Analyzing Gendered & Raced Editorial Scrutiny of Lawmakers in the U.S. and U.K.

• In Event: Research in Five (Undergraduate Students)

Abstract

This content analysis project focuses on editorial treatment of female legislators. Existing women and politics literature find that news outlets of several mediums treat women and minorities less favorably. This holds true for women and minorities in positions of legislative power, who are discussed frequently and openly. Measuring the treatment of elected officials will become increasingly more important in political science as legislative bodies and candidate pools diversify. Writers published in major news outlets act as facilitators for public-political conversation; it is therefore important that we pay attention to the ways our lawmakers are discussed in editorials and opinion pieces. Additionally, measuring the ways sitting female lawmakers are editorialized can provide insight into the ways in which policy topics are written about in gendered terms. Looking at editorial news data from major U.S. and U.K. news outlets available through LexisNexis, I compare how female legislators are discussed across race and in comparison to their male counterparts. Each article is extensively coded with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Analysis of the dataset tests for several hypotheses: sexism and racism via coded language, variable treatment by policy topic and positionality, chronological improvement of treatment toward female lawmakers over time, and treatment based on party.

Author

• Julia Suzanne Bourkland, Indiana University