators and a blunt but useful indicator of women legislators’

tendency to represent women.

Recent work on women in the House of Representatives,

however, argues that Republican and Democratic women are

increasingly polarized. Democratic women remain more liberal

ideologues than Democratic men, yet Republican women ap-

pear indistinguishable from, or even more conservative than,

Republican men (Frederick 2009). A pattern of increased con-

servatism in Republican women matches observations by other

researchers of women and politics that some Republican women

are becoming increasingly ideologically conservative (Deckman

2016; Schreiber 2008; Swers 2013; Thomsen 2015). Thus, changes

in voting patterns may signal changes in how women in different

parties will represent women’s issues.

Primar ily, trends in whether Republican women have grown

more conservative focus on the U.S. Congress. We know less

about whether Republican women are growing more conserva-

tive generally, and thus whether women legislators are polariz-

ing, among women in the U.S. state legislatures. In this article,

we consider whether Democratic and Republican women in the

U.S. state legislatures are more liberal than, more conservative

than, or indistinguishable from their male partisan colleagues. If

women legislators are more liberal or conservative voters, we also

examine whether these patterns stem from changes in legislators’

ideologies, the types of districts women represent, and/or the ef-

fects that parties have on the legislative roll-call voting process in

a chamber. To do so, we capitali ze on the coterminous trend of i m-

proved state legislative voting data with t wo new data sets of state

roll-call votes: Shor and McCarty’s (2011) American Legislatures

Project data and Clark’s (2015) roll-call data in the states.

We find that while Democratic women legislators remain

consistently more liberal than their male counterparts in many

(but not all) state legislative chambers, Republican women leg-

islators are changing—from indistinguishable from their male

colleagues to more conservative than their male colleagues in re-

cent sessions. Thus , we show that women legislators in m any state

649Women State Legislators

chambers are polarizing, similar to trends in the U.S. House of

Representatives. We argue that these ideological changes among

women state legislators have potential i mplications for our under-

standing of whether and how women legislators represent women

as a constituency.

Women, Roll-Call Voting, and Representation

Scholars have long used the extent to which women legis-

lators are more liberal voters as a proxy to assess women’s sup-

port for feminist issue positions. For example, Welch (1985) finds

women members of the U.S. House from 1972 to 1980 were more

liberal roll-call voters compared to the men in their parties. She

attributes much of this l iberalism to women legislators’ represen-

tation of more liberal dist ricts; once she controls for district ideol-

ogy, some differences, such as those between northern male and

female Democrats, disappear. Similarly, Frankovic (1977) shows

that legislator sex has a significant, independent effect on voting

when one controls for party effects, though she also notes that

women tended to represent more liberal distr icts.

Gendered voting patterns exist in more recent Congresses

as well. Using a scale of votes based on Congressional Caucus

for Women’s Issues key votes, Dolan (1997) finds women of both

parties were more willing to support issues important to the leg-

islative caucus. Democratic women generally were more likely

than Republican women to support these issues. Dolan con-

cludes, however, that Republican women were much more likely

than Republican men to vote in support of the caucus position.

Similarly, using a subset of issues in the 101st, 102nd, and 103rd

Congresses, Norton (1999) argues that gender significantly pre-

dicts women’s positions on common interest-group scales of roll-

call votes. In an ana lysis using the same CQ conser vative coalition

scores as Welch (1985), Vega and Firestone (1995) uncover fewer

differences between partisan women and men than Welch did.

Nevertheless, they still find Republican women are more liberal

roll-call voters than Republican men. Finally, Swers (1998, 2002)

shows that gender has a significant, positive effect on women’s

votes for women’s issues bil ls in the 103rd Congress, even control-

ling for constituency and party.

Recent work on women in Congress questions this research

consensus on gendered voting, however. Frederick (2009) pos-

its that women legislators in the House of Representatives have