Religious Adherence, Women-Friendliness, and Representation in American State Legislatures

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas L. Pyeatt ◽  
Alixandra B. Yanus
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
National Studies ◽  
State Legislative ◽  
Positive Effect ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Cross National ◽  
Evangelical Protestant

AbstractNational and cross-national studies demonstrate that the probability of women candidates' emergence and success is lower in more religious areas. One recent study of the U.S. House of Representatives even suggests that the effect of religiosity may be so powerful as to render insignificant other contextual factors, including a district's baseline women-friendliness. We argue that this finding is an institutional artifact; in less competitive contests with more internally similar constituencies, both religion and other contextual factors should affect women candidates' emergence and victory. We test this proposition using state legislative data and find that while women are less likely to run and win in more religious areas, district women-friendliness has an independent, positive effect on women's candidacies. These effects are particularly noteworthy in districts with large evangelical Protestant populations and affect Republican and Democratic women similarly.

Presidential Coattails and Midterm Losses in State Legislative Elections

1986 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
The State ◽  
Legislative Elections ◽  
Aggregate State ◽  
Midterm Elections ◽  
State Legislative Elections ◽  
State Legislative ◽  
The U.S

The president's party consistently loses partisan control of state legislatures in midterm elections, a pattern similar to the loss of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in midterms. This study examines presidential coattails as a possible explanation of these losses. Aggregate state legislative election outcomes between 1944 and 1984 in 41 states are examined. The analysis indicates that the president's party gains seats in presidential elections in proportion to the presidential vote in a state, and subsequently loses seats in midterm elections also in proportion to the prior presidential vote in the state. The presidential coattail and the midterm repercussion effects are evident even when gubernatorial coattail effects are introduced, but are fairly modest in states lacking competitive parties.

scholarly journals Term Limits and the Increased Election of Women: Evidence From State Legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 275-287
Author(s):  
Stanley M. Caress
Keyword(s):  
Growth Rate ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Initial Period ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
Term Limits ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Female Candidates ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The U.S

This study seeks to determine if term limits increase the likelihood of women being elected to legislative seats. Using a simple comparison of growth rates, we found that, during the initial period of term limit implementation (1991 to 2009), the increase of females elected to state legislatures with term limits was approximately the same as to those without term limits. Additionally, a comparison of the growth rate of females elected to the non-term-limited United States House of Representatives with those of the state legislatures during this same time period shows that the U.S. House actually had a greater increase than state legislatures both with and without term limits. Moreover, in California, which has a full-time, professional state legislature with electoral dynamics similar to the U.S. House, the proportion of women elected to the state’s non-term limited U.S. House delegation from 1990 to 2009 exceeded the proportion of women elected to its term-limited state legislature. These comparisons all suggest that term limits do not facilitate the election of female candidates to legislative seats.

The Inexact Science of Congressional Redistricting

1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (03) ◽  
pp. 431-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles S. Bullock
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Justice Department ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Congressional Representation ◽  
The U.S

Incumbent politicians are understandably nervous when electoral rules are altered. In the case of the U.S. House of Representatives, members are well aware that a change in decade is accompanied by the near certainty that their own district lines will be redrawn. These incumbents know that changes resulting from the reallocation of congressional seats among states and the shift of population within states could have a shattering effect on their careers: their districts could be eliminated; they could be thrown into a district with another House incumbent; their district lines could be radically redrawn, destroying their traditional bases of support.Incumbents' unease is transformed into serious worry by one additional fact:de jurecontrol of redistricting is out of their hands. State legislatures and governors, the Justice Department (for those states falling under the Voting Rights Act) and ultimately the courts determine the fate of incumbents.Of course, the ostensible purpose of congressional redistricting in accordance with the decennial census is to ensure that congressional representation reflects the changes in the geographical distribution of the nation's population and thus to ensure that the members of the House from each state represent approximately the same number of citizens. Putting that principle into practice creates opportunities for the parties to increase their strength in the House but it also causes tremendous uncertainty among incumbents.Looking at political science research on the effects of redistricting on the fortunes of incumbents, one might wonder why they worry. In 1972 I reported findings of my study on incumbents who lost their elections after redistricting.

Women's and Men's Campaigns for The U.S. House of Representatives, 1972-1982 A Finance Gap?

1985 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara C. Burrell
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Fund Raising ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Political Action Committees ◽  
Financial Problem ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
Disadvantaged Women ◽  
Campaign Financing ◽  
The U.S

The lack of access to equal financial resources with male candidates has been viewed as a major contributing factor in women's inability to gain public office. Analysis of the campaign finance records for election to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1972 to 1982 shows that although on the average women nominees have never raised or spent as much as men, the size of their disparity is curvilinear over these years, and the correlation between gender and campaign financing is weak. Within candidate status groups (incumbents, challengers, and open races) and within the parties female nominees have not been consistently disadvantaged. Women candidates of both parties even have outdistanced their male counterparts on occasion. Data from the 1980 and 1982 elections also indicate that the structure of male and female fund raising is similar in their support from large contributors, political action committees, and the parties. Further, for women challengers, expenditures have a larger impact on votes than for male challengers. The financial problem for women candidates would appear not to lie at the general election stage of the process. Earlier stages, however, may account for women's relative absence from the elected political elite.

scholarly journals Do Women Vote for Women Candidates? Attitudes toward Descriptive Representation and Voting Behavior in the 2010 British Election

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (02) ◽  
pp. 209-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosie Campbell ◽  
Oliver Heath
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
Descriptive Representation ◽  
Social Characteristic ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The U.S

A growing body of work on candidate traits shows that people with a given social characteristic tend to prefer candidates or leaders who share that characteristic (Campbell and Cowley 2014; Cutler 2002). However, the existing evidence for whether women vote for women is mixed. For example, Kathleen Dolan found that candidate sex was a driver of voting behavior for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1992, but not in 1994 or 1996 (Dolan 1998, 2001, 2004). Eric Smith and Richard Fox used pooled U.S. data from 1988 to 1992 and found that well-educated women were more inclined to support women candidates in House but not Senate races (Smith and Fox 2001), and others have found that women are more likely to vote for women candidates only when they are perceived as being pro-feminist (Plutzer and Zipp 1996). By contrast Fulton (2014) found that women are not more likely to vote for women candidates in the United States, but that male Independents are somewhat less likely to vote for them. Others have found little evidence whatsoever of an association between candidate gender and vote choice (McElroy and Marsh 2010).

The Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures

2011 ◽  
Vol 105 (3) ◽  
pp. 530-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
BORIS SHOR ◽  
NOLAN McCARTY
Keyword(s):  
Ideal Point ◽  
Spatial Models ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Legislative Politics ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Substantial Progress ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Spatial Locations ◽  
State Legislative ◽  
The U.S

The development and elaboration of the spatial theory of voting has contributed greatly to the study of legislative decision making and elections. Statistical models that estimate the spatial locations of individual decision-makers have made a key contribution to this success. Spatial models have been estimated for the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court, U.S. presidents, a large number of non-U.S. legislatures, and supranational organizations. Yet one potentially fruitful laboratory for testing spatial theories, the individual U.S. states, has remained relatively unexploited, for two reasons. First, state legislative roll call data have not yet been systematically collected for all states over time. Second, because ideal point models are based on latent scales, comparisons of ideal points across states or even between chambers within a state are difficult. This article reports substantial progress on both fronts. First, we have obtained the roll call voting data for all state legislatures from the mid-1990s onward. Second, we exploit a recurring survey of state legislative candidates to allow comparisons across time, chambers, and states as well as with the U.S. Congress. The resulting mapping of America's state legislatures has great potential to address numerous questions not only about state politics and policymaking, but also about legislative politics in general.

scholarly journals Shapes Determine Elections

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika L. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
School Board ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Unfair Advantage ◽  
State Legislative ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Do So

When we elect representatives to the U.S. House of Representatives (or to state legislative bodies, or even the school board), we do so by dividing people into districts, and having each district elect one representative. The districts we draw as shapes on maps can affect the outcome of the elections. As a result, the process of creating or changing districts and the shapes we draw to create them are important. After every census, each state must construct a new district map. When they do that unfairly, it can give an unfair advantage to one of the political parties. This is called gerrymandering. By looking at the shapes of districts and examining their compactness, we can start to detect fair and unfair district maps.

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