ABSTRACT
The ascension of Nancy Pelosi to Speaker of the House marks a major milestone in the history of women’s participation in American politics. However, the media attention lavished on Pelosi masks a more persistent trend in women’s political participation, the slow pace of women’s integration into political office. Indeed, in comparison to their numbers in the general population, women are greatly underrepresented at all levels of political office. For example, in the halls of Congress women constitute only 16 percent of the membership in the House and Senate. Furthermore, the political representation of women in the U.S. lags behind the advancement of women in other developed nations, particularly the Nordic countries where the proportion of women in the lower house of Parliament ranges from 37 percent in Denmark to 47 percent in Sweden.*
While scholars have spent years examining the institutional and sociological factors that contribute to women’s underrepresentation in elective office, we have yet to develop a consensus around the primary factors that contribute to this imbalance in order to inform efforts at reform. With regard to institutions, scholars note that American women are disadvantaged by an electoral system that features weak parties, candidate-centered
proportional representation with strong parties that control nominations or even quota systems. Yet, the stickiness of institutions makes institutional reform a difficult target. Incremental reforms such as the adoption of term limits in many state legislatures have not been beneficial to women. Susan J. Carroll and Krista Jenkins find that in many states the dearth of women in the political pipeline meant that term-limited women were not replaced by other women.
