Men Idle, Women Network: How Networks Help Female Legislators Succeed

• Author: Shawnna Mullenax,Stefan Wojcik
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12169
• Date: 01 November 2017

STEFAN WOJCIK

One Earth Future Foundation

SHAWNNA MULLENAX

University of Colorado, Boulder

Men Idle, Women Network: How

Networks Help Female

Legislators Succeed

Why do some lawmakers form denser professional networks than others? We

extend existing theories of gendered networks, arguing that legislators use networking

as a strategy to compensate for a challenging institutional environment. Using original

data from Brazil, we provide survey-based evidence that female representatives in the

Chamber of Deputies engage in higher rates of intragender networking and have more

profuse and diverse legislative networks than male deputies. We also provide suggestive

evidence that these profuse legislative relationships pay off for women in the form of

higher vote shares at election time.

The percentage of women in parliament worldwide has doubled in

the last two decades and continues to grow each year. The increased

inclusion of women in positions of power raises important questions

about whether gender differences in legislator behavior exist, and if so,

why. On one hand, scholars have argued that women are excluded from

old boys’ networks. On the other hand, recent work suggests that women

have more collaborative ties (i.e., cosponsors) than men and that a larger

proportion of their collaborators are women (Barnes 2016). Our study

makes theoretical and empirical contributions to this area of study. In the

f‌irst half of the article, we broaden and extend current context-based the-

ories of gender networks suggesting that women form network ties to

overcome the challenges of being institutionally disadvantaged in the

legislature (Barnes 2016; Bratton and Rouse 2011; Kanthak and Krause

2012). In the second half of the article, we use data from the national

elections held in October 2014 to test whether there is utility in the net-

work ties women tend to create. We examine whether there is a

relationship between the number of network ties a deputy possesses and

the share of votes he or she receives in an election.

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 42, 4, November 2017 579

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12169

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C2017 Washington University in St. Louis

We extend current theories of gender in legislatures by arguing

that for women to gain access to legislative resources and support, they

will have to foster working relationships with peers both within and

across established social boundaries. In short, women must form inclu-

sive networks not segregated along typical social cleavages (e.g.,

gender, age, and experience). Access to important resources largely

remains in the hands of male deputies, so we hypothesize that female

deputies will form larger and more inclusive networks in order to coun-

teract their marginalized status. We expand the focus from the number

of network ties held by women versus men (see Barnes 2016), to exam-

ine collaboration within and between women and men, conditioning on

various network structural and social features. Our evidence suggests

that sex-based challenges lead women not only to form dense intragen-

der network ties, but to form expansive networks that bridge differences

in gender, age, and legislative experience. Finally, we present evidence

suggesting that network ties pay off for legislators at the ballot box. We

f‌ind that well-connected deputies receive a larger share of electoral votes

than their less-connected colleagues. This evidence hints that networks

may be an important tool for helping legislators achieve their goal of

remaining in off‌ice. Overall, our f‌indings suggest that networking

may act as a strategy that allows women to compete with men in an

environment that often limits their ability to compete in other ways.

In addition to advancing understanding of legislator networking

behavior, we make methodological contributions in this study. First, we

present original survey data on political communication networks among

legislators in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. These data were col-

lected using a digital network survey application developed by one of

the authors exclusively for measuring network ties in legislative con-

texts. Second, we utilize a network-analytic methodology that allows us

to test for differences in networking behavior between men and women

while controlling for structural and other variables affecting tie forma-

tion. Much work on gender and networks—with a growing stream of

exceptions—still depends on models using independent and identically

distributed (iid) assumptions, which are inappropriate for many network

questions. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are a powerful

general inferential framework that were developed for network data to

understand the roles of multiple variables simultaneously.

The article will proceed as follows. We begin by drawing on exist-

ing literature to discuss how the gendered structure of legislatures

incentivizes women to behave differently from men. In short, the gen-

dered structure of the legislature is rooted in formal and informal rules

that disadvantage women (Barnes 2016; Bratton and Rouse 2011). Next,

580 Stefan Wojcik and Shawnna Mullenax

we present a theory extending current arguments for why women should

behave differently from their male counterparts in the legislature and

offer three hypotheses that we test using original survey data drawn from

the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Finally, we present suggestive evi-

dence that women form ties as a tool to compete with men by showing

that the number of linkages in a deputy’s network is predictive of the

proportion of votes she receives in subsequent legislative elections.

Gender and Political Networks in the Legislature

Networks are patterns of social links that form the infrastructure of

social communication and deliberation (Sokhey and Djupe 2011). Net-

works determine how and between whom democratic information is

exchanged (Carpenter, Esterling, and Lazer 2004), and they aid in mak-

ing government more effective (Putnam 1992). Types of network links

between parties and politicians include alliances, coalitions (Laver and

Shepsle 1996), resource exchanges (Katz and Mair 1995), debating/dis-

cussing ideas, sharing information (Koger, Masket, and Noel 2010),

providing legislative support (Bratton and Rouse 2011; Fowler 2006),

and coauthoring policy (Cho and Fowler 2010; Fowler 2006). We know

that networks are important tools for legislators, but legislative networks

remain understudied for a few reasons. Legislative networks are often

diff‌icult to measure, and gathering reliable data is both costly and time

consuming. Second, political science leans heavily on iid statistical

assumptions to make inferences and simply lacks emphasis on relational

dimensions of politics. The work that has been done on legislative net-

works rarely examines linkages made by women in legislatures (but see

Bratton and Rouse 2011). Consequently, the role of women in legislative

networks contains many unanswered questions.

Extant studies that refer to networks, though they do not use net-

work analysis per se to test their claims, are pessimistic about whether

networks aid women in advancement. In the context of the United States,

legislator connections tend to be segregated along gender lines, where

men interact with men and women interact with women, but there is little

cross-gender interaction (Sanbonmatsu 2006). Such gendered hierar-

chies may also exist in Argentine politics, where women have diff‌iculty

gaining access to elite networks, which tend to be dominated by men

(Franceschet and Piscopo 2013). Some suggest that because women do

not often associate with men, and men tend to hold leadership positions

in congress, the prospects for women’s advancement in politics looks

gloomy (Gehlen 1969; Moore and White 2000). Given these

581How Networks Help Female Legislators Succeed