Collective Representation Negotiated by Black Women Legislators

• In Event: Understanding Legislative Negotiation

Abstract

Legislative institutions themselves have necessitated the creation of organizations beyond political parties and legislative committees. While these caucuses may be established by marginalized legislators to harness collective political power, there are still many obstacles standing between these groups and success. Caucuses matter for understanding vote cohesion, solidarity, and symbolic representation; however, what remains less clear is the role that identity-based caucuses play in negotiation. Although caucuses are where legislators come together under some commonality, this is also where we observe heterogeneity within identity categories resulting in jockeying for political power and priority. In this paper, we center Black women legislators in Maryland to illustrate the complexity of representation as a Black woman within raced and gendered institutions which only offer collective representation within single-axis caucuses. We use interview data collected in the spring of 2022 to assess how caucus membership and maintenance do not adequately take into account how identity shapes the motivations, experiences, and behavior of intersectionally marginalized legislators. We find that while caucuses are useful in advancing the policy priorities of Black women lawmakers, the politics and strategies they use to advance their policies differ. Thus, we observe varied ways that this population draws on their identities to negotiate within single-axis identity caucuses.

Authors

• Nadia E. Brown, Georgetown University

• Christopher Jude Clark, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Anna M. Mahoney, Dartmouth College