Analyzing Roll-Call Voting Tools for Content

Abstract

The roll-call voting tools most frequently used by legislative scholars are not equally useful for all. Roll-call votes selected for traditional measurement tools systematically exclude issues determined to be important to women legislators. Those who study women in politics are unable to employ roll-call voting tools with the assurance that they are using valid measures for their research. After analyzing the content of widely used voting tools and discovering that votes from controversial bills of interest to women were often excluded, I outline suggestions for employing alternative methodological approaches. Further, I add to a growing criticism of roll-call voting statistics by identifying another limitation to their use.