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legislative remedies and whose interests should be incorporated in a piece of legislation.
Additionally, the roll-call vote represents a censored preference in which members are
restricted to the choices embodied in the vote rather than being able to select the policy
option closest to their preferences. Since all members must cast a vote, examining roll-
call votes provides little insight into the intensity of policy preferences.
Toward a Theory of Legislative Entrepreneurship on Women’s Issues
In this study, I suggest that to understand the impact of descriptive representation,
we should look at the beginning stages of policy development, at the agenda setting phase
where issues get defined, competing policies are drafted, and policy solutions vie for the
attention of time-constrained legislators (Kingdon 1984, Baumgartener and Jones 1993).
I hypothesize that women are more likely to act as legislative entrepreneurs seeking to
place the concerns of women on the legislative agenda than are their male partisan
colleagues (Hypothesis 1). Congressional scholars describe legislative entrepreneurs as
those members who invest their scarce resources of time, staff, and individual effort to
gather the information necessary to become experts in an area, identify existing
opportunities for enacting legislation that others have failed to notice or pursue, draft
policy proposals, and build coalitions and design strategies for enacting those policies
(Wawro 2000, Kingdon 1984, Arnold 1990). Additionally, the decision to become a
champion of one legislative cause involves an opportunity cost that prevents legislators
from focusing the needed time and resources in another legislative arena and takes away
resources that could be devoted to constituency service (Hall 1996, Wawro 2000).
Theorists who argue in favor of descriptive representation, maintain that women
and other underrepresented minority groups will display an added intensity of
commitment to issues that have a disproportionate impact on their group (Mansbridge
Convention