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This research examines whether states with higher female representation in the legislature will be innovators in women's health policy. The issue of health policy was chosen due to increasing state legislative activity in health care, especially in response to citizen dissatisfaction with HMOs and PPOs. We use nine health policies to create an index of women's health mandates for the fifty states and Ordinary Least Squares Regression to test a number of explanations for policy adoptions. Previous research suggests women state legislators play an important role in placing policy issues of concern to women on the political agenda. Contrary to the literature and our expectations, female representation and leadership in state legislatures, the presence of a women's caucus, women chairs of health care committees, and the pace at which women have been elected to state legislatures over the past four decades were not related to policy adoptions. Similarly, the growth and size of the managed care industr...

What, if anything, can feminism contribute to political inquiry? Indeed, if political science qua science is conceived of as a search for universals, an investigation of objective reality, then feminism by its very nature seems contrary to the project of our discipline. Is not feminism, after all, limited to the particular and the subjective? The "woman question" may indeed be relevant to individuals and the circumstances of their lives, but it is not the stuff of which "real" political science is made. The works reviewed in this essay suggest the contrary. As representatives of the fields of public policy, political history, and theory, each in its own way suggests the value of feminism and feminist-directed inquiry for our discipline.

Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice is a response to the developmental theory of Lawrence Kohlberg and his associates. Gilligan is primarily concerned with correcting what she sees as a gender bias in Kohlberg's methodology and interpretation of women's moral reasoning. Women, she argues, are not inferior to men as moral reasoners. They are different, and they operate according to different standards and goals. This paper considers the implications of Gilligan's ideas for theories of women's political participation and critiques recent publications of three scholars (Virginia Sapiro, Ethel Klein, Keith Poole & Harmon Zeigler) in terms of how well their research facilitates incorporating Gilligan's concerns. Questions to be addressed include the following: are our definitions of "political participation" adequate to accomodate women's experience? Is there a bias in political science's understanding of women and political participation, a bias which does not acknowledge the differences in women's thought ...

A growing number of political theorists are finding the study of psychology or psychoanalysis a rewarding key for an understanding of politics. Within the Marxian school of thought the apparent incompatibility of the presuppositions of Marx and Freud have been the source of serious theoretical problems and have eventually precipitated deep cleavages. Some theorists, in particular members of the Frankfurt school, have tried to reconcile the seeming contradictions. In the present essay Professor Steuernagel examines Herbert Marcuse's effort to harmonize Marx and Freud and finds that his attempted synthesis is unconvincing. She shows that he could have been more successful if, instead of relying on Freud, he had relied on Jung, whom he dismisses out of hand. Through her analysis she contributes to the continual search for the aims of political philosophy and buttresses the case for the use of psychology in the study of political phenomena.