Fixing Washington:
Two new books on what's right and wrong with Congress
Story about two books about Congress, including "Women & Congressional Elections: A Century of Change," co-written by SMU Associate Professor of Political Science Dennis Simon.
By Heath Brown
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Seton Hall University
Today, public approval of Congress is around 15 percent. A summer of gridlock is clearly not good for the business of Washington or for its popularity. Thankfully, two new books help make some sense of what's right and wrong with Congress.
The first is Women & Congressional Elections: A Century of Change (Lynne Rienner 2012) from Barbara Palmer (Baldwin Wallace University) and Dennis Simon (Southern Methodist University). The authors accumulated a lot of new data on when and where women have run and won: nearly 40,000 candidates in total. Jeannette Rankin was the first women to serve in Congress in 1916, Rebecca Latimer Felton in the Senate in 1922, Shirley Chisholm was the first African American to win an election (1968), and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen the first Hispanic American (1989).
Thanks to these pioneers, women are represented in much greater numbers than in the past, but still, just three states send more than a third of the women currently serving in Congress. This persistent inequality is in part because the conditions for a successful campaign are clustered around a small number of variables: smaller, urban, wealthier, and racially/ethnically diverse districts favor women candidates. Women candidates do not fare well in every district of the country, resulting in some states with a disproportionate share of women representatives.
Most intriguingly, Palmer and Simon find that women face even bigger challenges for re-election. Incumbency, which typically insures an increasingly safe ride through the primaries, does not seem to bring the same safety as for men. Women members of Congress face more opposition from across party lines but also from within their own party during the primary phase. Palmer and Simon unearth why this may be the case.
Despite the persistent under-representation of women in Congress, the trend is positive, and Palmer and Simon demonstrate how the future could continue to trend in that direction in favor of better representation.
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