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

Hayden, Jessica M.

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

dc.contributor.advisor	Crespin, Michael H.
dc.contributor.author	Hayden, Jessica M.
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Gaddie, Keith
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Israel-Trummel, Mackenzie
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Jenkins-Smith, Hank
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Workman, Samuel
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Meeks, Lindsey
dc.date.accessioned	2018-07-26T17:58:30Z
dc.date.available	2018-07-26T17:58:30Z
dc.date.issued	2018
dc.date.manuscript	2018-07
dc.description.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.	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/11244/301310
dc.language	en_US	en_US
dc.subject	Political Science	en_US
dc.subject	Congress	en_US
dc.subject	Political Communication	en_US
dc.subject	Gender and Politics	en_US
dc.thesis.degree	Ph.D.	en_US
dc.title	Gender, Partisanship, and Women's Issues in Congressional Communication	en_US
ou.group	College of Arts and Sciences::Department of Political Science	en_US