This study tests the hypothesis that collective descriptive
representation has important benefits for strengthening and legitimizing
democratic society. Specifically, we test whether increased proportions of
collective female descriptive representation in the statehouse and the
presence of a female state executive are important to female
citizens' attitudes toward government responsiveness, or external
efficacy. We hypothesize that an increase in female collective descriptive
representation in the legislative and state executive branches of
government will increase female citizens' external efficacy but will
be unimportant to males. We pooled American National Election Studies
(ANES) data from 1988 to 1998 and used ordered probit techniques to test
the hypothesis. In addition to our main independent variable of interest,
our model includes state political culture, dyadic descriptive
representation, dyadic substantive representation, sociodemographics,
political participation, strength of partisanship, and electoral dummy
variables as controls. Our results confirm that higher levels of
collective female descriptive representation promote higher values of
external efficacy for female citizens, suggesting that collective female
descriptive representation has important benefits to a democratic
society.An earlier version of this article
was presented at the American Political Science Association's Annual
Meeting in San Francisco, California, August 30–September 2, 2001,
and the International Society of Political Psychology, Seattle,
Washington, July 1–4, 2000. We would like to thank the following
people for their comments and support: Anthony Coveny, Randall Partin, and
Cherie Maestas.