Personal Experience Narratives in US Democratic Primary Debates

• In Event: Who Speaks for Whom? Gender, Ethnicity, Partisanship & Legislative Discourse

Abstract

Women political representatives’ advocacy for women is often explained in terms of their shared experiences of household and care-taking labor and of historical political exclusion. Although the salience of these shared experiences is usually only indirectly observed, many scholars imply or assert that the lynchpin between women’s descriptive representation (their presence in political office) and women’s substantive representation (promotion of their rights and interests) consists of these shared experiences. This logic is also implied and asserted in studies of political minority groups’ political representation. Here I discuss two critiques of this assumption, and I propose and examine an alternative theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics of group representation. First, an untested expectation about the origins of advocacy for group members (e.g., women), by group members, conflates the marker of shared experiences with the experiences themselves. Second, it makes unfounded assumptions about what group members’ reactions to shared experiences will be. Instead of viewing group interests, and advocacy for them, as necessarily grounded in objectively similar experiences, I argue that political representatives (candidates as well as office holders) participate in constructing interests when they talk about them. Further, this construction of interests often happens simultaneously with the representative’s narrative identification of herself as a member of group for whom she is advocating. This personal experience narrative is an account or story in which the speaker depicts her/himself as taking action in a specific situation. I argue that the “personal experience narrative” thereby functions as a bridge between descriptive and substantive representation.
The paper’s empirical section examines US Democratic primary candidates’ use of spersonal experience narrativeas. In campaign debates, speakers aim to establish their qualities and appeal relative to other candidates. Theories of rhetoric lead to the expectation that speakers (candidates) will use PENs differently depending upon the audience. Theories about gendered socialization and gendered expectations of leadership figures further suggest that political candidates received as women will use PENs differently from their men counterparts in an effort to manage voters’ often-conflictual expectations of women vs leaders. In other words: all candidates differ _between_ debates in their use of PENs, and women’s and men’s PENs will differ _within_ debates. The paper tests these theoretical expectations with a content analysis of verbatim transcripts of Democratic primary debates, 2019-‘20. These debates offer leverage on these hypotheses because they occur before varied audiences and because the 2019-‘20 Democratic primaries have included a record number of women candidates.

Author

• Christina Xydias, Bucknell University