Emerging from early literature that explored whether and to what degree women made a difference in legislative attention to and action on women's issues, a wealth of research has said, “Yes, but…” Early research could focus on only a small number of women in state legislatures and, later, in the U.S. Congress and investigate their backgrounds, issue interests, voting records, priorities, legislative styles, and political ambitions as a group. Recent increases in female officeholders at all levels have produced opportunities to ask crucial questions about how differences among women and the nature of the political environment affect women's capacity to influence the policy process. As a result, a much more nuanced understanding of how and when women can make a difference has taken shape.
In How Women Represent Women: Political Parties, Gender, and Representation in the State Legislatures, Tracy Osborn's central thesis is that party identity and institutional partisan structure powerfully shape how women represent women. They do so by influencing the types of solutions offered by individual legislators to solve women's policy problems and by using majority control of chambers to advance partisan policy alternatives.
Osborn comes to her conclusions through careful analysis of three types of data at three stages of representation: candidate position taking, bill introductions, and roll call votes. The National Political Awareness Test from Project Vote Smart, which measured state legislative candidates' issue positions on women's issues in 42 states in the 1998 election, is the first source of data. The second and third sources are original data collections of every bill introduced in the 1999–2000 legislative sessions in 10 lower chambers that varied in party control, and roll call votes taken in 95 legislative chambers in the 1999–2000 sessions, with a subsample of votes on women's issues in 23 chambers.
Osborn's findings are consistent with a long line of research demonstrating that female state legislators represent women's interests more extensively than do male legislators. But her work digs deeper to show that women represent women with party in mind. First, although significant gender differences in policy preferences exist for women of both parties, partisan identity divides candidates' issue preferences before they enter legislatures (although some of the survey respondents were incumbents). In many cases, partisan women are closer to men in their own parties than to women of the other party. Second, with regard to bill introductions, although female legislators introduce significantly more bills pertaining to women's issues than do men, partisan female state legislators tend to concentrate on different types of women's issues. Democrats focus on women's health and equality issues, and Republicans emphasize child care and morality policies. Women in the two parties also advance different solutions to women's policy problems. This is important because the party in power in a legislative chamber controls which bills have the chance to be enacted. Finally, on roll call votes, rarely do partisan women step outside their party identity to support women's issues positions with women of the other party. This is particularly evident in closely held party majorities. In total, Osborn concludes that, as scholars, we must not conceptualize the role of political parties and the role of gender in women's representation as separate from gender effects. When women represent women, they do so as partisans.
How Women Represent Women is a substantial and compelling contribution to the literature on female office holders. It features a careful unpacking and analysis of the way women's policy influence has been measured in contemporary research studies; it relies on multiple data sources to represent different stages of political careers and the legislative process; and it provides critical insights into the effects of party ideologies and institutional influence on female legislators' policy foci and choice of solutions. In it, Osborn makes clear that not “just any woman will do” (Dovi Reference Dovi2002).
Osborn's book also features a thoughtful assessment of what the study did not address, which serves as a clear blueprint for future research. For example, new scholarship could investigate intraparty ideological heterogeneity as an explanation for policy alternatives chosen by partisan women. And several aspects of the legislative process, such as committee activity and preventing bills from reaching the floor, may be examined in the next phase of inquiries into party effects on women's policy influence. Finally, collection of longitudinal data would supplement the cross-sectional data analyzed in How Women Represent Women.
One aspect of How Women Represent Women may give readers pause: early in the book, Osborn dedicates considerable attention to the conflicting literature on critical mass. Yet, the ensuing research findings do not offer very much that could be considered a definitive answer on this topic. Analytical pursuits of this knotty and contested concept are only likely to yield convincing insights if they emerge from research designs that address and reconcile the very different foci of current studies on places, time periods, operationalizations of women's issues, aspects of the legislative process, and mediating variables. That is not the case here.
This quibble aside, Tracy Osborn's new book extends our understanding of how female officeholders bring women's interests to the legislative table and how party ideology and institutional control and strength affect their efforts to craft concomitant public policy. This book takes its place in a long line of political science research that suggests that, without women, these issues would not be accorded much space in governing bodies. And it does so acknowledging the complexity of the inquiry. Students of American politics, state legislative politics, and women and politics will want to make the book a staple of their intellectual diets.
