A duration analysis of congressional widows’ careers

Abstract

The extensive congressional politics literature on House member retirement has yet to consider an important and unique subgroup of members – congressional widows. Using a semi-parametric Cox Model, this paper examines the duration of widows’ careers in the United States House of Representatives. Of particular concern are the relationships between years in office and age, education, region, prior political experience, committee positions, career ceilings, majority/minority status, and majority party size. We find that age, region, and majority party size are most relevant to understanding lengths of widows’ careers. In doing so, we contribute to the literature on political widows, gender in politics, as well as more general scholarship centered on congressional careers.

Keywords:

• U.S. Congress
• Congressional retirement
• Gender and politics
• Event duration models

Notes

1 Data is from the Center for American Women in Politics website. http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/levels_of_office/Congress-Current.php accessed 21.01.11.

2 Widows are defined here as women who immediately enter seats left vacant following their husbands’ deaths. As Kincaid (1978) points out, several other congresswomen are widows, but do not enter Congress to fill seats vacated by their deceased husbands. For example, Niki Tsongas (D-MA) currently represents the same district that her late husband Paul Tsongas did in the 1970s. These women are not analyzed in this paper.

3 Substantive representation involves women leaders’ responsiveness to the political interests of women (Pitkin, 1967).

4 Boland served from November 13, 1942 to January 3, 1943; Fulmer served from November 7, 1944 to January 3, 1945; and Gibbs served from October 1, 1940 to January 3, 1941.

5 One can work around this potentially problematic assumption by including spline functions or similar duration dependent parameters in the cross-sectional time-series logit model (Jones & Branton, 2005).

6 Following Box-Steffensmeier and Jones (2004), we employ a linear term for age in the duration model. Data for party margins comes from http://www.house.gov/.

7 Data for widows’ background and House positions come from http://womenincongress.house.gov/.

8 None of the independent variables were correlated over .60, including the career ceilings and committee chair variables (correlated at .45).

9 Using a variety of diagnostic tests, we do not violate the Cox proportional hazard assumption. As a robustness test, we also estimated a model allowing for shared frailty by region (Box-Steffensmeier & Jones, 2004). We did not find any discernible difference in our results.

10 This value is attained by calculating the hazard rate for the South coefficient: h(t) = exp(1.13 × 1) = 3.5 (Jones & Branton, 2005).

11 This value is attained by calculating the hazard rate for the absolute majority party margin coefficient and turning it into a percentage: h(t) = [exp(.01)−1] × 100.

12 This is compared to the husbands they replaced (Jalalzai & Hankinson, 2008). These are more appropriate comparisons to make than between non widow House members since many personal factors including region and district can be held constant. Also, if we included non widows, we would not be able to explain what variables influence the length of widows’ careers in particular.