Strategic Cosponsorship Networks among Women & Women of Color in US Legislatures

• In Event: Inter-Party Legislative Politics

Abstract

There is a rich body of literature exploring collaboration and cosponsorship in American legislatures. Fowler (2006) examines cosponsorship data from the US House and Senate as a way to understand and measure relationships between legislators, finding that a legislator’s “connectedness” has a positive impact on both bill passage and success of amendments offered by the legislator. Providing more nuance to this finding, Kirkland (2011) examines the networking strategies and effects in the US House and eight state legislatures and determines the strength of relationships between legislators, with results indicating that weaker ties (those occurring less often between members) led to increased bill success. By contrast, he shows that strong ties (those occurring more often between the same legislators) are not predictive of legislative success. Yet, little is known regarding how these strong ties work for women and women of color, which is particularly relevant with recent scholarship examining women’s collaboration.

Indeed, there is an expansive body of literature examining the circumstances and effects of women’s collaboration. In a working paper, Craig et al. (2015) demonstrate that women, Black and Latino members of Congress often collaborate more among one another due to race- and gender-based assortative mixing. In an examination of state legislatures, Swift and VanderMolen (2021) show that women often collaborate to overcome marginalization in their respective chambers. Similarly, Holman (2021) finds that women’s cosponsorship at the state level increases the success of bills in state legislatures. However, little work has specifically examined women’s strong ties and their effects on legislative outcomes. Ultimately, the literature presents us with our motivating puzzle: If women and people of color often have these stronger cosponsorship networks, what benefits ultimately arise, given that strong ties are not predictive of legislative success (Kirkland 2011)?

We propose to make four novel contributions to further understand why women and women of color are cultivating these strong ties, especially among one another. First, we examine how women and women of color’s strong ties affect legislative success – making it into committee, out of committee, to the floor, and ultimate passage out of the chamber. Second, we also expect that women’s strong ties can focus attention on specific policy domains, such as healthcare, elder care, education and family leave —policies typically conceptualized as “women’s issues”—thereby increasing the likelihood of bill success. Third, we argue that the benefits of women’s collaborative networks are not limited to bill success, but likely reap other benefits within the chamber. Specifically, we expect that women legislators leverage these strong ties into leadership positions in subsequent sessions. Finally, these strong ties also serve a symbolic function where, during reelection, they can point to their strong ties and collaborative efforts in legislating, thereby increasing their margin of victory. This is particularly apt, given the gendered expectations of women legislators.

Thus, we examine a wide variety of outcomes: bill success, both generally and across a wide variety of policy domains (from the Policy Agendas Project); leadership positions (from CRS reports); and electoral outcomes (from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab). Specifically, we build from Kirkland's (2011) dataset of the House’s 102nd through 106th Congressional ties to include through the 116th. We also code for the race, gender, and ethnicity of the legislators, as well as other relevant covariates, like external networks, ideology, and seniority. Preliminarily, we find that women do have a greater number of strong ties than their male counterparts, but it doesn't lead to bill passage. Thus, we expect the benefits of these strong ties likely accrue in less studied areas that we seek to explore further here. In a secondary analysis, we seek to confirm these findings with state legislatures. Specifically, we extend Holman, Mahoney, and Hurler’s (2021) dataset to include measures of strong and weak ties. Ultimately, this project helps scholars understand when minority status and gender considerations might both be salient to networking and institutional behavior.

Authors

• Markie McBrayer, University of Idaho

• Andrea Kathryn Eckelman, University of Montevallo

• Jason P. Casellas, University of Houston