Abstract
The number of women seeking elected office in the United States has increased significantly over the past several decades, and they are represented now in larger numbers than ever before. In light of these developments, an emerging literature has attempted to make more nuanced sense of how female candidates are covered by the news media.
Early analyses that uncovered significant media hurdles for female candidates (Bystrom et al. 2004; Kahn 1996) treated the problem of gender bias in news media somewhat one dimensionally—as befitted the first forays into the field. Ages-old gender stereotypes permeated election news, these studies found, in ways that posed barriers for women seeking office. Journalists (and the public) often had trouble taking women seriously as political leaders. News coverage tended to focus as much or more on women’s personal traits than on their policy positions or professional accomplishments. The burden on female candidates was to emphasize their qualifications, focus on the issues, and studiously try to avoid falling into the “hair, hemlines and husbands” trap.
Today, the emerging picture is more complex. Methodological innovation—more sophisticated uses of surveys, experimental research, and large-scale content analysis—and a growing number of female candidacies have made possible a better understanding of the dynamic interaction between women candidates and the media. Scholars from the fields of women and politics, voting behavior, and political communication have brought distinctive theories and methods to this task, and a more nuanced understanding of female candidates’ experience is taking shape. Gender stereotypes still loom large, but a variety of other variables demand our attention. As Fowler and Lawless (2009) have noted, the “theoretical and empirical challenges created by the interaction of gender, media, context, and electoral institutions” offer new opportunities for research, but also demand more subtle analysis. They cite an “emerging consensus” among scholars that “greater focus on the political context is likely to produce bigger scholarly payoffs than is continued attention to observable differences between male and female candidates” (Fowler and Lawless 2009, p. 519, emphasis added).
This new attention to context creates rich opportunities for research that bridges disciplinary divides and brings explicitly feminist theories into closer dialogue with those working outside of an explicitly feminist framework. Indeed, the pieces in this mini-symposium illuminate questions about electoral context that are of as much interest to scholars studying political communication, voting behavior, and political institutions as to those who study gender and politics. As a whole, this mini-symposium integrates and contributes to theory building among both feminist scholarship and scholarship not directly animated by feminist concerns, raising questions such as, “How does the type of office (female) candidates seek affect the news agenda?” “How does political party influence the (gender) stereotypes the news media and voters attach to particular candidates?” “How do race and ethnicity of (female) candidates influence the amount and the quality of attention they receive in the news?”
Dunaway, Lawrence, Rose and Weber (“Campaign News Coverage and Female Political Candidates”) investigate the relative amounts of issue coverage versus coverage of personal traits found in campaign news, focusing on the specific electoral context of particular contests. Their data, drawn from a large sample of news from many media markets and various types of outlets around the country, demonstrate that female candidates receive more trait coverage overall than their male counterparts, but that these patterns vary with the office that women seek: the news features more candidate trait coverage when women run for governorships than for senate seats, for example. Using innovative experimental methods, Burns, Eberhardt, and Merolla (“What is the difference between a Hockey Mom and a Pit Bull? Presentations of Palin and Gender Stereotypes in the 2008 Presidential Election”) show that different media frames within the campaign information environment can enhance or diminish voters’ perception of gender stereotypes. Their case also brings in the important variable of political party, and their findings suggest that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin may have benefited from a combination of feminine and masculine traits attributed to her in the news and subsequently by voters. Finally, Sarah Allen Gershon (“Media Coverage of Minority Congresswomen and Voter Evaluations: Evidence from an Online Experimental Study”) brings in the crucial contextual variable of race/ethnicity, focusing on the unique challenges faced by minority women candidates, who must often use news media to build support among voters of different backgrounds. Her evidence demonstrates that women candidates experience different quantities and types of news coverage depending upon their racial/ethnic identity. While African American women receive less coverage than their White counterparts, Latinas tend to be covered in ways that lead to lower levels of support among voters compared with coverage of either African American or Anglo congresswomen.
Overall, this collection of studies draws upon original data sets using innovative research methods, and points to important new research questions and theory development going forward. They suggest that there is no one experience of female candidates with the news media. This mini-symposium demonstrates the importance of taking the level of analysis deeper to rigorously test the multiple dimensions of women’s experiences on the campaign trail and to enhance theory development. This emerging research creates intriguing possibilities for comparative research, both across political systems and cultures, and comparing male and female candidacies in terms of other electoral cues such as party, ideology, and issue ownership. This symposium is an effort to highlight this emergent literature, to explore its boundaries, and to pose new questions for future research in this field.