Women in the Majority: Critical Mass and the New Hampshire Senate

Abstract

In 2009, the New Hampshire Senate became the first chamber in the United States where a majority of the legislators were women. In this article, we test whether a female majority changed the agenda content and behavior of legislators in the 2009–2010 session. We compare bill sponsorship and co-sponsorship in the majority woman session to three other sessions of the chamber. We find that the content of the legislative agenda did not change significantly under a female majority; however, women legislators did co-sponsor each other’s bills more often in the majority women session. Our results suggest that partisanship rather than gender drives legislators’ behavior under a female majority.