http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6648-4122
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The marginalisation of some groups in legislative bodies promotes the construction of subaltern public spaces, including caucuses. In this paper, we evaluate whether the substantive focus of women’s caucuses in state legislatures matters in shaping women’s collaboration with each other. We first present an evaluation of the types of women’s caucuses in U.S. state legislatures, drawing on qualitative examples and evidence from founding efforts. We then evaluate whether it matters if a caucus is focused on social cohesion among women, sets policy agendas, or is has ad hoc policy focus. We theorise that the focus of the caucus should not matter, as it is the existence of the subaltern space (versus the absence of the space) that confers trust and collaboration among members. Using all co-sponsorship behaviour between women legislators in every U.S. state legislature in 2015, we find little evidence of consistent patterns of a type of caucus mattering across institutional arrangements; instead, all caucuses increase collaborative patterns. Our findings provide evidence for the importance of institutional arrangements that build trust and cooperation in increasingly polarised and divided legislative bodies.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on Contributors
Mirya R. Holman, Political Science, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Anna Mitchell Mahoney, Newcomb College Institute, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID
Mirya R. Holman http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6648-4122
Notes
1 For specific examples in Argentina and Uruguay, see Barnes (Citation2014, Citation2016); in Australia, see Sawer and Turner (Citation2016); in Uganda and Uruguay see Johnson and Josefsson (Citation2016); in New Zealand, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, see Celis, Childs, and Curtain (Citation2016).
2 Notable exceptions include evaluations of Black caucuses by Clark (Citation2019) and King-Meadows and Schaller (Citation2007).
3 Two states (New Jersey and Alaska) did not hold legislative sessions in 2015. We used 2016 information for both these states.
4 While many of these variables are important in shaping the ability of women to collaborate and may relate to each other, they are not the principal focus of our analysis. Given that we are including them to evaluate the accuracy of theoretically important coefficients, their multicollinearity is “almost entirely harmless” (Voss, Citation2005).
5 A notable exception is Osborn et al. (Citation2002) which finds that in states with women’s caucuses, “women voted more moderately within their party, but did not form one distinct group in the legislature” (19).They first observed that women’s caucuses did not increase voting cohesion among women legislators until they ran the analysis excluding caucuses that did not have a policy agenda. By differentiating between types of women’s caucuses, they were better able to illustrate their impact.