scholarly journals Gender and policy persuasion

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Georgia Anderson-Nilsson ◽  
Amanda Clayton

Abstract Are policy arguments more or less persuasive when they are made by female politicians? Using a diverse sample of American respondents, we conduct a survey experiment which randomly varies the gender associated with two co-partisan candidates across four policy debates. We find strong effects contingent on respondent partisanship and gender, most notably on the issue of access to birth control. On this issue, regardless of the candidate's stance, Democratic respondents, particularly Democratic men, are much more likely to agree with the female candidate. Conversely, Republican respondents, particularly Republican women, are much more likely to agree with the male candidate. We discuss the implications of our findings for the meaning of gender as a heuristic in a highly partisan environment.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Wiesehomeier ◽  
Tània Verge

Abstract Given the gender stereotype that women are more ethical than men, people should assess female politicians as being less corruptible. Yet information about access to networks suggests that opportunities to engage in unethical behavior may counter this perception. Using a conjoint analysis in a nationally representative survey in Spain, a country shaken by corruption scandals, we asked respondents to identify the more corruptible politician between two hypothetical local councilors by imagining an investor willing to offer a bribe to advance business interests. Results indicate that female politicians do symbolically stand for honesty. However, this assessment is offset by embeddedness cues signaling a woman politician’s access to opportunity networks. We discuss our findings in light of instrumentalist arguments for an increase of women in politics as a means to combat corruption.


2020 ◽  
pp. 089590482098303
Author(s):  
Cris Mayo

In recent years, conservative advocates have obscured their transphobia by framing their concerns as religiously-based parental rights claims. They have advocated for limitations on youth rights to gender identity self-determination. This article examines policy debates over transgender-inclusive practices in schools, including conservative demands for parental notification and limitations on healthcare access for transgender youth. I suggest that schools ought to be more concerned with children’s or students’ rights to help enable diverse students to flourish and become who they are in supportive schools. This shift would move schools away from the distractions of conservative parental rights claims and re-focus them instead on the needs of students.


Field Methods ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip S. Brenner ◽  
Justine Bulgar-Medina

Many social identities (e.g., race, ethnicity) are measured using mark-all-that-apply (MATA) questions because they allow survey respondents to account for the multiple, nonexclusive ways in which they identify themselves. We test the use of MATA measures of sexual orientation and gender identity and compare them with forced choice (FC), an alternative format using a series of yes-or-no questions. Respondents, including an oversample of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) individuals, participated in a 2 × 3 factorial survey experiment. For the first factor, we hypothesize that respondents randomly assigned to FC will report a higher count of identities than those assigned to MATA. For the second factor, we hypothesize that increased topic salience will help LGBQ respondents in particular to overcome poor question design. Findings suggest that MATA and FC measure comparably when question writing best practices are followed, but topic salience can yield higher data quality when poorly formatted questions are used.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (03) ◽  
pp. 572-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley English

AbstractThough the concept of intersectionality has been in circulation for nearly 30 years and women's organizations have long been criticized for failing to prioritize the concerns of women of color, poor women, and LGBTQ women, more research is needed to determine precisely why women's organizations do and do not discuss those intersectional identities during policy debates. This study analyzes 1,021 comments that women's organizations submitted to rulemakers to test a series of hypotheses about how women's organizations’ references to women's intersectional identities increase or decrease depending on the organization's primary constituency and ideology, the proposed rule's target population, and other features of the policy-making context. Using automated text analysis and a series of models, it shows that women's organizations do discuss intersectionally marginalized women in their comments. However, not all subgroups of women are equally represented during the process. Women's organizations focus on women's sexual orientations and gender identities more than their races, ethnicities, nationalities, or socioeconomic statuses. Intersectionally marginalized women also tend to receive the most attention when commenters are from organizations that are explicitly focused on representing intersectionally marginalized women and when bureaucrats include references to intersectionally marginalized women in their proposed rules.


Author(s):  
Dan Reiter

Essentially all scholars agree that the levels of violent conflict, especially wars, within democratic pairs of states are significantly lower than levels of violent conflict within other pairs of states. However, debate rages as to whether this observed correlation is causal or spurious. Does democracy actually cause peace? Answering this question is critical for both scholarly and policy debates. Critics have lodged two sets of arguments proposing that the observed correlation between democracy and peace does not mean that democracy causes peace. First, some claim that the peace observed among democracies is not caused by regime type, but rather by other factors such as national interest, economic factors, and gender norms. These critics often present statistical analyses in which inclusion of these or other factors render the democracy independent variable to be statistically insignificant, leading them to draw the conclusion that democracy does not cause peace. The second critique claims that there is a causal relationship between democracy and peace, but peace causes democracy and not the reverse. Peaceful international environments permit democracy to emerge, and conflictual international environments impede democracy. Though peace causes democracy, democracy does not cause peace. Careful examination of the theoretical claims of these critiques and especially the pertinent empirical scholarship produces two general conclusions. First, there is enough evidence to conclude that democracy does cause peace at least between democracies, that the observed correlation between democracy and peace is not spurious. Second, this conclusion notwithstanding, the critiques do make important contributions, in the sense that they demonstrate that several factors (including democracy) cause peace, that there may be some qualifications or limitations to the scope of the democratic peace, and that causality among factors like democracy and peace is likely bidirectional, part of a larger dynamic system.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (03) ◽  
pp. 451-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Fong ◽  
Neil Malhotra ◽  
Yotam Margalit

ABSTRACTPoliticians bequeath an important legacy after they leave office: the public’s memories of their time in office. Indeed, the media often discuss legacy concerns as a key motivation of politicians. Yet, there has been little empirical analysis of how politicians’ legacies are interpreted and used by the mass public. Analyzing millions of comments from online discussion forums, we show that citizens frequently mobilize memories of past politicians in their discussions of current events. A randomized survey experiment rationalizes such invocations of past politicians: they bolster the persuasiveness of contemporary arguments—particularly bad ones—but only when made in the context of a policy domain specifically associated with a past politician. Our findings suggest that politicians have a strong interest in cultivating a positive, broad, and enduring legacy because memories of them influence policy debates long after they leave office.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 539-571
Author(s):  
Andrew Kerner ◽  
Jane Sumner ◽  
Brian Richter

AbstractAmerican discontent with offshore production features heavily in trade policy debates. But Americans more typically encounter offshore production in apolitical contexts as consumers. We argue that these ostensibly apolitical encounters with offshore production are, in fact, freighted with political consequences. This paper asks: When and for whom does consumer-based exposure to offshore production reduce support for free trade? This is an important in its own right, but also sheds light on the contexts in which more overtly political references to offshore production are likely to find the most fertile ground. We answer these questions using a survey experiment that embeds an offshoring “prime” into an advertisement for pet furniture, varying the location of production across different treatment groups. We find that our experimental exposure to offshore production depressed enthusiasm for free trade, but only when production occurred in China, and mainly among white men living near trade-related job loss. That heterogeneity resonates with work on the economic and social aspects of the decline in American manufacturing employment.


Ethnicities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 939-958
Author(s):  
Andreea I Alecu

Is people’s trust in doctors affected by their ethnicity or gender? It is often assumed that highly skilled migrants are protected from the worst effects of discrimination. Yet, they also report high degrees of discrimination. This study examines whether ethnic and gendered stereotypes influence trust in general practitioners in Norway. The question is investigated using a survey experiment. Respondents receive a brief resume of a general practitioner where the ethnicity and gender of the physician are randomly varied. Thereafter, the study focuses on investigating the interaction between the respondents' and fictive GPs' ethnicity and gender. The results show that while the majority population is indifferent to the ethnicity of the physicians, they prefer females. Non-Western minorities have a bias in favour of Pakistani-named GPs but are indifferent to the GP's gender.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci

AbstractThis article explores the ties between the early birth control movements in the United States and Japan, both of which emerged from a transnational socialist network after the Russian Revolution of 1917. By closely examining the activism of two symbolic figures in the movements, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Ishimoto Shizue (1897-2001), their roles abroad, and the public responses in both nations, the article studies the possibilities and limits of the transnational birth control movement in the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that, while the socialist network helped expand their original goal of relieving working women across the world from the dual burden of reproductive and wage labor, the moment they crossed national borders, they simultaneously became bound by nationalist frameworks and gender biases. Their liberal and reformist, rather than revolutionary, approaches to birth control based on the Western model of progress and the eugenic concept of racial survival ultimately blunted the dream of universal sisterhood and female liberation.


2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Lis Højgaard

Obtaining Power – power, gender and gendered actors in the political arena The gendering of politics in Denmark is no longer manifested in large differences in representation in important political positions or in unambiguous gender specific ways of doing politics or of climbing the political hierarchy. A discourse analysis of interviews with top male and female politicians shows that gender and political are woven together in multifarious ways, while revealing gendered patterns in discursive practices. There are no sharp differences in male and female politicians’ discourses on doing politics, on obtaining top positions in the political hierarchy or on gender and politics. Gendered patterns appear in the way male and female politicians combine discourses on how to get power and in their discourses on the meaning of gender in politics. The interviews revealed three discourses on how to get power: the fight, the party community and the personal stake. These represent distinct ways of characterizing the processes involved in becoming politically powerful. The interviews also revealed two main discourses on the meaning of gender: gender as an explicitly important dimension of political praxis, and gender as unimportant in relation to political praxis. The gendered agents combine these discourses in different ways, which opens different spaces of action and nego-tiation as well as different possibilities for positioning in the political field, possibilities that are reflected by a meta-discourse expressing processes of inclusion and exclusion in the field of politics.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document