Honors Program Theses

Award/Availability

Open Access Honors Program Thesis

First Advisor

Christopher Larimer

Abstract

This paper examines whether descriptive representation, in terms of gender, affects substantive representation among female legislators in a single state legislature. Data are collected from the 82nd General Assembly of the Iowa state legislature's lower-house. The unit of analysis is the individual bill. Controlling for legislator and district characteristics, I test whether legislator gender has an independent effect on the likelihood of the introduction of healthcare legislation. Utilizing the substantive representation index, and logistic regression with robust-cluster-standard-errors, I find that males introduce more healthcare bills when compared to females. The implications of this finding in terms of legislative representation are then discussed.

Year of Submission

2008

Department

Department of Political Science

University Honors Designation

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the designation University Honors

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

12-2008

Object Description

1 PDF file (28 pages)

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