Women’s legislative collaboration and institutional constraints: Variation from the Argentine provinces

Abstract

In democracies, power is obtained via competition. Yet, as women gain access to parliaments in record numbers, worldwide collaboration appears to be on the rise. Why are women more likely than men to collaborate? I argue that as women have limited access to formal and informal political power, they collaborate more than men to influence policy-making. Despite that all women have an incentive to collaborate to overcome their marginalized status in legislatures and to attain political power, women’s collaboration varies because not all women have the same electoral incentive or institutional opportunities to collaborate. (...) By comparison, in districts where party leaders exercise more constraint over legislators’ behavior, women are only marginally more likely than men to collaborate with other women and their propensity to do so decreases when women comprise a larger share of the chamber.