Just Amongst Us: Women’s Caucuses, Collaboration, and Policy Making in U.S. State Legislatures

In 2016, women’s legislative caucuses engage in agenda setting, position taking (ad hoc), and social activities in half of U.S. state legislatures (NCSL 2016). These caucuses are created to provide collective action on policy priorities, along with social support for women within male-dominated institutions, and recruiting and training women for public office. To accomplish these goals, women's caucuses develop relationships among their members across geographic, ideological, and partisan lines. Extant scholarship has measured the effect of women’s caucuses on bill filing and passage rates (Thomas 1991, Osborn et al 2002, Osborn 2012, Tolbert and Steuernagel 2001). But the full effect of caucuses remains understudied and is best evaluated through a network approach. In particular, we focus our attention on the relationship between caucuses and collaborative behaviors like bill co-sponsorships. In this paper, we leverage the diversity of caucuses in U.S. states to examine the collaboration between female legislators in caucus and non-caucus states, and compare behavior over time before and after the implementation of a caucus, using co-sponsorship data from all state legislatures in the United States across 15 years. In doing so, we both apply Barnes’ (2016) measure of collaboration and utilize network analysis to examine how and when women in caucus and non-caucus states co-sponsor legislation with each other. In particular, we focus on the density of networks in caucus and non-caucus states, as well as identifying the role of central legislators in these networks. Our findings speak to the long-term consequences of electing women to political office, the importance of women’s organizations, and the institutionalization of gender in politics.