Date of Award
1-1-2012
Document Type
Campus Access Dissertation
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Laura Woliver
Second Advisor
Lee Walker
Abstract
My dissertation advances the theory of democratic representation by separating descriptive representation from substantive representation. Although there has been a substantial amount of research on the relationship between gender and legislative representation, there are conflicting findings about the activities and effects of female legislators. The outcome variable, government spending, measures substantive representation by analyzing government spending data across several issue areas. The key question is: has the addition of women to national legislatures led to an increase in government spending in women's issue areas?
Despite the quantitative nature of the data, I employed a mixed methods approach to identify the causal mechanisms between female legislators and government spending outcomes. I constructed a substantial cross-national, time-series data set, which tracks spending in defense, education, childcare, and maternity/paternity leave spending during a 28 year period. I joined the dependent variable data with measures of the percent of women in the legislature, the presence of a strong, autonomous women's movement, the presence of a state feminist agency, the rate of female labor force participation, while also including additional covariates. Following the statistical analyses, I employed case-studies to illustrate the causal mechanisms within legislative process.
Rights
© 2012, Jennifer Suzanne Tison
Recommended Citation
Tison, J. S.(2012). Female Legislators and the Power of the Purse: Does Gender Affect Government Spending? A Cross-National Analysis. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/1797