Publications by Author: Rosenbluth, Frances

Low levels of female labor force participation contribute to female underrepresentation in democratic polities, both by reinforcing traditional voter attitudes toward women (a demand-side feature) and by constraining the supply of women with professional experience and resources who are capable of mounting credible electoral campaigns. Female labor force participation, however, is only part of the story. Comparative analysis suggests that electoral systems have a strong, systematic effect on the extent to which women’s workforce participation boosts female political representation. In candidatecentered political systems, where seniority is an important factor in legislative effectiveness, career interruptions for the sake of childcare and other family work hurts female aspiring politicians more seriously than in proportional representation (PR) systems, where political parties control the policy platform and constituency service is a minor consideration in the careers of candidates. In countries with mixed electoral systems, women do better in seats elected by PR than by single-member plurality. Within countries, women are more likely to get elected to offices characterized by shorter tenure and higher average levels of turnover.

Most studies of gender socialization start with patriarchy and explore its effects on female social, economic, and political status. In this paper we turn the causal arrow the other way to understand where patriarchal values come from in the first place. We argue that the relationship between the mobility of male economic assets to the mobility of female economic assets goes far in explaining intra-family bargaining power, and by extension, in explaining the norms that become societally dominant. We investigate this proposition empirically by looking at mate choice preferences between agricultural, industrial, and post-industrial societies, and by looking at the gender gap in political attitudes.

This paper argues that governments formed from post–election coalitions (majority coalition governments in PR systems) and pre–election coalitions (majority parties in SMD systems) aggregate the interests of voters in systematically different ways. We show that the multiple policy dimensional policy space that emerges from PR motivates parties in the government coalition to logroll projects among themselves without internalizing the costs in the way that a majoritarian party would. We further show that, although centrifugal electoral incentives dominate in PR systems, some incentives towards coalescence across groups and across parties exist through the greater likelihood that large parties have in becoming a member of a minimal winning coalition of parties. The model predicts that the size of the public sector should should be larger in PR systems. This prediction is tested using data from the 1970's–90's in 17 European countries.

Most explanations of female under-representation in democratic polities emphasize either demand for female representatives (say, as a function of female labor force participation), the political mobilization of women, or overt or covert discrimination by male-dominated political organizations. We offer a different—though not necessarily competing—explanation based on an analysis of democratic politics as a particular type of career market. Because seniority is an important factor in legislative effectiveness in candidatecentered systems, career interruptions for the sake of childcare and other family work hurts female aspiring politicians more seriously in majoritarian systems than in PR systems where political parties control the policy platform and constituency service is a minor consideration in the careers of candidates. We find support for this explanation from several sources. First, we find that personalistic electoral systems penalize females (following the rank ordering technique provided by Carey and Shugart 1995). Second, we find that in countries with mixed electoral systems women do better in seats elected by PR than by SMP.