Gendering Experience: How Female Legislators’ Careers Shape Legislative Behavior

• In Event: Pathways to Power

Abstract

In the recent past, congress has grown increasingly diverse. This unprecedented diversity supports exploration of the relationship between career experience, gender, and legislative behavior. In this paper, we build on extant research on the effects of career experience on legislative behavior (Theriault and Rohde 2011; Keena and Knight-Finley 2018). to explore the relationship between career experience, gender, and legislative behavior. Specifically, we examine whether women’s career paths to politics differ over time, whether female legislators' previous experiences differ from their male counterparts, and whether and how these differences meaningfully influence legislative behavior in the context of the U.S. House. To execute our study, we use the Congressional Biographical Directory to code the political jobs and prior career experiences of the house delegations from 1992 to 2019. We then employ a panel regression model to analyze the effects of these career experiences on party loyalty in House floor votes, controlling for representatives’ gender. Our research identifies temporal variation in the trajectories of female legislators, and implicates gendered experiences and partisan differences in efforts to mobilize female candidates as partial sources of party polarization in the House. Ultimately, gendering our examination of political experience informs and enriches the study of legislative behavior.

Authors

• Misty Knight-Finley, Rowan University

• Anne C Pluta, Rowan University