Does electing women to legislative bodies matter? Will women legislators will be better stewards of public policies that influence women’s lives than men? Over time, gender and politics scholars have moved beyond simply connecting presence and policies (e.g., Saint-Germain 1989; Thomas 1994) to identifying how and to what degree certain women work toward certain policies that affect women within specific legislative opportunity structures. Theoretically, this shift from a focus on critical mass to critical actors has helped foster a better understanding of the creation of substantive women’s issues policies as a whole (Childs and Krook 2006).
Legislative institutions are inherently gendered (e.g., Duerst-Lahti 2002; Hawkesworth 2003; Lowndes 2020) with the impact including a lack of women in leadership positions in certain legislative bodies and political parties (Hansen and Clark 2021), ghettoized patterns of women’s appointment as committee chairs (Provins n.d.; Rosenthal 1998), and resistance to gendered cooperation within legislative institutions (Mahoney and Clark 2019; Swers 2003). Institutions can even respond to women’s incorporation in leadership roles by defining the roles themselves (Smooth 2017). Likewise, legislative parties, the chief organizational feature of most legislatures are increasingly ideologically separating women by their party identification (Osborn et al 2019; Frederick 2009) with parties themselves become more polarized with many chambers (e.g. Layman et al 2006) restricting the potential for gendered coordination.
In this paper, following the tradition of feminist institutionalism (Mackay and Waylen 2009; Mackay et al 2010; Kenny 2014; Kenny and Bjarnegard 2025) we argue that scholars should reconsider the relationship between critical mass and women’s policy making by accounting for women’s formal and informal power within their political party and institutional setting. That is, we ask: how powerful are women legislators, and how does measuring this institutional power help explain the connection between electing women and women’s issues policies? Here, we present an original dataset accounting for a range of formal and informal variables impacting women’s incorporation to parties and legislatures at the U.S. state level.
