“Jeff Lazarus”:http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwpol/2759.html emails me with a different perspective on the question of why women in Congress seem to do better at porkbarrel politics:
bq. As it happens, Amy Steigerwalt and I are working on the same issue as Anzia and Berry. We’ve been working with earmarks data instead of the FAADS dataset, but we have come to the same conclusion: female members bring home more bacon than male members.
bq. However, we disagree with Anzia and Berry as to why. We agree that the difference stems from the fact that female candidates for office have a harder time winning than male candidates. On the other hand, we believe that the increased challenges faced by female candidates for office produce a subtly different effect. Female members of Congress look forward to their upcoming reelection with an understanding that they will have a harder time winning reelection than their male counterparts.
bq. This prompts them to spend more time and energy on position-taking and credit-claiming activity than male members. Thus, we argue that the difference in pork barrel spending is not due to any difference in quality between male and female legislators (as Anzia and Berry argue), but rather to a difference in what part of the job members of different gender are likely to focus their efforts on.
bq. Fortunately, the two models make different predictions about other areas of the legislative process. The selection model predicts that female legislators will be “better” in other areas of legislative behavior, such as writing bills which successfully navigate the legislative process. However, our evidence indicates that female members’ bills are actually less successful than male members’ bills. On the other hand, the effort model predicts that female members spend more time engaging in credit-claiming and position-taking activity. One type of credit-claiming activity is pork barrel spending, which got this whole conversation started. One type of position-taking
activity is bill authorship. We find evidence that female members of congress do indeed write more bills than male members of Congress. So on the whole we believe that the evidence for the effort model is much stronger than the evidence for the selection model.