Those who study the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women in governmental institutions are often frustrated with evidence that the increased presence of women legislators leads only to incremental change in transforming masculinist governing institutions and policy processes. Empirical analyses on the impact of women legislators often report that women do pay more attention to women's issues. The conclusion that follows from the data analysis is that increased presence will surely lead to increased representation for women. In this book, Debra Dodson carefully explains that descriptive and substantive representation of women has a probabilistic rather than a deterministic relationship and that we need to avoid essentialist assumptions that gender differences will naturally equal nonincremental substantive representation. Dodson concludes by pointing to strategies that ultimately may enhance the representation of women. The inclusion of strategies to effect change makes this book one of the rare empirical studies that incorporates both the normative and empirical to make conclusions and recommendations.

Using extensive in-depth interviews of women members of Congress, staff members, and lobbyists, as well as the committee transcripts, the congressional record, and other archival data from the Democratic-controlled 103d Congress and the Republican-controlled 104th Congress, Dodson argues that there are a number of factors beyond descriptive representation that shape the quality of substantive representation for women. As she explores the controversies that lurk, often ignored, beneath the surface of the studies on representation of women, she discovers that women do make a difference, but that a confluence of individual, ideological institutional and cultural factors temper female congressmembers' interest and ability to regender governmental institutions to include both the masculine and the “feminale” approach to policymaking and political processes.

This book is a well-written and thoroughly researched extension of three-decades of research on the question “Do women make a difference?” Rather than simply study the participation rates and behavior of individual congresswomen, Dodson's analysis utilizes recent work on gendered governmental institutions, including Duerst-Lahti and Kelly's Gender Power, Leadership, and Governance and Kazenstein's Faithful and Fearless, to develop her argument about impact. Using new institutionalism, feminist theory, and policy analysis, Dodson writes a complex book that attempts to bridge gaps in understanding among feminists, policymakers, and legislative scholars. The use of multiple theoretical layers may be challenging to follow at times, but it allows an understanding of the legitimate diversities among women to surface. If we are to understand how women represent the needs and interests of women differently, and how this diversity can contribute to a better understanding among those who theorize about and study women, then empirical feminist scholars, feminist theorists, and practitioners must together tackle questions about the probabilistic “contested legitimacy” of substantive representation.

Three sections divide the analysis presented in the book. The first provides a comprehensive review of the research on gender differences and makes clear the need for a more fully developed model to study the factors that influence the public representation of women. Here, Dodson introduces the familiar Garbage Can Model, designed by Cohen, March and Olson in their seminal article “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” to help structure her analysis of representation in a fluid political environment with multiple participants, conditions, and policy solutions. She claims that this model “offers the opportunity to describe the policymaking process in ways that can acknowledge that breadth and depth of diversity among participants varies over time and across settings, with substantial effects on impact” (p. 35). Although the Garbage Can Model promises to organize the body of the analysis to follow, its introduction here does little to enhance the book except perhaps to warn us that the case study analysis will be complex and at times necessarily messy because there are myriad factors to discuss when studying influences on substantive representation.

In the second section, Dodson deconstructs the relationships among women members of Congress and between congresswomen and their constituencies. Here, she presents the method she uses to uncover what women mean when they say they represent women. The description of the interviews, referenced in the appendix, and the content analysis of hundreds of interviews conducted in three waves during the 103d and 104th Congress show that Dodson has collected an invaluable treasure of data that will be hard to replicate. Not only does she collect data across two ideologically different Congresses, but she also collects data on three important policy types. Her initial exploration of the connections between elite and mass women shows that all women generally express a commitment to women, but that scholars must look “beyond the words like women and women's issues to explore the different meanings women give to these words, for different words may result in very different actions” (p. 82). She concludes that the policy solutions different women seek are conditioned not by their words but by their ideological perspectives and the institutional environment in which they work.

The entire relationship among the individual actors, ideological perspectives, institutional environment, and cultural factors are explored in the final section. Three case studies of policies reported to be of interest to women legislators in varying degrees are presented in six final chapters: reproductive policy, women's health policy, and health-care reform. These case studies, together, show that the increased presence of women in the 103d Congress gave women members new energy and issues to work on together, but that the political realities of the 104th Congress uncovered significant ideological and cultural differences between women and their proposed policy solutions. Although the diversity of ideological approaches may have increased the diversity of policy responses available for all women, the institutional environment tempered the extent to which we see any notable substantive change made in masculinist assumptions and practices.

Although the strength of the book lies in its set of case studies, the concluding chapter provides a good set of strategies to encourage substantive representation of women and the regendering of political institutions. If women want to make the connection between descriptive and substantive representation deterministic instead of probabilistic, Dodson recommends that the voices from women on the outside need to be stronger, that men who support women as a political group should be elected, that the recruitment process of gender-conscious women candidates should be improved, and that the contested meaning of substantive representation should always be considered.