Political Parties, Legislatures, and the Organizational Foundations of Representation in America

When Heather Wilson first arrived in Washington, D.C. in June of 1998 after winning a special election to become the first Republican woman from New Mexico and the first woman military veteran to be elected to Congress, she was something of a darling in the Republican Party. With Senator Pete Dominici as a mentor (Giroux 1998) and having won a seat on the prestigious Energy and Commerce Committee (then known as the Commerce Committee), her first choice (Associated Press 1998), she seemed poised for a quick ride to top of the Republicans’ leadership ladder. During her tenure, Wilson was a loyal Republican, managing to vote with her party most of the time despite the fact that her district leaned Democratic, having supported John Kerry for president over George W. Bush in 2004 (Giroux 2007). For her loyalty, Wilson received fundraising help and national visibility from the Republican leadership (Coleman 2005).

But all that quickly changed, despite having voted with her party over 90 percent of the time in the previous three years, after she made several moves in 2004 that the party leadership, particularly Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Joe Barton, deemed to be disloyal (Coleman 2004). “I’m an independent person,” Wilson explained to her hometown newspaper, the Albuquerque Journal. “I fight for New Mexico and I try to do it politely and with some grace. But I can’t be bullied.” (Coleman 2005). After Wilson broke Republican ranks and voted for a proposal that would force the Bush White House to release internal cost estimates for their prescription drug program, Chairman Barton began telling other members of the committee that he wanted Wilson kicked off. According to Wilson’s Chief of Staff Bryce Dustman: “We’re kind of puzzled about why Chairman Barton would be so upset over a single vote. Up until Thanksgiving she had an excellent relationship with the chairman.” (Coleman 2004). Ultimately, Wilson kept her seat on Energy and Commerce, but lost her seat on Armed Services because Chairman Barton refused to grant the “waiver” she needed to serve on both committees (Journal Washington Bureau 2005). She resigned her House seat in 2008 to run for the Senate: She lost in the primary.

Heather Wilson’s story illustrates anecdotally that the theoretical propositions derived from the preceding chapter’s unified theory of colleague valuation in political organizations. The aim of this chapter is to provide an empirical test of those propositions. Specifically, the theoretical model predicts generalized tokenism effects that transcend how majority groups treat minority groups. Instead, we show that both majority group and minority group members alter their valuations of members of the other group as that group’s relative size changes. Furthermore, group size effects become relatively more important than preference (ideological) divergence effects on individual-level colleague valuation decisions as the numerical balance between the majority and minority groups approaches parity. In turn, this means that as the minority group becomes smaller, both majority and minority group members increasingly discount the value of individual members from their own group, as well as those from the other group, due to ideological differences.

These results have implications for the descriptive-substantive representation link because they indicate that minority group members are constrained in terms of the ideological preferences they can safely reveal. In fact, the point at which men most highly value women – when the proportion of women is at its smallest – is precisely the point at which their failure to toe the ideological line yields the greatest punishment. In fact, Figure 4.1A reveals that even the slightest deviation from a man’s ideal point results in a precipitous decline in men’s valuation of women. Under these circumstances, then, women can do little to represent other women substantively when any overtures toward that representation will result in a loss of the esteem that provide token women with any power at all.

The statistical evidence analyzing member-to-member leadership PAC contributions in the U.S. House of Representatives for the 105^th-108^th Congresses yields strong support for the theory in several ways. Specifically, the analysis finds that when men with leadership PACs valuate their colleagues, both men and women, the gender composition of the group plays a central role in those valuations. Men give more to men, less to women, as the proportion of women increases. For women with leadership PACs, however, the results are less clear. Women valuate each other significantly differently from how men valuate each other, but the effect of gender composition is much more muted with respect to women colleague valuation decisions. In other words, although women value other women more highly as the proportion of women in the party increases, they do not increase these intra-group valuations enough to offset the decrease in inter-group valuations from their majority-men colleagues. Further, contrary to the theory, women actually increase their valuations of men as the proportion of women increases, possibly as a means to diffuse the threat that they pose to the majority group within the political organization, thus creating an asymmetric tokenism effect whereby men devalue women as their ranks increase but women do not concomitantly value each other more highly. The preference divergence effects reveal in seven out of eight instances that House members place a greater value on a colleague as preference divergence declines at any given value of w or m.

These results make a vital contribution to the literature on tokenism in general. We find strong support for the main implication of Kanter’s (1977) theory: Men do, in fact devalue women as the ranks of women increase. Yet the secondary implication of that theory – that women will increasingly value one another – sees little support. Furthermore, our consideration of preference divergence adds another aspect to the tokenism theory. Ideology is extremely important in the U.S. Congress, and also extremely easy to measure in that context, but this does not mean that preference divergence is absent in other types of workplaces at which Kanter’s theory might apply. Our research, for example, has implications for Kanter’s sales force. Certainly, members of a sales force will have different attitudes and ideas relating to their approach toward sales. Some will favor the use of technology, such as the internet. Others will not. Some will value the “personal touch” with customers, and others will think it is less important than quick and reliable service. Our research indicates that minority group size will affect the relative importance of those factors in determining how effectively members of the sales force (or of any group of professions who must work together) will be able to collaborate. Furthermore, these effects matter not only as a question of how to integrate minority group members into the larger group effectively or how to ensure that minority group members can collaborate with each other. Our results show that minority group size also affects how majority group members tolerate deviations in approaches even from other majority group members, a result that is not likely to be limited to Congress. Indeed, it is likely true in any workplace in which collaboration among colleagues is important. For managers interested in fostering cooperation among their employees, our results indicate that they can ignore the effect of minority group dynamics only to their detriment, since these effects have direct implications for their employees’ abilities to work with their colleagues, either from the same or from the other group.

More important for our purposes, these findings have clear implications for the study of group behavior in representative institutions. Legislators prefer those colleagues who are ideologically closest to them, and those preferences are much stronger when the relative sizes of the two groups are far from parity. A legislature with a token minority group is a legislature in which personal relationships are tenuous. Majority group members value their minority group colleagues provided they do not represent a threat to the status quo: Preference divergence is just such a threat, and so majority group valuations of minority group members are very sensitive to any changes in divergence. Similarly, token minority group members know that their power vis-à-vis the majority is rooted in the majority’s willingness to tolerate the minority. Preference divergence may mean decreased tolerance, which translates to decreased power vis-à-vis the majority. Within-group valuations are similarly sensitive to changes in preference divergence, since preference comity is the sole source of utility from a within-group colleague when groups are far from parity. This is because neither group can derive much group-based utility from each other, men because they represent the long-standing majority group that is so large that they do not need each other, women because they constitute a long-standing minority group that is so small that they cannot effectively work together.

These results indicate that it is impossible to understand the true effects of tokenism in a legislative setting without properly accounting for preference divergence. Similarly, the effects of preference divergences cannot be fully understood except through the lens of tokenism. The results, then, point to the critical role group size plays in myriad facets of legislative life where issues like the representation of minority groups had not previously been considered important. If group size affects how legislators respond to something as foundational as ideological position, what other foundational effects might group size have? The answer to that question is left for future research. At the same time, though, the results have prescriptive implications for the effect of minority or under-represented groups in legislatures in matters that have little to do with minority representation itself. If the legislature already includes dramatic ideological divergence that may create organizational instability, increasing representation of a small minority group will help mitigate this instability, since larger minority group translate to less dramatic effects of preference divergence on colleague valuation. Increasing minority group representation, then, could have a calming effect in general on legislatures with intra-party heterogeneity that may cause volatility in legislators’ interactions with one another.

Surely, we will know more when we can analyze a legislature in which women have transitioned to majority status. Yet the evidence reveals that this transition may not be as smooth as aggregate-level studies suggest (e.g. Grey 2006; Yoder 1991). This is because women U.S. House members, as their numbers increase, do not exchange support from men colleagues with support from each other, leading to asymmetric tokenism. If we consider leadership PAC campaign contributions as being akin to gifts meant to obligate colleagues to provide future help (e.g., Gouldner 1960; Shrum and Kilburn 1996), the results may indicate that women do not properly assess the abilities of their women colleagues to provide valuable future assistance. Instead, their valuations tend to mirror those of the men in their group. These findings may suggest that valuations of minority and majority groups are not, in fact, symmetric, since men increasingly devalue women but women do not increasingly value each other. Further, if these asymmetric tokenism patterns persist as the proportion of women increase beyond those we observe in these data, then it is possible that gender quotas, which many proportional representation systems have implemented in recent years, may not serve as a panacea, since numbers alone will not solve the problem.

The asymmetric tokenism effects we uncover may indicate that women face a dual dilemma as their ranks increase: Men devalue them, which is to be expected, but so do women, which implies that minority and under-represented groups that are increasing in size will see a concomitant decrease in actual influence in the legislature. Regardless of group size, coordination problems may make attaining an effective critical mass of women an elusive goal (see Chapter 5). Moreover, the unified theory of colleague valuation in political organizations extends to those representative institutions that do not offer data on member to member campaign contributions, such as those that rely on publicly-financed elections. But empirical analysis of these types of elected assemblies would necessitate the use of less finely grained data with strong resource constraints, such as party leadership and committee assignments. Nonetheless, these results have strong implications for minority representation in general, because they indicate that under-represented minorities in democratic institutions receive benefits from their token minority status, but those benefits ebb once the group reaches a size large enough to provide benefits for each other. Even then, there are no guarantees that the group can provide benefits. Most starkly, increasing the size of an underrepresented group may actually dramatically diminish the level of institutional support members of that group receive. Put simply, both majority and minority groups appear to reinforce one another in the construction of an implicit “glass ceiling” that serves to constrain entrenched minority group members’ ability to work together to fulfill the promise of increased minority representation.

Now that we have identified firm empirical evidence of intra-minority group behavior that is inconsistent with the canonical tokenism logic, we move next to seek to understand the source of this problem. Addressing this inconsistency is critical on normative grounds since if minority group members have difficulty coordinating amongst one another, then the link between descriptive representation (“numbers”) and substantive representation (“policy”) will be substantially frayed. We tackle this problem by advancing an explanation for why women devalue one another as their ranks increase. We turn our attention to addressing this puzzle in the next chapter by focusing on the coordination dilemmas confronting women in the U.S. Senate. We pursue this puzzle in the form of a comparative analysis of differences in how current women Senators value fellow incumbent women colleagues and how they value prospective women colleagues. In doing so, we can determine whether coordination problems among women legislators are the culprit for these asymmetric tokenism effects. Moreover, we discuss the implications of asymmetric tokenism on minority groups’ ability to rely on the attainment of a critical mass to unilaterally usher in the ability to work together successfully.

values. Some control variables omitted for space. See Endnote 16 for more information.

** p < 0.05 (one-tail test). * p< 0.10 (one-tail test).