Cabrera, Luis, and Sonya Glavac. “Minutemen and Desert Samaritans: Mapping the Attitudes of Activists on the United States' Immigration Front Lines,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies: 673-95.

The Problem

Camobreco and Barnello aim to explain the increase in women’s political

representation in US state legislatures over time. They argue that such political

representation has been studied cross-sectionally but not longitudinally. C&B make a

strong case for using broad theories of cultural and political change to study the dynamic

process. It is not clear, however, whether their principal research question aims at

explaining women’s political representation or explaining cultural change more broadly.

Literature Review

C&B offer a focused review of literature on women’s representation and on

cultural change, focusing on theories of post-materialism and post-industrialism. Post-

materialism asserts that the priorities of citizens of advanced industrial societies have

changed from material or economic considerations to post-materialist or cultural issues.

People who are post-materialists hold a more liberal view of gender roles as a result of

economic development and prosperity during their formative years than materialists.

Post-industrialism explains cultural changes as stemming from changes in the levels of

education in a society. For example, those with a college education are more likely to

have liberal cultural or social values, including presumably accepting politically active

roles for women.

Study Design

C&B convert the claims of post-materialism, post-industrialism and previous

studies of female representation into ten hypotheses, from which they construct a model

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with ten independent variables and test it using data from 1971, 1981, 1991 and 2001.

The IVs are measured by official and credible secondary sources, such as the Book of

States, using state-level data. The DV is women’s descriptive representation at the state

level. C&B perform regression analysis on both cross-sectional and panel model data.

The model is clearly presented, the variables operationalized in an intuitive fashion or

derived from indices created by other scholars, and the tables of data easy to read.

Findings and Interpretation

C&B’s model as a whole has explanatory strength as the R-Square for three of

four years tested is >.5 in the simple cross-sectional comparison. College education,

religious adherence, and a moralistic political culture strongly influence the rate of

female descriptive representation. The panel models also demonstrate that college

education and religious adherence are significantly related to the DV. The variables

derived from previous studies of women’s legislative representation (such as institutional

character) were not found to be consistently significant.

C&B conclude that post-industrialism, not post-materialism, is the more powerful

tool for explaining political and cultural change in the last four decades as the variables

of age and wealth did not have the predicted relationship to female representation. They

identify avenues for further research on the effect of college education and religious

adherence on social policies. The authors may stretch the power of their model when

they argue that their results demonstrate that conflict over cultural issues “pits the

college-educated against the religious” (p. 131) in the US and they may be throwing the

baby out with the bathwater when they dismiss the entire theory of post-materialism

because it does not explain the change in women’s political representation.

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