A perennial question overarching women's participation in public office asks, Do women make a difference? In other words, is government qualitatively different when women represent citizens in the assembly? Working from the perspective of gendered vulnerability, Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt marshal an impressive body of empirical analysis to answer, convincingly, that women provide a different, and better, type of political representation than their male counterparts. This sophisticated work advances our understanding of the gendered parameters of democratic public service and political representation. It contributes clearly, and perhaps controversially, to the debate over whether female and male legislators behave differently.
The foundation for this analysis centers on the concept of gendered vulnerability, which is set out neatly in chapter 2. The authors exemplify the discriminatory conditions affecting female politicians by relating the disturbing case of Coya Knutson. Knutson was a member of the US House of Representatives whose bid for a third term in 1958 was lost when local leaders of her own party colluded with her abusive spouse to engineer her defeat (19–20). Lazarus and Steigerwalt underscore the numerous parallels between this case and the life of the modern female politician, emphasizing that female officeholders are “consistently subject to challenge by political opponents and thus need to continually prove their worth both to colleagues and to their constituents” (14). Less secure in office, and more easily displaced, female politicians perceive themselves to be more vulnerable than their male competitors.
The objective difficulties and subjective biases marking the condition of gendered vulnerability also work to incentivize an alternate approach to public office. Building on earlier insights, the authors hypothesize that female politicians respond to gendered vulnerability by working more diligently in areas that most effectively offset electoral weakness. They reason that because “female legislators must be concerned with overcoming their gendered vulnerability and proving their worth to the voters … they will simply do more advertising, position-taking and credit-claiming activities, and be more attuned than their male colleagues” (59). Therefore, female politicians ought to devote more time, energy, attention and resources specifically and deliberately to activities designed to secure their hold on office, and they should reap the benefits of such behaviour, such as enjoying high re-election margins (59).
After summarizing their argument and core hypotheses, Lazarus and Steigerwalt spend the next several chapters studying female Congress members across several key areas of political activity, in order to test the propositions. They examine the legislative behaviour of members in the US House and the Senate, mainly from the 103rd to 110th Congresses, spanning the years 1993 to 2005 (15). The empirical analysis relies on carefully collecting data and analyzing key indicators (such as calculating the amount of money spent on yearly travel to the constituency), along with testing for the presence of correlation among the main variables, and multivariate analysis. As well, the data collection is informed further via twenty in-depth interviews with current and former members of Congress and congressional staff.
In chapter 3, the focus is on gender and constituency services. The authors hypothesize that because women are vulnerable in ways men are not, female members overall devote more time and resources to constituent services than male politicians do (63). In this chapter, as with the subsequent ones, there is diligent attention paid to setting out the extant state of knowledge concerning gender and legislative activity and then clearly establishing how this study aims to advance understanding. Lazarus and Steigerwalt note that earlier studies find providing constituency services helps Congress members win re-election and that female politicians perceive themselves to be more available to constituents than their male counterparts. The authors’ specific goal is to directly assess this gendered effect by examining female legislators’ actual behaviour, rather than their self-reported interactions (71). In a careful analysis of several constituency activities—for example, the examination of the volume of mass mailing and the amount of money spent annually on district travel—the authors find female House members spend about 20 per cent more money sending mail to constituents than their male counterparts do (82). The analysis of the Senate suggests that women senators hire more staff to work in the state than their male colleagues do (83).
Attention shifts in chapter 4 to exploring the relationship between gender and pork-barrel spending. Hypothesising that female members deliver more federal projects and dollars to their constituents, Lazarus and Steigerwalt examine two types of pork-barrel spending: congressional earmarks included in the 2008 fiscal year appropriations budget and money flowing from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (87–88). The analysis builds on earlier work by Sarah Anzia and Christopher Berry (2011) in the American Journal of Political Science that found districts with female representatives receive more pork-barrel spending than districts with male representatives do. Lazarus and Steigerwalt report that there are signs of a gender gap in both chambers: female pork-barrel spending outstrips male spending in the House in both of the resource outlays examined here, while in the Senate the gendered difference is present only in relationship to earmarks (109).
Chapter 5 examines whether gendered vulnerability induces female Congress members to sponsor qualitatively different types of bills than male Congress members do, mainly by introducing “messaging” bills that are designed to showcase legislators’ efforts in working on particular issues of interest to their constituents. They find the expected relationship among women in the House of Representatives but not in the Senate (134–35). The focus in chapter 6 is on gender and policy responsiveness: examining how well members represent their constituents in terms of their committee work, the bills they introduce and their roll-call votes. The authors report finding strong support for the proposition that women act as better substantive representatives for all their constituents (171).
The authors conclude that their theory of gendered vulnerability successfully explains differences between male and female behaviour across four different areas of legislative activity: constituency service, distributive benefits, legislative activity and policy representation. Lazarus and Steigerwalt note several fertile arenas in which to continue to explore their theory, including testing its effects in places other than the US Congress (185). The analysis is cogent and meticulously undertaken, and the authors are refreshingly honest in discussing its limitations. This work certainly will benefit scholars aiming to understand the behaviour of modern legislators, the dynamics of legislatures and how women make their way in politics.
