Are Women Less Effective at Passing Bills? Exploring the Direct and
Indirect Effects of Gender.

Are women as effective as men in gaining approval for their legislation? What are the institutional pathways through which gender affects bill approval? I argue that gender does not have a direct effect on a legislator’s ability to gain legislative approval. Instead, women are marginalized in their access to influential institutional positions which may have consequences for bill approval.  I examine these relationships between gender, institutional positions, and bill approval using non-parametric mediation analysis and random forests on bill data from the Argentine Chamber of Deputies (1983 to 2007). While I do not find a direct effect of gender on bill approval, I do find that gender has an indirect effect by disadvantaging women in their access to certain institutional positions which affect bill approval. This finding has important implications for gender research because it exposes the need for greater emphasis on the relationship between gender and women’s access to influential institutional positions.

Poster

Examining the Dimensions of Representation: How Does Constituency Service Affect Bill Introduction?

with Agustín Vallejo

How does engagement with constituents affect the content of the bills that legislators introduce? Following the existing literature, this paper adopts a multidimensional approach to the study of representation by examining how engagement in one dimension of representation affects engagement in other dimensions. Specifically, we focus on district-level dimensions of representation: constituency service and allocative policymaking. We argue that legislators who engage in greater levels of constituency service can use the informational resources they obtain from engaging with members of their electoral district to subsidize policymaking that allocates certain benefits to their district. We find that legislators who spend more resources on travel back to their home districts to conduct constituency service are also more likely to introduce bills that target their electoral districts.

Women’s Representation in Latin America: A Review Essay.

with Leslie Schwindt-Bayer

This essay reviews five contemporary works on gender representation in Latin America. In the context of the increasing number of women entering arenas of representation in Latin America, this essay reviews the new questions that these works bring to light regarding women's representation in Latin America: What explains the increase in women's representation? What affects have these trends had on policymaking in Latin America? The literature reviewed provides new insights into our understanding of women's representation in Latin America by moving beyond the current literature to answer these questions. This essay demonstrates how these five works contribute to our understanding of women's representation in Latin America and move this field of research forward.