The women and politics literature has for many years carried an implicit expectation that women, when elected to legislatures, will represent women's interests. This expectation reflects a deep and sincere desire of many in our society to elect a more representative and just government. It also masks a nagging challenge in the field: that defining “women's policy” is a vexing problem and that women are a diverse bunch who demand varied policy responses to their issues. Tracy L. Osborn's new book, How Women Represent Women, addresses these challenges, among others, while tackling the intersection of partisanship and gender representation.
The evidence regarding whether women legislators “make a difference” on behalf of other women is murky: Scholars have been producing conflicting findings (Michele Swers, The Difference Women Make: The Policy Impact of Women in Congress, 2002; Debra Dodson, The Impact of Women in Congress, 2006; Beth Reingold, Representing Women: Sex, Gender and Legislative Behavior in Arizona and California, 2000) for more than a decade. The present study purports to examine the role of political parties in substantive representation and to do so by viewing partisanship and gender as interactive variables. In the end, Osborn's central argument is clear: “[P]arties mediate how women represent women in two ways: they organize alternatives on women's issues problems, and they create the legislative structure through which these alternatives are considered” (p. 6).
In order to come to this conclusion, Osborn tackles the interstices of party/gender mix through party identity and institutional partisan structure, namely, which party controls the legislature and how strongly it does so. She accomplishes this agenda through an extensive comparative research design using state legislatures, whereas most prior research in this field has focused on congressional studies, which have the distinct disadvantage of being unable to compare different party control scenarios in the same year.
Osborn organizes her book around her considerable data sets. The arc of the narrative begins by taking us through previous literature dedicated to the ways in which parties shape substantive representation and to research design. The author reviews the Project Vote Smart's National Political Awareness Test results during the 1998 state legislative election cycle in order to determine the preelection policy positions that women carry vis-à-vis male comparators. There, she finds that even before obtaining elected office, women legislative aspirants reflect partisan ties. Next, she turns to two stages in the legislative process: bill sponsorship and roll call voting. She relies on original data from all bills introduced in all competitive roll call votes taken in 95 state legislative chambers during the 1999–2000 sessions, focusing on a subset of data on “women's issues” within a subset of the lower chambers of 10 state houses. Finally, she examines legislative characteristics in order to tease out the impact of party strength and control on her findings. While these findings reveal variations in policy commitments, she confirms that the similarities between the legislative behavior of men and women in the same party are stronger than similarities of women's behavior across party lines.
It is here that Osborn's work answers some important questions in the field. A challenge for her is the definition of “women's issues,” which have been defined before, though not consistently, by other scholars. She provides two typologies of women's issues: specific and traditional. They find that while Democratic and Republican women and men all express policy solutions to women's issues in both categories, they do so in distinct ways that reflect party ties. So distinct are Republican and Democratic women's policy solutions that Osborn finds only one potential arena for interparty collaboration among women legislators: women's health. And even there, this reviewer would doubt that in actual fact women legislators can collaborate across party lines for the betterment of women's health. Today, health policy is nearly inextricably linked to reproductive policy at both the state and national level; given that reproductive policy provides one of the few areas where the parties have staked out clear and divergent policy positions, once reproductive issues surface in any health debate, on the basis of Osborn's own findings I would predict little party deviation for women legislators.
While I do not share Osborn's optimism that women legislators can work together toward women's health policy, I do embrace and support her focus on understanding that women of different political orientations carry, necessarily, a partisan imprint into their work. This finding is consistent throughout her book and it answers the call from multiple authors that the field take better care to understand the policy perspectives of conservative women (Ronnee Schreiber, Righting Women: Conservative Women and American Politics, 2008).
In the end, Osborn's findings point to one consistent outcome. With few deviations, women's policies—whether expressed prior to election, during the process of agenda setting or as roll call votes—are filtered through a partisan lens. To greater or lesser degrees, depending on party control and strength, women legislators reflect partisan interests. In the end, the author's most significant contributions are in her considerable data collection, which yields results robust enough for generalization; the application of comparative methods; and a demonstration that “women represent women's issues through parties, rather than in spite of them” (p. 150).
