Women in Politics | Exploratory Data Analysis in R

It all started in Montana. In 1916, Jeannette Rankin, a peace activist and a strong advocate for women’s suffrage, broke down centuries-long barriers by becoming the first woman elected to Congress. Since then, 366 women have served in U.S. Congress, and thousands more in various elected and executive offices at the state-level.

In this post, we will analyze the Women in Politics dataset published by the Eagleton Institute of Politics’ Center for American Women and Politics. CAWP, the nation’s leading source of scholarly research and data related to women’s political participation in the United States, has gathered tens of thousands of records of women holding political (both elected and appointed) office across the United States, dating back to the late 1800s, and made them all available in their centralized Women in Political Office Database. We will use this data along with a variety of exploratory and modeling techniques to answer the following questions:

• How many women have held political office by level of Government?
• Is one political party more apt to be represented by women?
• Does race add a layer of complexity to gender representation for political office?
• How long do women serve in office?
• When will the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate achieve full gender parity?
• Is there a geographic component to equitable gender representation? Are there more female officeholders in certain states?

Let’s start by applying some basic data cleaning/manipulation techniques, dealing with missing (NA) values, and touching up our dataset.

As part of my set-up, I took a look at the number of missing (null) values for each variable (field). Based on this, I removed the “District” column, which is entirely null in the dataset I downloaded, and thus provides us no value. Middle name, which is about 1/3 null, has been left in the dataset since it’s not an essential variable.

Now that we have our data, let’s start to explore it.

In absolute terms, most of the women who have held office have done so at the state legislative level, which makes sense given that there are more seats available at that level. Interestingly enough, in U.S. Territories/D.C., a lot of women outside the two major parties have held office.

This is great to see total numbers, but our data, depending on which level of government we’re talking about, can span 130 years! Let’s breakout our totals over time to look for trends.

Here are some key takeaways:
1. The number of women holding political office has been growing incredibly fast over the past few decades.
2. Most of the positions held are at the State Legislative level, which makes sense given the greater number of positions open at that level.
3. U.S. Territories and D.C. are late to the game, not having any semblance of gender representation until the 2000’s.

Let’s look to see if these trends have differed based on political party.

For female officeholders in Congress, Democrats and Republicans were in lockstep until 1990, when Democrats took off at a much faster rate.

How does gender representation in political office change not by political party, but by race? Let’s take a look.

We can see rather clearly that white women dominate across the board (except in U.S. Territories/D.C., which is dominated by women of Hispanic/Latina ethnicity). This would not be too surprising given that places like Puerto Rico are include in this group. The difference is clearest in Statewide Executive positions, which are often not elected (Secretary of State, Treasurer, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Lt. Governor, etc.) and instead appointed.

Let’s take a look at how long individual female officeholders have held their respective office. We’ll do so by utilizing a density plot, which shows the distribution of the number of years a given politician has served in their respective office.

From this, we can see the distribution of the number of years a given politician has held her respective office over the past 120 years, broken out by different levels of government. In particular, we can clearly see that the women who have held office in various U.S. Territories/D.C. have done so for a very short period of time: 3 years. This makes sense given how women have only been holding office in U.S. Territories/D.C. since the early 2000’s. On the other end of the spectrum, women in Congress have held their positions for a much more uniform amount of time, averaging about 21 years in office!

Now let’s hone in on the Federal/Congressional piece of the puzzle. Specifically, let’s look at the proportion of women who have been members of the U.S. Senate/House of Representatives over time. Unfortunately our dataset only includes the number of women who have held political office over time, so it’s difficult to compare that to the number of men who have held office over time at all the levels of government, except for the U.S. Senate, which has had 100 members since 1959, and the U.S. House of Representatives, which has had 435 members since 1959. Thus, we’ll focus our analysis to 1959 and after.

From this, we can see that in both chambers of Congress, the share of female representatives has increased steadily, with a significant bump in the 1990s and a steady increase from there on out. The next question that comes to my head is:

When will we achieve a 50-50 parity in each chamber of Congress?