Rosalyn Cooperman, Ph.D.
rcooperm@umw.edu
Professor
University of Mary Washington
Year of PhD: 2002
City: Fredericksburg, Virginia
Country: United States
Research Interests
Gender and Politics
Political Parties and Interest Groups
Campaign Finance
Women's PACs
Countries of Interest
United States
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump secured their respective party’s 2016 nominations only after raucous, spirited debates among delegates at the start of each party convention. Groups and their preferred candidates behaved consistently with the policy demanders view of parties, which identifies parties as comprised of coalitions of groups with strong policy preferences that negotiate with one another for influence in the party decision-making and policy process. Using the 2016 Convention Delegate Study, the longest standing survey of Democratic and Republican Party activists, we examine intra-party groups as new delegates are folded into the framework along with returning delegates. We assess how the theory of parties as comprised of policy-demander groups works in a context of high external party polarization. The competition between these groups to recast their party in its preferred image in the absence of a standard party bearer for either party holds important implications for Democrats and Republicans in future presidential and congressional elections.
Although 2018 has been called another “Year of the Woman,” increases in women’s representation that year were party-specific. Historically, women’s organizations fought to expand women’s representation in both parties; however, the fruit of these efforts is currently concentrated among Democrats. Indeed, women contributed funds in record numbers in 2018, but the majority of women donors supported Democratic women candidates (Haley 2018), and liberal women’s political action committees (PACs) played a prominent role in raising those funds.
In this collection of essays for which I served as guest editor with Shauna Shames and Malliga Och, scholars examine the campaign and governing experiences of rightist women in comparative democratic political systems.
Parties need to win elections, but they also heed the policy preferences of activists to provide the incentive to mobilize. Moving beyond the debate as to whether parties as a whole are policy or office driven, we examine groups within parties and identify different factions that place differential emphasis on office-seeking versus policy-demanding. Using data from the 2012 Convention Delegate Study of Democratic and Republican Party national delegates, we identify distinct factional groups within each party. We map these factions within each party, finding policy-driven and office-driven factions of delegates in both Republican and Democratic parties. We evaluate each group’s response to political and party involvement, support for the larger party organization, and response to both intra- and interparty conflict. Finally, we make clear the picture of factional relationships within each party by accounting for how factional goals are integrated into the party organization over time.
Why do Democratic women seek and hold office more frequently than Republican women? We use an original survey of donors to party campaign committees and women’s political action committees to answer this question. We theorize that the intense policy demanders in each party have built party cultures with substantively different orientations toward women’s political involvement. These cultures shape party elites’ behavior and influence responsiveness to a newly defined policy-demander group—women’s representation policy demanders (WRPDs)—whose primary goal is to increase women’s political representation. We reveal that Democratic elites’ political activity and financial contributions are significantly more motivated by WRPD concerns than are Republicans. We also show that WRPDs like EMILY’s List and Susan B. Anthony List are far more integrated into Democratic than Republican party coalitions. Thus, we reveal both the continued existence of distinct party cultures and the consequences of this distinction for women’s representation.
Book Chapters:
This chapter is from Gender & Elections Shaping the Future of American Politics, 5th edition, edited by Susan J. Carroll, Richard L. Fox, and Kelly Dittmar. This chapter examines the role that political parties, women's organizations, and women's political action committees (PACs) play in the recruitment and support of women to federal office.
This chapter is from Politicking While Female: The Political Life of Women, edited by Nichole Bauer. The chapter examines Democratic and Republican women's political candidacy to Congress and the campaign finance networks available to them.
Rosalyn Cooperman and Melody Crowder-Meyer A Run for Their Money: Republican Women's Hard Road to Campaign Funding This chapter examines why the campaign finance networks of Republican women candidates are underdeveloped when compared to those of their Democratic counterparts and the significance of this disparity in the party gap in representation for Republican and Democratic women candidates and officeholders more broadly.