At the Intersection of Gender and Party: Legislative Freedom

This paper examines the conditional effects of legislator gender, party, and key district-level characteristics on patterns of roll-call votes. I propose and test a theory of legislative freedom conceptualized as a member of Congress's ability to defect from their party in roll-call votes. I argue that women members of Congress (MCs) will be more able to exercise legislative freedom in women-friendly districts. I expect both Democratic and Republican women MCs representing women-friendly districts will be more likely than those representing districts that are less women-friendly to defect from party and that the women-friendly district effect will be stronger for Republican women MCs. To test these hypotheses, I use roll-call voting data, women-friendly district data (Palmer and Simon 2006), and original data collected on members of the U.S. House beginning with the 103rd Congress. In this paper, I further explore the proposed theory of legislative freedom to examine recent high-profile cases of women MCs defecting from the Republican party and the conditions in which they exercise this freedom.