[Crossed-posted from Primary Colors.]
Back in 2011 Matthew Yglesias observed that DW-Nominate scores showed Democratic women were more liberal than Democratic men, but then updated the post with a link to this 2009 paper from Brian Frederick showing that the effect went away when you controlled for a district's partisan profile.
We were curious if that had changed at all five years later, so we mapped male and female House Democrats' progressive voting scores compared to their districts' partisan profiles.
It's not a major difference, but just in case you needed any more reasons to elect more Democratic women to Congress -- however small -- here it is:
At least if you rate the importance of a progressive score the way we do -- where current congress and crucial votes are weighted more, etc. -- the Democratic congresswomen above are on average consistently more progressive than men. The distinction is fairly small, as it's a difference of approximately two points, but it's still noticeable.
Democratic congresswomen also technically vote more progressive than men in R+ districts as well -- when they get elected there. But since there are only three Democratic women in the House currently representing districts that lean Republican [1, 2, 3], we don't have enough data to make an accurate determination.
If you extrapolate this graph, the takeaway is that simply electing more Democratic women to Congress will automatically shift it to the left. Only 31% of Democratic elected officials in the House are women, so the return on a political investment in a campaign to equalize representation within the Democratic Party would be high. Embarrassingly, women hold only 19% of all seats, but make up 51% of the country.
This is an opportunity to make Congress more progressive and more representative of the American people. Let's get to it.