Women are active participants in government processes but have limited influence on female representation (OECD, 2021). While they engage in political discourse, their impact on policymaking remains limited and the gap between descriptive and substantive representation continues to persist (Childs, 2004; Dodson, 2006; Grey, 2006; Htun and Power, 2006; Vincent, 2004; Weldon, 2002). This dissertation will address this paradox with the study of legislative speeches in Pakistan. It will build on a text-as-data approach to understand gendered political communication and highlight the reasons for why female politicians continue to have less impact on female representation. The topics covered by male and female parliamentarians will be analyzed to highlight the differences in content and focus of speeches by gender.

The main experimental design depends on the variation of international scrutiny that Pakistan faced in two different time periods that will be classified as high international scrutiny (2012-13) and low international scrutiny (2022-23). A high international scrutiny period is one where a country comes under the international lens because of a domestic event that has international ramifications, for example, in terms of gender equality. I will analyze the representation of women’s interests in the parliament with an examination of speeches made by women in the years 2022-23 and 2012-13 over a period of ten months. These speeches will be studied to measure how often female parliamentarians speak, the topics they select and the engagement they receive in comparison to male leaders in politics. The data collected will be evaluated to extract a context-dependent topic analysis (Remschel and Kroeber, 2020).

How does Congress structure the Judiciary, specifically the organization of the lower District Courts? Since 1789, Congress has allocated at least 84 judicial districts, 686 judicial seats, 533 judicial meeting places, and 604 judicial courthouses to the lower courts. While previous scholarship has examined instances when District Court seats are created, we still know very little about the structuring of the District Courts by Congress. By combining insights from both the judicial politics and distributive politics literatures, I argue that Congress allocates districts, seats, meeting places, and courthouses as a means of providing pork to members’ states. I develop a theory of the allocation of judicial pork where I argue that Congress allocates judicial institutions similarly to traditional pork, like bridges and highways. Specifically, I contend that states with representation on the Judiciary Committees in the Senate and House of Representatives are more likely to be allocated judicial pork than states without such representation. Using newly collected data gathered from the Federal Judiciary Center, I test my theory using observational data from 1813 to 2014 and four case studies. In line with my expectations, I find evidence that suggests rank-and-file representation on the Senate and House Judiciary Committees positively effects the allocation of judicial pork.

My dissertation is comprised of three essays investigating the economic and representative implications of institutional variation in legislatures using time and space varying data as well as experimental methods. The first essay argues that there is substantial variation

in informational resource centrality. My theory predicts that intra-partisan voting discipline is more difficult to enforce when members have access to individual informational resources. The empirical implication, which is supported by the data, is that there will be higher levels of party cohesion when party leadership dominates informational resources. My results provide a new understanding of the role of informational resources in legislative behavior and how the parties use information to control members. My second essay considers the contextual variation in state economic productivity and derives testable hypotheses regarding committee membership. I find that majorities tend to dominate committees that receive high-value political contributions and have jurisdiction over policy areas with decreasing economic stability while minority members are overrepresented on committees which receive lower contributions and that have jurisdiction of policy areas with increasing economic stability. Additionally, these differences are conditioned in some cases by formal committee assignment procedures. These findings have implications associated with how the majority party gains power in the legislature outside of traditional procedural and agenda control powers. Finally, my third essay argues that committee request procedures can mitigate and exacerbate gender bias in committee assignments. I predict that gender bias will manifest and women will be more frequently assigned to committees handling stereotypically feminine jurisdictions absent an open request procedure. I use a scientific approach to finding the gender stereotypes associated with policy areas. Using the results of this analysis, I find experimental support for my prediction that committee request procedures mitigates gender bias. These findings have implications for understanding of how the design of institutions allow for bias against minority groups which can impact subsequent policy outcomes and representation.