Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Thomas, Sue
• Welch, Susan

Titel

Commentary on the 1991 Thomas and Welch Article "The Impact of Gender on Activities and Priorities of State Legislators"

Ist Teil von

• Political research quarterly, 2008-03, Vol.61 (1), p.43-45

Ort / Verlag

Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications

Erscheinungsjahr

2008

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

PAIS Index

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The message distilled from this research is that pipeline issues are much deeper than a time lag between the present and the moment when an experienced, trained, and interested pool of women will emerge mat will yield a fully representative legislative body.\n Since that time, policy studies focused on individual-level bill introduction and passage and aggregate women-friendly policy existence across state legislatures have been more prevalent, but they too have produced mixed results. Some reasons are as follow: (1) mixed empirical results across existing studies are unsurprising in light of vast differences in research designs and operationalizations; (2) separating out previously conflated concepts of critical mass, threshold effects, token versus nontoken status, and relationships between the rise in women's representation and increased women-friendly policy enactment will improve the nature of this line of inquiry; (3) the impact and importance of critical acts and critical actors on achieving equity goals are theoretically and empirically consistent with the existence of relationships between levels of representation and policy enactments; (4) differences among women officeholders may reasonably be expected to coexist with such effects as they presently do with collective equity impacts; and (5) exploration need not rest on essentialist assumptions.