Power of the Purse: Female Governors’ Effect on State Budgets

Abstract

This thesis studies women leaders by examining the highest executive position in each state: the governorship. To date, much of the literature on women and politics has focused on the role of gender in campaigns and elections – examining factors that come into play prior to the candidate taking office. Another significant area of the literature focuses on women as policymakers, but mostly in the legislative context, where more women serve. Few papers analyze how women perform as policymakers at the executive level, partially because few women have held state executive office (and no women have held federal executive office as of April 2017). Instead, research on women in executive office has focused on the stark gender gap in the governorship. Studying the policy impact of female governors can yield answers about how women perform in an executive role. Taking a different approach from other research, I measure the policy preferences of governors by using the allocation of state expenditures in the annual budget. I extend a dataset from Jacoby and Schneider (2009), which outlines state expenditures by sector using data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Although a small sample size has limited prior research on female governors, my analysis yields almost 1,000 data points by examining 49 states over a 20-year time period. Nearly 11% of the observations contain female governors – an amount sufficient to allow for statistical examination. I run both ordinary least squares (OLS) and generalized least squares (GLS) regressions to analyze the effect of governor gender across five policy areas: education, health, welfare, law enforcement, and corrections. The analysis examines the hypothesis that female governors allocated more spending than male governors do on issues that align with feminine gender stereotypes, including education, health, and welfare. Additionally, the thesis considers the hypothesis that female governors may do the opposite; they may actually allocate more money toward “masculine” policy areas such as law enforcement and corrections in order to counteract gender stereotypes and display the leadership characteristics associated with men. Contrary to either of these perspectives, the results suggest that governor gender is ultimately not a significant factor in how state expenditures are allocated. I do find a small trend in health expenditures, however, with more money consistently allocated to health by women governors than by men, although this gender difference is not always significant in the analysis. Given the fact that the types of men and women who win gubernatorial elections are likely a product of the political system, it is perhaps not surprising that a strong, significant gender difference does not exist. However, this does not mean that men and women, on average, have the same policy preferences. Future research should study budgeting decisions by men and women in an experimental setting, or examine how women who serve as governor differ from women in general.