Gender & Officeholding at the Sub-national Level

Abstract

This panel considers issues germane to women’s officeholding at the sub-national level across four distinct political systems. In her paper, Use Your Power for Good: Women Legislators Transforming Virginia’s Voting Laws, Cooperman considers how Virginia women state legislators, mostly Black or mixed race women, carried and passed legislation to transform the state’s voting laws, expand voting access, and increase voter participation in a state long known for violently suppressing the vote. In their paper, Party Power: Understanding Women State Legislators’ Institutional Power in United States, Osborn and Mahoney evaluate women’s formal and informal power within their political party and institutional settings in U.S. state legislatures to assess the broader representational and policy implications of electing women. In her paper, Recognition in and through local politics in Australia: Nancy Fraser’s parity of participation for gender and politics scholarship, Jakimow introduces the concept of ‘electoral currencies’ to assess women’s efforts in representing constituents and building political influence in regional and metropolitan councils in Australia. In their paper, Invisible Inequalities: The Domestic Mental Load, Efficacy, and Ambition among Local Politicians, Helgøy and Weeks consider gender differences in the domestic mental load of anticipating, planning, and monitoring household tasks of local councillors in England and its impact on women’s efficacy, workload, and political ambition. Finally, in their paper, The Perception Gap in Experiences of Gender-Based Violence in Local Politics, Tolley, McMahon, and Bittner survey voters and municipal officeholders in Canada to measure attitudes regarding and determine the prevalence and implications of gender-based violence in politics. Taken together, these papers cast new attention at state and local politics, levels of government that are often considered more accessible to women, but which are sometimes overlooked in favor of research on the national level. The papers employ a broad array of methodological approaches, including process tracing, elite interviews, survey research, and experiments, to consider the work and experiences of women officeholders at the sub-national level in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and England. These papers broaden our understanding of the issues facing women officeholders seeking to fulfill their representational duties while grappling with the gendered constructs of legislative institutions, division and value of work, and violence. Moreover, the work of this panel contributes meaningfully to the dialogue regarding diversity in leadership and representation within a wide range of contexts.

Title	Details
Use Your Power for Good: Women Legislators Transforming Virginia’s Voting Laws	View Paper Details
Party Power: Understanding Women State Legislators’ Institutional Power in United States	View Paper Details
Recognition in and through local politics in Australia: Nancy Fraser’s parity of participation for gender and politics scholarship	View Paper Details
Invisible Inequalities: The Domestic Mental Load, Efficacy, and Ambition among Local Politicians	View Paper Details
The Perception Gap in Experiences of Gender-Based Violence in Local Politics	View Paper Details