How do the President and the Congress affect the policy choices of the Federal Open Market Committee, the primary policymaking arm of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed)? I draw on a commonly used tool for estimating the sensitivity of Fed responses to output and inflation - the Taylor rule - to learn about the politics of monetary policy. Does the Fed respond more aggressively to inflation under a Republican President or if a Republican majority controls Congress? Does the Fed respond to recession sooner and with lower interest rates if the President is a Democrat? The results indicate that the ideology of the pivotal legislator influences monetary policy choices, rather than the President alone, appointments to the Board, or the Board chair. The Fed is more responsive to inflation when Republicans control the White House and the Congress.

Chapter 3 explores the relationship between gender rights provisions and gender equality outcomes. Are there different outcomes where women's equality is constitutionally valued, protected, and promoted? To address this question, this chapter looks at whether specific rights and provisions are associated with a more women-friendly legal framework in several key policy areas, including family law, reproductive autonomy, and employment equality. Egalitarian provisions are associated with legal frameworks that are more supportive of women's rights. These legal frameworks may, in turn, contribute to greater gender equality; thus, the chapter also examines whether constitutional provisions, along with other explanatory factors, contribute to greater gender equality as measured by global indicators. This analysis employs the authors' global database in which each country's constitution is coded systematically with respect to sex and gender-based rights and protections at three points in time over a 20-year period. The cross-national results show that egalitarian provisions are associated with greater gender equality, while maternal provisions are negatively associated with gender equality.

T he nineteenth amendment to the us constitution was ratified in August 1920, setting of a fl urry of speculation about how newly enfranchised women would vote in the upcoming presidential election. Although women in fi fteen states already enjoyed the right to vote by 1920, politicians and observers nonetheless expressed uncertainty about what to expect. “Women’s Vote Bal es Politicians’ Ef orts to Forecast Election” claimed one newspaper. 1 Another reported that “anxious politicians of both parties are sitting up nights worrying about [women’s votes].” 2 Appeals to new women voters emphasized issues specifi c to women, such as equal pay and maternity care, and issues related to women’s roles as mothers, such as child labor and education. 3 In the aftermath of the election, many claimed that women had handed the election to Republican Warren G. Harding , for reasons ranging from his good looks to the Republican party’s support of women’s suf rage. 4

After a more than seven-decade battle, American women secured the right to vote in August 1920. The struggle for women to have a voice in elections was not over, however. The Nineteenth Amendment states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The amendment gives Congress the power to enforce the law by appropriate legislation. It does not, however, empower or charge any government office or actor with ensuring that women can and do cast ballots. This article argues that this reality, often taken for granted, has serious implications for both the incorporation of women into the electorate and the representation of their political interests.

In the wake of the presidential election of 1980, the women’s movement was at a crossroads. The victorious Republican party had removed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the defining feminist issue of the time, from its platform after nearly 40 years of support, and, for the first time, added an unequivocal statement in opposition to abortion rights. New president Ronald Reagan was strongly supported by Phyllis Schlafly, the well-known anti-feminist activist and organizer.

Presidential elections in the twenty-first century broke with history in many ways, from the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 vote count to Barack Obama’s barrier-breaking nomination and victory to the unprecedented events of the 2016 campaign. From “W is for Women” to the first major party nomination of a woman candidate for president, women remained front and center in presidential election discourse and debate nearly 100 years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

On July 19, 1848, some 300 women and men gathered at Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. They had traveled from as far as fifty miles away in response to an advertisement Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and three other women had placed in the Seneca County Courier just five days earlier, inviting the public to a “women’s rights convention.” After two days of speeches and deliberations, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men (one-third of those in attendance) signed the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled after the Declaration of Independence. The document identified grievances related to employment, marriage, and property, and directly critiqued women’s place in society, religion, and the home.

Consider the presidential elections of 1932 and 1980. These two contests occurred less than 50 years apart but represent distinctly different moments for the political fortunes of the major parties. The historic election of 1932 ushered in a new Democratic majority that would persist for decades. In that election, slightly fewer than 50% of eligible women turned out to vote, compared to three-quarters of men, a more than 25-point difference. Despite differences in turnout, both women and men gave a large majority of their votes to the political party that promised to work aggressively to alleviate the suffering of the Great Depression: 60% of women and 57% of men cast their ballots for Democrat Franklin Roosevelt.

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The decades of the 1940s and 1950s conjure conflicting images of American women. The strong and independent Rosie the Riveter of the Second World War soon gave way to June Cleaver, the perfect suburban mother. Betty Friedan would later describe this aggressive reassertion of traditional gender roles as “the feminine mystique.” For women and politics, this era is usually cast – if discussed at all – as one of relative political quiescence, sandwiched between impassioned Progressive and suffrage activism and the second wave of the women’s movement. While the view that women were absent from politics in the immediate postwar period has been challenged on several grounds, our understanding of women as voters during this period remains limited and often characterized more by stereotypes than evidence.

With the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, those who had fought to accomplish women’s suffrage throughout the nation had high hopes for new women voters. “Let the politicians keep in mind the fact that the women’s vote is going to be a tremendous factor in this election,” warned one suffrage activist. Another predicted a “marked change because of women’s entrance into the electorate.”

How have American women voted in the first 100 years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? How have popular understandings of women as voters both persisted and changed over time? In A Century of Votes for Women, Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder offer an unprecedented account of women voters in American politics over the last ten decades. Bringing together new and existing data, the book provides unique insight into women's (and men's) voting behavior, and traces how women's turnout and vote choice evolved across a century of enormous transformation overall and for women in particular. Wolbrecht and Corder show that there is no such thing as 'the woman voter'; instead they reveal considerable variation in how different groups of women voted in response to changing political, social, and economic realities. The book also demonstrates how assumptions about women as voters influenced politicians, the press, and scholars.

The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in August 1920, setting off a flurry of speculation about how newly-enfranchised women would vote in the upcoming presidential election. Although women in fifteen states already enjoyed the right to vote by 1920, politicians and observers nonetheless expressed uncertainty about what to expect. “Women’s Vote Baffles Politicians’ Efforts to Forecast Election” claimed one newspaper. Another reported that “anxious politicians of both parties are sitting up nights worrying about [women’s votes].” Appeals to new women voters emphasized issues specific to women, such as equal pay and maternity care, and issues related to women’s roles as mothers, such as child labor and education. In the aftermath of the election, many claimed that women had handed the election to Republican Warren G. Harding, for reasons ranging from his good looks to the Republican party’s support of women’s suffrage. Others attributed the Republican advantage to specific groups of women; the women many considered most likely to turn out to vote in 1920 – suffrage activists – tended to be native-born white women, who like native-born white men, were expected to vote Republican.

Abstract This article is an effort to isolate and estimate the impact of political party control of state government on the length of time it took U.S. states to issue shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) in an effort to control the spread of COVID-19. We adopt a two-step process to isolate the effect of politics. First, we measure the number of days between the date that state-level cases first exceeded one case per 100,000 population and state issuance of a SIPO. This permits us to compare governor’s choices in similar contexts – when the disease is known to be present in the community. Second, we use a statistical tool – survival analysis – to differentiate between state characteristics that might be associated with higher risks of uncontrolled spread and the impact of political party control. We find that the timing of disease progression was remarkably similar across states, suggesting that many states reached the 1:100,000 benchmark at about the same time. By contrast, we find that, even after controlling for a variety of factors, a Republican governor coupled with a Republican majority in the state senate predicts delays in the implementation of SIPOs – delays on the order of two days for Republican states that did act, but no action by more than one-third of those states after more than two months above 1:100,000. In contrast, potentially important decision-making factors such as urbanization, elderly population, hospital beds, extent of chronic diseases, and budget capacity of the state government serve, at best, as poor predictors of SIPO timing.

How did the first female voters use their ballots? Focusing on the presidential election of 1924—in which Progressive Robert M. La Follette secured 17% of the vote—this chapter examines the expectation that women would be particularly likely to support candidates associated with the Progressive movement. Employing new strategies to estimate women’s vote choice using aggregate data, the findings show that female voters were not uniquely likely to support the Progressive candidate. Rather, in a small number of Republican-dominated midwestern states, female voters were more Republican than men, and men were more Progressive than women, in their voting choices. As a result, the presence of female voters actually stabilized the electorate, reinforcing the Republican advantage in most states and dampening the Progressive surge in the Midwest in particular. The conclusion places these findings in the broader perspective of the nearly one hundred years of female electoral participation that has followed.

We examine state-level variation in the flow of benefits under the largest Social Security programme - the Old-Age (OA) programme. OA pensions remain a robust and growing component of the American social safety net. Although OA pensions are entirely administered by the federal government, state-level demographic features can imply different aggregate levels of programme expenditures across states. We describe high levels of variation in the resources flowing into states from the OA programme and we find relationships between state features that might seem only remotely related to income support for the elderly: current unemployment rates, previous income levels, poverty rates and minority populations. We find a particularly strong link between current unemployment rates, OA coverage and OA average benefits. The number of recipients and the level of average OA payments increase when unemployment increases. This is a poorly understood but important feature of the OA programme.

How did the first female voters cast their ballots? For almost 100 years, answers to this question have eluded scholars. Counting Women's Ballots employs new data and novel methods to provide insights into whether, how, and with what consequences women voted in the elections after suffrage. The analysis covers a larger and more diverse set of places, over a longer period of time, than has previously been possible. J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht find that the extent to which women voted and which parties they supported varied considerably across time and place, challenging attempts to describe female voters in terms of simple generalizations. Many women adapted quickly to their new right; others did not. In some cases, women reinforced existing partisan advantages; in others, they contributed to dramatic political realignment. Counting Women's Ballots improves our understanding of the largest expansion of the American electorate during a transformative period of American history.

Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state in the union to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.After a more than seventy-year battle, women throughout the United States secured the right to vote.The national enfranchisement of women represented the largest expansion of the electorate in American history, nearly doubling the size of the voting age population. 1 Millions of citizens who had never cast a ballot became eligible to do so.This dramatic expansion of the electorate generated a great deal of activity and uncertainty.Newspapers offered advice to new female voters."You Can't Drag Your Husband Into The Booth When You Vote on Tuesday!" explained the Bridgeport Post (Bridgeport, CT), helpfully adding that "There Are No Mirrors Inside . . .Hubby Cannot Legally Offer You a New Hat to Vote for His Candidate." 2 Political parties and women's organizations designed "play elections" and practice voting booths to teach women how to fulfi ll their new civic obligations. 3Cities 1 We say "nearly" because eleven states allowed women to vote in the 1916 presidential election.On the other hand, restrictive interpretations of registration rules (ratifi cation occurred after registration deadlines in a number of states) denied women access to the ballot in Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina in 1920, delaying women's participation in presidential elections in those states until 1924 (Gosnell 1930 ).Together with black men, many black women continued to experience systematic exclusion from the franchise until the second half of the twentieth century. 2 "You Can't Drag Your Husband Into The Booth When You Vote Tuesday!" Bridgeport (CT) Post , October

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