Getting a High Heel in the Door: An Experiment on State Legislator Responsiveness to Women’s Issue Lobbying

Abstract

Are women in office more likely to providvae access to women’s lobby groups than men in office? If so, how can women’s strategic lobbying increase the responsiveness of male legislators? This paper presents a field experiment examining how women and men in state legislatures respond differently to women’s organizational lobbying. My findings suggest that substantial gender gaps do exist; women are twice as likely to respond to a women’s issue group’s simple meeting request. That said, meeting requests signaling constituent mobilization have heterogeneous effects across legislator gender, doubling the likelihood that a male legislator will respond and effectively closing gender gaps in responsiveness. My results identify how women’s lobbying can employ distinct lobbying strategies on descriptive and nondescriptive representatives to successfully gain their attention. In distinguishing differing pathways toward maximizing opportunities for women’s organizational inclusion in policymaking, this paper importantly informs women’s groups lobbying in state legislatures, wherein low levels of descriptive representation often persist.