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The article explores how women's experiences in neighborhood associations are hindered by gender, as well as how women confront exclusions in their everyday living. It discusses the meaning of gender and identity, and how gender is constructed through discourse and social interaction. It also describes and assesses the ways in which gender is constructed in the context of neighborhood associations.

This paper uses interpretive methods to examine the lived experiences of people in neighborhood associations and how social identities such as gender, race, and ethnicity might be relevant to these experiences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I investigate how gendered, racial, and ethnic identities are relevant to people’s understanding of their experiences in neighborhood associations. Specifically, I explore how social identities are constructed through social interaction and how the environmental context of a neighborhood association has the capacity to influence one’s identity within a social group. Neighborhood associations are one of the many ways in which people participate in and influence local politics. To gather data, I conducted participant observation, interviews, and document analysis of neighborhood association meetings in St. Louis over the course of a year. Using the principles of discourse analysis and interpretive research as my guide, this analysis focuses on determining how the social context and nature of group interactions permeate a person’s understanding of their role in politics. I find that neighborhood associations clarify social identities in a way that reinforce exclusion, thus undercutting the potential effectiveness of neighborhood organizations as tools for facilitating democratic citizenship. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research on women's ability to get legislation passed in Congress and state legislatures indicates that female legislators are just as successful at getting their legislation passed as male legislators, and they may even be more successful. In examining legislative success, these studies implicitly assume that men and women face the same challenges within the lawmaking process. However, we do not know if female and male legislators face the same obstacles in the legislative arena or how they might handle these obstacles. To this end, we examine legislative effectiveness at three stages in the House of Representatives during the103rd - 105th Congress: the process by which legislators are able to get their legislation approved by committees, passed on the floor, and eventually enacted into law. Our results indicate that female members of the House of Representatives pursue legislation in a somewhat different manner than male legislators although the process is only significantly different at the committee stage. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how patterns of social communication between men and women relate to gender differences in voting behavior. Using data drawn from the 2000 National Election Study we test three different models of gendered voting. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 1990s, citizens have used the initiative process to limit the behavior of their state legislatures. In several states, these initiatives have led to term limitations for state legislators (e.g., Arkansas, Ohio, Michigan). In other states, voters have chosen to limit the number of days legislators can meet in any given year (e.g., Colorado) and have cut legislative budgets, staffs, and pension benefits (e.g., California). It would seem that the public very much dislikes those occupying their statehouses. In this paper we investigate whether the public's punitive actions against state legislatures are the result of actual state-level conditions or whether the public is displacing their anger and disapproval of Congress onto their state legislative bodies. Early in the term limitation movement several states attempted to term limit their Congressional representatives as well as their state legislative representatives. The Supreme Court quickly ruled that term limiting members of Congress was unconstitutional, but upheld the term limiting of state legislators. Are citizens punishing their Statehouses for the sins of the Congress? Using a variety of available public opinion, policy, and institutional measures, we seek to understand the extent to which citizen disapproval of state legislative performance is related to feelings about Congress. We find only limited evidence that the public displaces their anger, and more support for the idea that they transfer their pleasure with Congress to state actors. There seems to be little association between negative ratings of Congress and punitive ballot measures at the state level, but improved Congressional ratings seem to lead to the passage of fewer restrictive measures at the state level, as well as the proposal and passage of more measures expanding state power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]