Response to APSR

From the outside looking in, it is hard to specify what is wrong with an institution. Those of us trying to reform APSR know from the results that something is wrong. The journal is not representative of the many types of research that political scientists perform. No one, not even the editor, has questioned that. But exactly why the journal is so unbalanced, and what might be done to correct it, are vexing issues for those of us who have never participated in its management.

This symposium had its genesis in a workshop on understudied groups in advanced industrial democracies. Sponsored by the American Political Science Association and funded by the Japan–United States Friendship Commission, the workshop met from August 27 through August 29, 2000 in Washington, D.C. It was the first of a cross-cultural series on a spectrum of topics that will give trans-Pacific scholars the benefit of each other's experiences and perspectives. When APSA applied for the grant it stated that: “Japan and the United States share many attributes but also have stiking differences. These similarities and differences allow for informative comparisons and interesting exchanges that are the hallmark of good scholarship. Sharing different perspectives and experiences on a wide range of topics will be helpful and enlightening to scholars on both sides of the Pacific.”

Foreword

It is common belief that democratic political systems are gender neutral. Yet data show that women continue to hold far fewer elected positions than do men. It is thus imperative that we re-examine not only the assumption that political systems are gender neutral, but also the electoral systems themselves. When we identify how the current electoral and political party systems support or sustain these low rates of female office holders we may begin to understand the hurdles that women face in entering politics.

In this brief overview, I examine Japanese literature in women and politics in Japan. In doing so, I focus specifically on literature that examines political institutions—defined here as a set of rules and procedures that affect public policymaking—in the field of equal employment laws. In the first section, I lay out the types of literature that exist in this field. In the following section, I draw attention to what the literature lacks in the field of women and political institutions. In the third section, I scrutinize a few articles that concentrate upon political institutions and politics related to women. In place of a conclusion, I make suggestions for future study.

Information about women who hold appointive office is a neglected area.

–Eileen Shanahan, former Assistant Secretary, HEWEileen Shanahan, former Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HEW, quoted in Carroll and Geiger-Parker, 1983.

With every new presidential administration in the United States, the incoming president is in charge of appointing thousands of individuals to work throughout the executive branch of government and assist him in fulfilling his constitutional responsibility to “faithfully execute the laws of the Nation” (Pfiffner 1996). When the Center of American Women and Politics (CAWP) first began studying female political appointees in the early 1980s, very few women had ever served in Cabinet positions or other high-ranking executive positions within the federal government. In fact, in 1977, almost two hundred years after the founding of the United States, President Carter appointed only the fourth and fifth women ever to serve as Cabinet Secretaries (CAWP 1998). As Carroll and Geiger-Parker note in the introduction to the very first study of female political appointees, “for the first time in history, women had been appointed in large enough numbers to survey and to compare with other appointees” (1983a, ix).

In the 2000 elections, women continued their slow advance into the halls of political power. Today women constitute 13.6% of the House of Representatives, 13% of the Senate, and 22.3% of state legislatures (Center for American Women and Politics 2000). The underrepresentation of women in politics has provoked concern from media commentators, political activists, and feminist scholars who believe that there is a connection between descriptive representation—being a woman—and substantive representation, the advocacy of women's interests (Mansbridge 1999; Phillips 1995; Pitkin 1967; Sapiro 1981). Predictions of the magnitude of women's impact on the policy process span a wide range. The pressure of frequent elections suggests that all representatives, regardless of gender, will zealously advocate the interests of their constituencies. On the other hand, it is possible that female legislators will devote special attention to the interests of women, children, and families. Additionally, women may exhibit a different style of leadership that will have consequences for the very process by which public policy is made. In this essay, I review the evidence concerning the nature of the policy impact of electing women and I suggest directions for future research.

Introduction

In the latest election for Japan's House of Representatives (Lower House) in June 2000, 202 women ran, and 35 were elected.This is the record high under the New Constitution. Another women was elected in the special election of October 2000, elevating women to 7.6% of the House of Representatives. Reflecting the enactment of 1999's Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society in 1999, major political parties in Japan recruited more women candidates than ever before. The Social Democratic Party (SDP) headed by Takako Doi—a women—had the highest percentage of female representatives (52.6%, or 10 of its 19 HR members). The Japan Communist Party (JCP) also increased its percentage (20%, of four out of its 20 HR members). This shows, to some extent, the advantage held by female candidates from leftist parties that advocate feminist concerns, such as gender equality in political representation.

The Scarcity of Female Politicians in Japan

In elections held in April 1946, Japanese women voted for the first time. Due to the old electoral system, voters elected an unprecedented number of women: 39 out of a possible 464 candidates. Since then this record number has never been equaled or broken, and with the establishment in 1947 of the mid-size constituency single-vote system (3–5 seats), the number of women members of the House of Representatives hovered around 10 (2%) until 1986. Although the length of a term of office is set at four years, there are circumstances in which the House may be dissolved.

The study of women and politics in the media is a relatively young subfield, blessed with scholarship from the fields of communications, cultural studies, history, sociology and political science. Members of these fields use methodologies—such as semiotics, qualitative analysis, and quantitative content analysis—to examine the content of communication about women and politics in news and advertising. Studies of the impact of messages use polls, experiments, and focus groups. Scholars draw primarily upon theories of framing (Entman 1993), hegemony (Gramsci 1971), and organizational structures (Epstein 1973; Sigal 1973) to explain why news content looks the way it does. Although most research focuses on content rather than causes and consequences, some studies are putting the pieces together to explain how efforts of groups and individuals influence coverage of women and politics and how audiences react to those messages.

Introduction

This essay focuses on three questions: Why are so few women elected to public office in the United States? What theories might best explain that? Are the theories that explain patterns of women's office holding in one country useful in explaining patterns of office holding in other nations?

In 1869, the state of Iowa admitted Arabella Mansfield to the Bar, making her the first woman to receive a license to practice law in the United States (Epstein 1993, 49). That same year, Myra Bradwell applied for an attorney's license in the state of Illinois. When the state refused her, she appealed her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied her claim by an eight-to-one vote (Bradwell v. Illinois 83 U.S. 130 [1873]). In his concurring opinion, Justic Joseph Bradley argues that, “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator” (83 U.S. 130 [1873]). Ironically, shortly before the Supreme Court announced its decision, another woman in Illinois, Adah Kepley, attained a license to practice law. The judge who granted this license believed that her admission to the Bar was “proper and in accord with the spirit of the age” (Berkson 1982, 288).See Bowman (1998/99) for a list of biographies of these early women lawyers.

Introduction

Japan's social policy has been categorized as a “residual” system, not only because of its low public expenditure (Hill 1996, 21) but also because of the weakness of its institutional form, which relies on private measures (Bryson 1992, 106–10). According to Esping-Anderson's three welfare-state regimes—social democratic, liberal, and conservative, classified by the criteria of decommodification and cross-class solidarity (1990, 21–29)—the Japanese welfare system “combines—in fairly equal measure—key elements of both the liberal-residual and the conservative-corporatist” models (1997, 187).However, Esping-Andersen avoids specifically classifying Japan as one of these three regimes because its welfare system “is still in the process of evolution” (1990, 187). Japan, at the same time, had followed the pattern of “a paternalist welfare state, in which male bureaucrats would administer regulations and social insurance ‘for the good’ of breadwinning industrial workers and their dependants” (Skocpol 1995, 12). Indeed, the Japanese social insurance system is bound by Bismarck's legacy (which basically qualified male employees as eligible for insurance coverage), and its policymaking has been dominated by males: ruling-party politicians, top bureaucrats, and representatives of pressure groups (See Nakano 1997, 13–63, 81–85, 89–94).

Today's policymaking process encompasses a broad range of participants: legislative, executive, and judicial office holders; members of the bureaucracy; and leaders of nongovernmental organizations, including nonprofit and volunteer organizations, private businesses, and interest groups. During the past three decades, women have become significant players in American policymaking, though their success rates have been uneven. Since local jurisdictions have provided better opportunities for women to influence the policy process, I ask the question: What roles do women play as policy influentials and leaders in local government decision making?

Twenty-five years after writing Congress: The Electoral Connection, what are my thoughts about it? Here are five observations of various kinds that I hope might be interesting. The first two belong under the heading, “What kind of work is it?” The last three address the question, “How have I come to think of the book in light of events and scholarship of the last quarter-century?”

The mark of a classic work of scholarship is an enduring lesson: Does the work teach a lesson that remains important and informative decades after it is written? David Mayhew's Congress: The Electoral Connection (1974) certainly statisfies this requirement. It is one of a handful of books published in the last half-century that contains insights and lessons that students of American politics still cite in their research and teach in their classes.

David Mayhew's two wonderful essays that constitute Congress: The Electoral Connection have withstood the test of time admirably well. My thoughts will be organized around two quotations taken from his book, because they reflect the two most remarkable aspects of the book's success: its impact on scholarship over its first quarter-century, and its durable portrait that suggest it will continue to resonate—perhaps with amendment—over the coming years and decades.

In regard to these member needs the best service a party can supply to its congressmen is a negative one; it can loeave them alone. And this in general is what the congressional parties do. Party leaders are chosen not to be program salesman or vote mobilizers, but to be brokers, favor-doers, agenda-setters, and protectors of established institutional routines. Party “pressure” to vote one way or another is minimal. Party “whipping” hardly deserves the name. (Mayhew 1974, 99–100)

The House Republican Party acted remarkably like the cohesive, responsible party of party government theory. It proposed and ran on a policy agenda; it organized the chamber and empowered its leaders so as to facilitate the expeditious translation of the agenda into law; with the members maintaining high cohesion, the party delivered on its promises. The fragmentation and lack of discipline most observers of American Politics claim to be cardinal characteristics of American political parties were not in evidence. (Sinclair 1998, 263)

Congress: The Electoral Connection was an important book when it appeared in 1974, and it remains one 25 years later. One measure of the importance of a work is the research that it stimulates. Mayhew's focus on advertising and credit claiming has led to a good deal of research on these activities, and those who study Congress have learned much from both Mayhew himself and the scholars he inspired. Moreover, analyses of advertising and credit claiming continue to proliferate and have recently been conducted on legislatures outside the United States. His identification of the third electorally-motivated activity, position taking, has had a more subtle and insidious impact on the study of Congress.

I cannot imagine my work on the U.S. Congress without David Mayhew's little book. When I discovered it in Trevor's bookstore in the fall of 1974, I was a 27-year-old newly minted Ph. D. who had just spent two years “teaching Congress” at the University of Texas and was on Capitol Hill working as an APSA Congressional Fellow. It was a heady time, both in Congress and in congressional studies. Vietnam was focusing attention on how the action and inaction of Congress affected the lives of ordinary citizens, particularly the young. Nixon's resignation a few moths earlier had helped sweep into office a new generation of Democratic legislators who then activated a period of dramatic legislative reform. An extraordinary generation of congressional scholars—Cooper, Davidson, Dexter, Fenno, Froman, Huitt, Jones, Kingdon, Lowi, Manley, Oleszek, Patterson, Polsby, Price, Rieselbach, Ripley, Truman, Wildavsky, Wolfinger, Young, and others—was etching out the details of congressional politics in a richly compelling manner. In the broader discipline, the works of Dahl, Downs, Easton, and Riker were holding out the promise that rigorous theoretical analysis could enable political scientists to make parsimonious and even predictive sense out of politics. And a new generation of young scholars had been drawn to the study of Congress by the conditions of the time and the intellectual ferment of the field. Into this swirl came The Electoral Connection.

Thanks for all those comments, or at least most of them! I will touch on a few of the points briefly, then close with two observations.