Decades of research have revealed a clear link between women’s descriptive representation—who our leaders are—and women’s substantive representation—what our leaders do. In study after study, female officials are more likely than their male counterparts to act on behalf of women and women’s interests. Except at the local level. Even though most female officeholders in the U.S. serve at the local level, our research has focused almost exclusively on national and state-level policymakers. And what little research that has been done suggests that local politics is the last place one would find either significant attention to women’s issues or significant effects of policymakers’ gender identity. As dominant theories of urban politics would suggest, unfettered competition to attract and maintain wealthy residents and businesses, ever-growing federal and state mandates, and limited fiscal capacity all conspire to severely constrain any sort of policy innovation on behalf of women, children, or the poor and needy. Economic development overrules all else.
Mirya Holman’s Women in Politics in the American City changes and challenges all that. We can no longer plead ignorance or readily concede that local politics is the exception to the women-represent-women rule. First, Holman reminds us of the long history of American women’s activism and influence on a variety of “urban women’s issues” concerning children and education, welfare and poverty, affordable housing, and violence against women. Then, by rallying a veritable treasure trove of original data, she shows how women holding local office in 21st century America carry on in this tradition. Surveys of mayors and councilmembers reveal that, even with controls for party and ideology, female leaders are far more likely than their male counterparts to forge strong ties with women’s and women’s issue groups; and those who do are more likely to pay close attention to women’s issues. Content analysis of council meeting minutes demonstrates that cities led by female mayors do in fact devote more attention to women’s issues and foster higher levels of citizen input on such issues, all else being equal. Detailed multivariate analysis of city budgets and employment records shows that local governments with more women in powerful positions allocate more money and workers to programs that address urban women’s issues. In-depth interviews and qualitative case studies usefully supplement and illustrate all of these findings. Convincingly, Holman concludes that while business, taxes, and development remain central, gender—and women’s representation in particular—matters in local politics. Thus, the fact that women still make up far fewer than half of our local government leaders remains a critical problem of American democracy.
The strength of Holman’s argument lies primarily in the variety, quantity, and quality of data she collected and analyzed. Multiple and complementary samples and sampling strategies (e.g., 100 matched cities, 300 randomly selected cities, a time-series panel of eight cities in California and North Carolina) round out Holman’s cleverly designed, rigorous, and robust multi-method approach. Most importantly, this wealth of data enables Holman to address just about every dimension of women’s substantive representation imaginable. At the individual level, she is able to compare male and female leaders’ group ties, policy priorities, and policy preferences. At the city level, she is able to examine the policymaking process from beginning to end: from the composition of policy agendas; to the participation of various individuals and community groups (and their subsequent evaluations of their local leaders); to the ultimate policy outcomes—allocations of money and jobs. At each step along the way, Holman provides multiple measures of responsiveness to women and urban women’s issues (as well as business and development).
Yet Holman’s contribution is not simply a thoroughly vetted and unexpected new “data point” demonstrating the impact of women in public office. Rather, her analysis is most interesting when she cautions against overly simplistic theories of descriptive and substantive representation and argues that “sheer numbers” of women in local office is often not enough (Karen Beckwith and Kimberly Cowell-Meyers, “Sheer Numbers: Critical Representation Thresholds and Women’s Political Representation,” Perspectives on Politics 5 [September 2007]: 553–65). First, Holman argues that gender alone does not distinguish city officials most likely to prioritize women’s issues. It is a subset of female (or mostly female) mayors and councilmembers who have forged strong connections with women and women’s-issue groups who are the most committed advocates. Second, Holman’s city-level analysis reveals that the mere presence of women on the council rarely makes a difference on women’s issues. But when women on the council join forces with a woman mayor—especially one able to wield power over the council, they can and often do make a difference. In short, women’s substantive representation depends on a combination of women’s presence, “gender consciousness” (p. 43), and power in office.
Unfortunately, the strengths of Holman’s work may also contribute to and highlight some of the book’s weaknesses. Perhaps in an attempt to squeeze so much data into such a short monograph, some important methodological and analytic details are left out or obscured. As a result, the clarity and power of the findings can suffer. And they suffer the most when Holman is making her most insightful arguments. How Holman identifies the “preferable descriptive representatives” (Suzanne Dovi, “Preferable Descriptive Representatives: Will Just Any Woman, Black, or Latino Do?” American Political Science Review 96 [2002]: 729–44), who are immersed in gender-conscious networks of community organizations and activists and are most likely to prioritize women’s issues, is not clearly established. Nor is it entirely clear how large their ranks are or even whether (despite the label) men are included. Elsewhere, the regression results meant to test Holman’s arguments about the interdependent effects of women on the council, women in the mayor’s office, and the institutional power of the mayor are not well presented or interpreted. Novice readers (e.g., undergraduates) may find the discussion confusing; readers well versed in modeling and interpreting interaction effects may find it frustrating.
Finally, while Holman is quick to acknowledge that gender identity is not the only thing that matters in the politics of women’s representation, her discussion of race, class, and intersectionality is quite limited. For example, Holman reports that female leaders were more likely to have “felt responsibility to represent racial groups, women, and the poor” (p. 34), but does not consider whether this might be because they were more racially or socioeconomically diverse than male leaders. In the all too brief section on “Dual Identities and the Role of Race and Gender” (pp. 62–63), Holman acknowledges that “it is often difficult to separate the effects of gender and race” on representational behavior, but then undertakes an analytic “attempt to separate the effects of race and gender” on policy discussions in city council meetings. Here and elsewhere, she identifies only “minority women” as possessing or grappling with “dual identities” of race and gender. Indeed, her attempt to analytically separate the effects of race and gender completely obscures the existence and impact of minority men (see Table 3.4). All this despite Holman’s astute recognition that gender, race, and class overlap and intersect to define the very essence of urban women’s issues. This alone should alert us all to the need for more and more sustained intersectional approaches to the study of identity and representation.
