Gender, Partisanship, and Women's Issues in Congressional Communication

Abstract

Despite much scholarly attention to women’s issues and women’s representation in recent decades, the definition of a women’s issue is not settled either in political science or public opinion. In this project, I present a new approach to evaluate the content of congressional communication about conventional women’s issues. In doing so, I demonstrate that the conventional characterization of certain policy areas as a “women’s issues” is not always accurate, and instead should vary by the time and forum in which it is presented. In this series of three essays, I make three major contributions to the debate surrounding the definition of women’s issues. First, I use quantitative text analysis to identify rhetorical patterns most prevalent in three policy areas conventionally understood as women’s issues. I then compare the influence of gender and party on the content of communications surrounding these issues. Finally, I use an original survey experiment to test whether the gender of the messenger of these political messages influences the public’s evaluation of the messenger’s quality. I find that gender is less influential on most rhetoric surrounding “women’s issues” than prevailing theories suggest. I argue that the new approach to defining and assessing women’s issues that I present can help us better understand women’s representation and communication about women’s issues in Congress.