Lobby Like a Girl: The Strength of Women's Organized Activism Open Access

Abstract

In three papers, this dissertation analyzes how gender-based differences in the relationships between state legislators and women’s issue advocacy groups shape variation in women’s political inclusion and representation. Each paper consists of an empirical study on the mechanisms through which these different relationships emerge and operate, measuring their impact on women’s issue policy and policymakers.

I first demonstrate that women’s advocacy groups target men and women in office differently. In developing the theory that produces this assertion, I use extensive qualitative data based on over 50 in-depth interviews with state-level women’s advocacy organizations and political action committees (PACs) across the United States. I show that women’s groups are more likely to target female candidates, but that tight electoral races rather than past legislative behavior predict whether an individual female candidate will receive a contribution. In contrast, legislative activism demonstrated through increases women’s issue policymaking has the strongest positive effect on campaign contributions to male candidates over time.

In the second paper, I examines how different lobbying strategies affect a legislator’s willingness to provide a women’s issue organization access to the policymaking process, and how this willingness changes according to a legislator’s gender identity. I conduct a field experiment observing legislator responsiveness to a women’s advocacy group, and present strong evidence suggesting that while women are twice as likely to provide access to a women’s issue group on face value, lobbying strategies signaling constituent mobilization are especially effective with men, doubling the likelihood a male legislator will respond and effectively closing gender gaps in responsiveness.

Finally, in the third paper, I shift attention to how changes in electoral support from women’s groups can lead to changes in bill sponsorship by men and women in office. My findings indicate that while women in state-level office sponsor more women’s issue bills as descriptive representatives overall, men are uniquely mobilized towards increased bill sponsorship when receiving increased contributions from women’s political action committees.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Sex, Money, and Subnational Politics: Do Women’s Groups Contribute Differently to Male and Female Candidates? 6

2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2.2 Group Strategies for Campaign Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

2.3 Grounded Theory Qualitative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

2.3.1 The Qualitative Sample . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

2.3.2 Women’s Political Group Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

2.3.3 Women’s Groups and Men in Office . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

2.4 Theory and Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

2.5 Empirical Research Design and Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

2.5.1 Analysis and Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

2.6 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

3 Getting a High Heel in the Door: An Experiment on State Legislator Responsiveness to Women’s Issue Lobbying 49

3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

3.2 Organizational Influence and Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

3.2.1 Benefits from Providing Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

3.2.2 Benefits and Allies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

3.2.3 Strengthening Alliances with Strategic Lobbying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

3.3 Experimental Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

3.3.1 The Sample . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

3.3.2 Experimental Stimuli and Treatment Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

3.3.3 Experimental Results and Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

3.4 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

4 Reconsidering Gender Gaps in State Legislatures: Heterogeneous Effects of Women’s Issue Lobbying 71

4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

4.2 Linking Descriptive and Substantive Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

4.2.1 Reconsidering Differences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

4.3 The Influence of Lobbying on Women’s Issue Prioritization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

4.4 Expectations, Data, and Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

4.4.1 Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

4.4.2 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

4.5 Concluding Discussion and Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

A Appendix to Chapter 2 112

A.1 Robustness Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

A.1.1 DV: Campaign Contribution in Nominal Dollar Amounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

A.1.2 DV: Logged Campaign Contributions, Adjusted for Inflation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

A.1.3 Fixed Effects Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

A.2 Data Collection Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

A.2.1 Purpose and Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

A.2.2 Women’s Issues Generally Defined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

A.2.3 Data Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

B Appendix to Chapter 3 122

B.1 Texts of Emailed Meeting Requests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

B.2 Model Included in Paper: Table Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

B.3 Ethical Considerations and the Use of Deception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

B.3.1 Coding Protocol for Measuring Responsiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

B.4 Robustness Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

B.5 Gender Gaps and Partisanship in Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

C Appendix to Chapter 4 142

C.1 Fixed Effects Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

C.2 Random Effects Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Political Science
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	Spanish
Research Field	Women's Studies Political Science, General
Keyword	American politics
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Beth Reingold, Emory University
Committee Members	Alexander Bolton, Emory University Zachary Peskowitz, Emory University

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