Widening, asymmetric polarization is evident in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. Recent work unveils a new dimension to this polarization story: newly elected Republican women are driving this polarization. Women are more likely to legislate on women’s issues than men, yet women’s shared interest in representing women doesn’t preclude their identity as partisans. In this article, we explore the effect of today’s political climate on state legislators’ policy representation of women’s issues. We ask what effect does gendered polarization have on women’s issues? To test this, we evaluate bill sponsorship in the states on the quintessential “women’s issue” of abortion. Our research design focuses on bill introductions and uses on an original dataset of pro- and anti-abortion rights bill introductions, which we analyze using an event count model. We find that overall polarization leads to the introduction of fewer restrictive abortion bills, but as polarization between women lawmakers grows, legislators are more likely to introduce anti-abortion rights legislation. Gender polarization has consequences on the types of bills legislators introduce and for how scholars should study polarization.
My Research Agenda in Brief
I study the political representation of women in state legislatures, including work on ideological polarization among women partisans, the underrepresentation of Republican and non-white women, and how women legislate on women’s issues.
My work also extends to studying the inequalities experienced by certain groups as a result of public policy, including work on state abortion laws, contraception deserts, same-sex marriage, racial resentment, and the social constructions of politically relevant groups.
Finally, I am interested in the variation of state policy, including both methodological and substantive research on policy diffusion.
Women and Political Representation
Descriptive representation is the idea that elected representatives represent not only the expressed preferences of their constituents but also those of their politically relevant descriptive characteristics. My work in this area pertains to studying women as partisan legislators, the polarization of women in state legislatures, and how organizations work to recruit, train and support women candidates.
To what extent and under what conditions do women in elective office lead the way on conservative women’s interests? The few existing studies find that, contrary to most research on women’s descriptive and substantive representation, legislative activity on conservative women’s issues in the U.S. is driven primarily by Republican men. This paper takes a new look at the heart of conservative policymaking by analyzing the sponsorship of anti-abortion bills in 21 state houses, from 1997 to 2012. We find that conservative Republican women stand at the forefront of anti-abortion policy leadership in state legislatures. However, their distinctive leadership is highly constrained; it is most likely to emerge in policy contexts that utilize women-centered issue frames and within competitive partisan environments. These complex interactions between gender, ideology, issue framing, and partisanship call for new theories and concepts of women’s representation as not only gendered, but also deeply embedded in the strategic interplay of polarized, partisan politics.
Link here.
In early work on women in Congress, scholars consistently identified a tendency among women legislators to be more liberal roll‐call voters than male copartisans. Recent changes in Congress point to the polarization of women, where Democratic women remain more liberal than Democratic men but Republican women are no different from, or more conservative than, Republican men. We use newly available state legislative roll‐call data to determine whether women state legislators are more liberal or polarized than male copartisans. We find that while Democratic women state legislators remain consistently more liberal than male copartisans in most state chambers, Republican women legislators are growing more conservative. Thus, women state legislators are increasingly polarized in most U.S. states. Legislator replacement and increasing polarization among state legislators in office contribute to this effect. We argue that polarization among women legislators has implications for the representation of women in the states.
Link here.
Unlike many other countries, the U.S. has not adopted sets of laws or voluntary policies, such as quotas or “all-women short lists” in the U.K., to increase women’s representation. In lieu of official policy, an informal network of groups has grown around the need to increase the number of women candidates vying for political office in the U.S. Though researchers and the media discuss these groups often, we lack a complete picture of how many groups exist and what they do. This paper builds a descriptive profile of women’s recruitment and training in the U.S. using a new census of active women candidate groups. We highlight patterns in where they operate, partisanship, abortion litmus tests, and their participation in recruiting, training, and funding women candidates. We find that organizations operate in all states, but that these organizations are not equally accessible to all groups of women.
Link here.
The number and variety of state policies regulating abortion each year is increasing. Opponents of abortion adopted a strategy of “legal but inaccessible” that has resulted in the passage of more than 700 state laws since the early 1990s. Despite being a very active area of policy making, we lack a coherent explanation for the proliferation of abortion policy. Scholars studying different policies at discrete moments in time have come to conflicting conclusions about how well theories of morality policy and representation explain abortion policy. Using an original dataset comprised of a near-universe of pro- and anti-abortion rights policy from 1973 to 2013, I establish the ways in which partisan control of the government and the moral preferences of constituents shape state policy. I find that anti-abortion rights policies are well explained by both theories but that pro-abortion rights policies are not well explained as a morality policy or with descriptive representation. In addition, I show the heterogeneous effect of representation across anti-abortion rights policies; Democratic women and governors decrease the probability of only certain anti-abortion rights policies.
Link here.
This chapter examines how partisan women in the U.S. state legislatures represent women’s issues. We argue that political parties shape the ways Republican and Democratic women legislate on women’s issues in two ways. First, they structure women legislators’ preferences on women’s issues; that is, partisan women conceive of different solutions to women’s policy problems rooted in their party identities. Second, political party control of the legislative process helps determine whose preferences become part of the legislative agenda and, thus, have a chance to become law. Given these partisan effects, we argue that theorizing about women legislators as a whole, while useful in some ways, should also give way to work that understands how women work on women’s issues through partisan channels.
Link here.
Inequality in Public Policy
Identity plays a part in politics and policy when groups experience the political world or are unequally affected by policy based on their identity. Several of my published and ongoing identity and inequality research relates to the social construction of identity, policy feedback, racial attitudes, and reproductive health care.
The social construction theory of target populations has proven to be powerfully predictive, showing that policymakers are incentivized to do good things for “good people,” but produce punitive policies for “deviants.” While establishing an important conceptual framework, the theory doesn’t address the idea that various subgroups in society may evaluate policy targets differently. Here, we focus on the key issue of partisan identity, a lens through which American policymakers and citizens view the world. Our study is an extension of this original work, building a bridge between critical policy scholars and scholars of political attitudes and behavior. By relying on crowdsourcing, we (a) assess the extent to which consensus emerges around social constructions, and (b) determine the role that partisan identity plays in producing vastly different worldviews around dozens of groups. We find that there are multiple mappings of the groups because several social constructions pivot on party lines.
Across the US states is a patchwork of policies in domains such as crime, guns, immigration, and welfare. A theory of social construction of target populations incorporates not only rational components of policy design to understand how democracies can produce inequalities in these domains, but it also highlights the need to consider value-laden components, including constituents’ assessment of target populations’ social reputations. This paper ascertains whether social constructions of various groups differ significantly across the states and to understand the link between group stereotypes and policy design. We leverage original survey data and multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) to create state-level estimates of social constructions. Ultimately, we are able to illuminate the heterogeneity in the social constructions of several politically relevant groups; ascertain whether a link between these social reputations and policy design exists; and a provide useful methodological tool for scholars of state policy design in four policy domains.
Historically, access to contraception has been supported in a bipartisan way, best exemplified by Congressional funding of Title X-the only federal program focused on providing affordable reproductive healthcare to Americans. However, in an era of partisan polarization, Title X has become a political and symbolic pawn, in part due to its connection to family planning organizations like Planned Parenthood. The conflicts around Title X highlight the effects of the intertwining of abortion politics with that of contraception policy, particularly as they relate to reproductive justice and gendered policymaking. Family planning organizations like Planned Parenthood have responded to these battles by bowing out of the Title X network. To what extent are contraception deserts—places characterized by inequitable access to Title X—developed or expanded in response to policy changes around contraception and reproductive health? What is the demographic make-up of these spaces of inequality? We leverage data from the OPA and the U.S. Census and use the integrated two-step floating catchment area method to illustrate the effects of a major change in the Title X network in 10 states. Our results reveal the widespread human ramifications of increasing constraints on family planning organizations due to quiet but insidious federal bureaucratic rule changes.
Student evaluations of teaching are ubiquitous in the academe as a metric for assessing teaching and frequently used in critical personnel decisions. Yet, there is ample evidence documenting both measurement and equity bias in these assessments. Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) have low or no correlation with learning. Furthermore, scholars using different data and different methodologies routinely find that women faculty, faculty of color, and other marginalized groups are subject to a disadvantage in SETs. Extant research on bias on teaching evaluations tend to review only the aspect of the literature most pertinent to that study. In this paper, we review a novel dataset of over 100 articles on bias in student evaluations of teaching and provide a nuanced review of this broad but established literature. We find that women and other marginalized groups do face significant biases in standard evaluations of teaching – however, the effect of gender is conditional upon other factors. We conclude with recommendations for the judicious use of SETs and avenues for future research.
Winner of the Lucius Barker Award for Best Paper in Race and Ethnic Politics, 2019
Although many scholars who study the role of racial animus on Americans’ political attitudes and policy preferences do so to help us understand national-level politics, (racialized) policy is largely shaped at the state level. States are laboratories of policy innovation whose experiments can exacerbate or ameliorate racial inequality. With that in consideration, we aim to develop state-level scores of racial resentment. By employing linear multilevel regression and post-stratification weighting techniques and by linking nationally-representative survey data with U.S. Census data, we create time-varying, dynamic state level estimates of racial resentment from 1988 to 2016. Through this endeavor we are able to explore whether and the extent to which subnational levels of racial attitudes fluctuate over time, and provide a comparative analysis of state-level racial resentment scores across space and time. We find that states’ levels of racial animus change slowly, but some exhibit increases over time while others do just the opposite. Additionally, we find that Southern states’ reputation for championing the highest levels of racial resentment has been challenged by states across various regions of the United States. Finally, when we examine state-year data, we find that many states have exhibited their lowest levels of symbolic racism decades ago, contrary to the traditional American narrative of racial progress.
Scholars of morality policy have built an extensive literature surrounding these issues, which often are associated with unusual political behavior. Early studies aimed at explaining this behavior but avoided defining a “morality policy” explicitly, typically by focusing on issues that appeared obviously to pertain to morality, like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Drawing on the existing morality policy scholarship and classic theories of public policy, we argue that no public policy is inherently moral. Rather, policies may be “moralized” or “demoralized” over time, not due to any intrinsic characteristic, but because the prominent policy frames in their debate have changed. Public opinion and its proxies, along with certain exogenous shocks, may be important in determining when a morality frame will be more prevalent. Because the distinctiveness of morality policy lies in the discourse surrounding it, scholars should examine the behavior and attitudes of relevant advocates in these debates, rather than relying on aggregate data and making assumptions about intrinsic policy characteristics.
Winner of the Midwest Political Science Association’s Kenneth J. Meier Award for best paper in bureaucratic politics, public administration, or public policy.
Schneider and Ingram introduced the pivotal theory of social construction of target populations in the American Political Science Review nearly 25 years ago. There, they developed four ideal type groups: advantaged, contenders, dependents, and deviants. They noted that there may be contention around the construction of the groups but implied an expectation of consensus. There has not been, however, a systematic categorization of politically salient target groups based on these categories, nor has there been an empirical assessment of whether or the extent to which consensus around the social constructions of salient target groups exists. We revisit this theory to offer a novel perspective and do so by leveraging advances in technology and methodological strategies. By crowdsourcing the task of evaluating the social construction of various target populations, we are able to assess underlying assumptions of theory as well as outline avenues for future research on policy design.
The stability of abortion opinions suggests that pre-adult factors influence these attitudes more than contemporaneous political events. Surprisingly, however, we know little about the origins of abortion opinions, no doubt because the majority of research focuses on cross-sectional analyses of patterns across cohorts. We use a developmental model that links familial and contextual factors during adolescence to abortion attitudes years later when respondents are between 21 and 38 years old. Findings show that religious adherence and maternal gender role values are significant predictors of adult abortion opinions, even after controlling for contemporaneous religious adherence and the respondents’ own views on gender roles. Adolescent religious adherence matters more than religious denomination for adult abortion attitudes. The results have important implications for future trends in abortion attitudes in light of declining religiosity among Americans.
SPPQ – top five most read articles from January 2015 – present.
SPPQ – most downloaded article in 2016
The number and variety of state policies regulating abortion each year is increasing. Opponents of abortion adopted a strategy of “legal but inaccessible” that has resulted in the passage of more than 700 state laws since the early 1990s. Despite being a very active area of policy making, we lack a coherent explanation for the proliferation of abortion policy. Scholars studying different policies at discrete moments in time have come to conflicting conclusions about how well theories of morality policy and representation explain abortion policy. Using an original dataset comprised of a near-universe of pro- and anti-abortion rights policy from 1973 to 2013, I establish the ways in which partisan control of the government and the moral preferences of constituents shape state policy. I find that anti-abortion rights policies are well explained by both theories but that pro-abortion rights policies are not well explained as a morality policy or with descriptive representation. In addition, I show the heterogeneous effect of representation across anti-abortion rights policies; Democratic women and governors decrease the probability of only certain anti-abortion rights policies.
Link here.
The Iowa Supreme Court adopted an unpopular but unanimous ruling in Varnum v. Brien, which established same-sex marriage. Using a unique panel study conducted immediately before and after the court decision, we evaluate the impact of policy adoption on changing opinions on minority rights. The signaling of new social norms pressured some respondents to modify their expressed attitudes. We find that respondents whose demographic characteristics would predict support for marriage equality, but previously did not, were more likely to shift their opinions to be consistent with the new state law. A policy feedback mechanism may be responsible for the rapid diffusion of laws legalizing same-sex in the states.
Link here.
State Politics and Policy Diffusion
While my primary substantive interests are in identity politics, I am also interested in the variation of state policy more generally. In particular, I am interested in how and why policies diffuse across the country.
Across the US states is a patchwork of policies in domains such as crime, guns, immigration, and welfare. A theory of social construction of target populations incorporates not only rational components of policy design to understand how democracies can produce inequalities in these domains, but it also highlights the need to consider value-laden components, including constituents’ assessment of target populations’ social reputations. This paper ascertains whether social constructions of various groups differ significantly across the states and to understand the link between group stereotypes and policy design. We leverage original survey data and multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) to create state-level estimates of social constructions. Ultimately, we are able to illuminate the heterogeneity in the social constructions of several politically relevant groups; ascertain whether a link between these social reputations and policy design exists; and a provide useful methodological tool for scholars of state policy design in four policy domains.
Historically, access to contraception has been supported in a bipartisan way, best exemplified by Congressional funding of Title X-the only federal program focused on providing affordable reproductive healthcare to Americans. However, in an era of partisan polarization, Title X has become a political and symbolic pawn, in part due to its connection to family planning organizations like Planned Parenthood. The conflicts around Title X highlight the effects of the intertwining of abortion politics with that of contraception policy, particularly as they relate to reproductive justice and gendered policymaking. Family planning organizations like Planned Parenthood have responded to these battles by bowing out of the Title X network. To what extent are contraception deserts—places characterized by inequitable access to Title X—developed or expanded in response to policy changes around contraception and reproductive health? What is the demographic make-up of these spaces of inequality? We leverage data from the OPA and the U.S. Census and use the integrated two-step floating catchment area method to illustrate the effects of a major change in the Title X network in 10 states. Our results reveal the widespread human ramifications of increasing constraints on family planning organizations due to quiet but insidious federal bureaucratic rule changes.
Widening, asymmetric polarization is evident in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. Recent work unveils a new dimension to this polarization story: newly elected Republican women are driving this polarization. Women are more likely to legislate on women’s issues than men, yet women’s shared interest in representing women doesn’t preclude their identity as partisans. In this article, we explore the effect of today’s political climate on state legislators’ policy representation of women’s issues. We ask what effect does gendered polarization have on women’s issues? To test this, we evaluate bill sponsorship in the states on the quintessential “women’s issue” of abortion. Our research design focuses on bill introductions and uses on an original dataset of pro- and anti-abortion rights bill introductions, which we analyze using an event count model. We find that overall polarization leads to the introduction of fewer restrictive abortion bills, but as polarization between women lawmakers grows, legislators are more likely to introduce anti-abortion rights legislation. Gender polarization has consequences on the types of bills legislators introduce and for how scholars should study polarization.
To what extent and under what conditions do women in elective office lead the way on conservative women’s interests? The few existing studies find that, contrary to most research on women’s descriptive and substantive representation, legislative activity on conservative women’s issues in the U.S. is driven primarily by Republican men. This paper takes a new look at the heart of conservative policymaking by analyzing the sponsorship of anti-abortion bills in 21 state houses, from 1997 to 2012. We find that conservative Republican women stand at the forefront of anti-abortion policy leadership in state legislatures. However, their distinctive leadership is highly constrained; it is most likely to emerge in policy contexts that utilize women-centered issue frames and within competitive partisan environments. These complex interactions between gender, ideology, issue framing, and partisanship call for new theories and concepts of women’s representation as not only gendered, but also deeply embedded in the strategic interplay of polarized, partisan politics.
Winner of the Lucius Barker Award for Best Paper in Race and Ethnic Politics, 2019
Although many scholars who study the role of racial animus on Americans’ political attitudes and policy preferences do so to help us understand national-level politics, (racialized) policy is largely shaped at the state level. States are laboratories of policy innovation whose experiments can exacerbate or ameliorate racial inequality. With that in consideration, we aim to develop state-level scores of racial resentment. By employing linear multilevel regression and post-stratification weighting techniques and by linking nationally-representative survey data with U.S. Census data, we create time-varying, dynamic state level estimates of racial resentment from 1988 to 2016. Through this endeavor we are able to explore whether and the extent to which subnational levels of racial attitudes fluctuate over time, and provide a comparative analysis of state-level racial resentment scores across space and time. We find that states’ levels of racial animus change slowly, but some exhibit increases over time while others do just the opposite. Additionally, we find that Southern states’ reputation for championing the highest levels of racial resentment has been challenged by states across various regions of the United States. Finally, when we examine state-year data, we find that many states have exhibited their lowest levels of symbolic racism decades ago, contrary to the traditional American narrative of racial progress.
In early work on women in Congress, scholars consistently identified a tendency among women legislators to be more liberal roll‐call voters than male copartisans. Recent changes in Congress point to the polarization of women, where Democratic women remain more liberal than Democratic men but Republican women are no different from, or more conservative than, Republican men. We use newly available state legislative roll‐call data to determine whether women state legislators are more liberal or polarized than male copartisans. We find that while Democratic women state legislators remain consistently more liberal than male copartisans in most state chambers, Republican women legislators are growing more conservative. Thus, women state legislators are increasingly polarized in most U.S. states. Legislator replacement and increasing polarization among state legislators in office contribute to this effect. We argue that polarization among women legislators has implications for the representation of women in the states.
Link here.
Unlike many other countries, the U.S. has not adopted sets of laws or voluntary policies, such as quotas or “all-women short lists” in the U.K., to increase women’s representation. In lieu of official policy, an informal network of groups has grown around the need to increase the number of women candidates vying for political office in the U.S. Though researchers and the media discuss these groups often, we lack a complete picture of how many groups exist and what they do. This paper builds a descriptive profile of women’s recruitment and training in the U.S. using a new census of active women candidate groups. We highlight patterns in where they operate, partisanship, abortion litmus tests, and their participation in recruiting, training, and funding women candidates. We find that organizations operate in all states, but that these organizations are not equally accessible to all groups of women.
Link here.
Pooled event history analysis (PEHA) allows researchers to study the effects of variables across multiple policies by stacking the data and estimating the parameters in a single model. Yet this approach to modeling policy diffusion implies assumptions about homogeneity that are often violated in reality, such that the effect of a given variable is constant across policies. We relax this assumption and use Monte Carlo simulations to compare common strategies for modeling heterogeneity, testing these strategies with increasing levels of variance. We find that multilevel models with random coefficients produce the best estimates and are a significant improvement over other models. In addition, we show how modeling similar policies as multilevel structures allows researchers to more precisely explore the theoretical implications of heterogeneity across policies. We provide an empirical example of these modeling approaches with a unique data set of 29 antiabortion policies.
Link here.
SPPQ – top five most read articles from January 2015 – present.
SPPQ – most downloaded article in 2016
The number and variety of state policies regulating abortion each year is increasing. Opponents of abortion adopted a strategy of “legal but inaccessible” that has resulted in the passage of more than 700 state laws since the early 1990s. Despite being a very active area of policy making, we lack a coherent explanation for the proliferation of abortion policy. Scholars studying different policies at discrete moments in time have come to conflicting conclusions about how well theories of morality policy and representation explain abortion policy. Using an original dataset comprised of a near-universe of pro- and anti-abortion rights policy from 1973 to 2013, I establish the ways in which partisan control of the government and the moral preferences of constituents shape state policy. I find that anti-abortion rights policies are well explained by both theories but that pro-abortion rights policies are not well explained as a morality policy or with descriptive representation. In addition, I show the heterogeneous effect of representation across anti-abortion rights policies; Democratic women and governors decrease the probability of only certain anti-abortion rights policies.
Link here.
The Iowa Supreme Court adopted an unpopular but unanimous ruling in Varnum v. Brien, which established same-sex marriage. Using a unique panel study conducted immediately before and after the court decision, we evaluate the impact of policy adoption on changing opinions on minority rights. The signaling of new social norms pressured some respondents to modify their expressed attitudes. We find that respondents whose demographic characteristics would predict support for marriage equality, but previously did not, were more likely to shift their opinions to be consistent with the new state law. A policy feedback mechanism may be responsible for the rapid diffusion of laws legalizing same-sex in the states.
Link here.
Political Science Blogs
- ‘Contraception deserts’ are what you get when you cut off this little-known federal program.’ (with Candis Watts Smith) Posted on The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post on 9/26/16.
- Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriage across the U.S.: USAPP experts react. Posted on the LSE American Politics and Policy blog on 6/26/2015.
- The states are now the battleground in the fight over abortion rights. Posted on the LSE American Politics and Policy blog on 2/4/2015.
- The legalization of same-sex marriage in a state is a signal that causes certain groups to change their opinion to support the policy. (with Allison Hamilton and Caroline Tolbert) Posted on the LSE American Politics and Policy blog on 7/29/2014.