Women, Collaboration and Legislative Effectiveness in the Mexican Congress

• In Event: The Difference Women Make: Inclusion, Representation, and Public Policy

Abstract

Several studies highlight the role of women in facilitating legislative collaboration in multiple countries. Increasing the number of women in deliberative bodies has been shown to improve deliberation and increase collaboration, and women have been found to be more effective legislators. Yet, prior work has not examined the specific link between increasing women’s collaboration and legislative effectiveness. While Volden, Wiseman and Wittmer (2013) argue women’s more collaborative nature will lead them to be more effective lawmakers, they focus exclusively on individual bill sponsorship and do not measure the effects of women’s collaboration through cosponsorship on legislative effectiveness. Moreover, recent work on women’s collaboration has focused more on when and why women collaborate (Barnes 2016; Holman and Mahoney 2018), and not on the legislative effectiveness of women’s collaboration. This study seeks to address this gap in the literature by more explicitly considering the link between collaboration and effectiveness.
In addition, prior work on women’s collaboration suggests that women collaborate more with other women to overcome their marginalized status within legislatures (Barnes 2016; Holman and Mahoney 2018; Wocnik and Mullenax 2017). Women can be marginalized through their limited access to leadership and agenda-setting positions within legislatures (Heath, Schwindt-Bayer and Taylor-Robinson 2005), or by having a harder time getting their legislation passed compared to men (Franceschet and Piscopo 2008). In addition, women can be marginalized through placement on committees that primarily deal with women’s issues, while other policy areas are reserved for men (Schwindt-Bayer 2006). Thus, it is likely the link between collaboration and effectiveness may vary based on the policy domain in which women legislate, although previous work on women’s legislative collaboration and effectiveness generally does not examine bills in different policy areas. Here, I examine how the relationship between collaboration and effectiveness varies between women’s interest and other policy domains.
To address these gaps in the literature, I use original bill co-sponsorship data from the Mexican Chamber of Deputies from 1997-2018. The co-sponsorship data also includes information on the progress of each bill through five stages of the legislative process from action in committee to passage into law. While a handful of studies exist that study bill sponsorship behavior in the Mexican Chamber, this is the first study to use co-sponsorship data from the Mexican legislature.
The Mexican case is ideal to examine the role of women in fostering legislative collaboration and women’s effectiveness since it allows for comparisons across different legislative sessions with differences in the number of women due to the adoption of gender quotas in 2002. In 1997, 17% of deputies were women, while in in 2015, 43% of deputies elected that year were women. Moreover, women’s issue bills were highly salient throughout this period.
Preliminary results suggest that while women sponsor more bills than men, women’s collaboration is only effective for pushing through bills related to women’s interests. Increasing women’s collaboration on other types of bills decreases the chances a bill will become law.

Author

• Yann Kerevel, Louisiana State University