The Congressional Gender Gap: Gender Effects on Congressional Roll Call Voting.

An extensive body of feminist theory holds that women perceive the world and make choices through a fundamentally different set of values than men. Consequently, political scientists have strong theoretical reasons to suspect that women will act differently than men in political contexts. Empirically, this supposition has found strong support in the broad evidence of a “gender gap,” persistent differences in the political opinions and behaviors of men and women in the mass public. Taken as a whole, this body of theory and empirical research strongly suggests that women may behave differently than men in elite political contexts as well. At the same time, beginning with David Mayhew (1974), many congressional scholars have argued that a strong desire to secure reelection, an “electoral connection,” dominates the behavior of members of Congress. The logic of the electoral connection seems to demand that any potential member of Congress for a given district would behave in a nearly identical manner as all others, the manner most nearly in line with the preferences of his or her district. Empirical evidence supports this position as well. From this perspective, it seems unlikely that, ceteris paribus, a woman would represent a given congressional district differently than a man in the same office. Taking advantage of the development of widely-accepted and widely-utilized, comprehensive measures of Congressional ideology, Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE data, I seek to answer a question first posed by Susan Welch, “Are women more liberal than men in the United States Congress?” Utilizing NOMINATE data, I test the effect of gender against the effects of party, region, and district characteristics in the House of Representatives for the 92nd-105th Congresses to determine whether there is an independent gender effect on voting in Congress. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2003 meeting of the MPSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]