Over the weekend I completed a long-form outline (about 1800 words). I finally feel like I have a grasp of the structure of my paper and its been a lot easier to figure out what other questions I still need to ask.
I wrote out a quick abstract:
On the surface, the 2012 election looked like a victory for women; more women than ever will serve in both the House of Representatives and the US Senate. These gains are indicative of a slow moving pattern in which women continually gain seats at the national level. When we look closer, we see a trend that should be disturbing, not celebrated. While women are making clear gains, they are only doing so in the Democratic Party. There is a growing partisan gap when it comes to female Congress members. This partisan-gender gap exists at all levels of government, but here I specifically look at the deficit of Republican women being elected to the United States House of Representatives during the election of 2012.
The main focus for this outline was working out the 6 hypotheses that I'm working with.
- Pipeline: Do Republican candidates have prior legislative experience?
- Primaries: Because primaries tend to reward extremism and the electorate sees Republican women to be more moderate than their male counterparts, are Republican women at a disadvantage?
- Fundraising: There are significant sources of political money directed at women candidates; yet the groups that support Democratic women overwhelmingly outnumber the groups that support Republican women; How does this disadvantage effect Republican women trying to raise money?
- Regionalism: Where are Republican women succeeding? The Republican party has made significant gains in the South where women have historically under-performed. Is the South still an area where Republican women are more disadvantaged?
- Republicanism: The two parties have become increasingly polarized over the last two decades. This is the same time that the partisan gender gap started to appear. How has this polarization affected Republican women? Because Republican women have generally been seen as more moderate than their male counterparts there may be a disadvantage to the increasing polarization; do Republican women have to become more conservative to survive in the current political environment?
- Redistricting: 2012 was a re-districting year. How did this affect female Republican incumbents?
I'm working in close dialog with several previous scholarly works:
- Women and Congressional Elections by Barbara Palmer and Dennis Simon
- The Partisan Gap and Women State Legislative Candidates by Laurel Elder
I'll be working on an appendices page over the next week to keep track of all the sources that I've been using.
You can see the outline in its entirety here:
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