Doctoral Dissertation Research: Partisanship, Gender, and Policy Frames

尽管在过去三十年中取得了进展，但相对于一般人口，女性仍然是国会中代表性最不足的群体。这个项目的目的是为了更好地了解国会中的女性是如何代表女性的。为此目的，该项目审查党派和性别对国会关于妇女问题的来文内容和选民对这些来文的反应的相对影响。为了完成这项任务，该项目分析了4万多份有关妇女问题的国会通讯的内容，并利用这些发现进行了一项调查实验，以测试选民中的男性和女性如何根据信使的性别不同解读有关妇女问题的信息。这个项目引发了一场重要的、持续的关于代表性的辩论——女性是否真正地代表了女性，所有的成员都是纯粹的党派，还是介于两者之间？选民对妇女问题的看法如何受到提出这些问题的人的性别的影响？这项研究将推动我们对妇女在国会中代表的性质的理解，并将扩大选民和国会议员对妇女在妇女问题上的描述性和实质性代表的质量的认识。这个项目的目的是评价党派和性别对国会关于妇女问题的来文内容和选民对这些来文的反应的相对影响。为了完成这项任务，该项目使用结构主题模型来确定性别和党派关系如何影响国会通讯中关于妇女问题的传播。它利用这些发现在一个调查实验，随机化代表的性别提供的内容，以测试男性和女性选民如何解释关于妇女问题的信息不同基于信使的性别。本项目对美国政治领域，特别是代表性和政治传播方面的学术研究做出了若干不同的贡献。在方法上，它利用一种创新的方法工具——结构主题建模——来分析一个大型语料库。它在元数据中可用的类别（包括性别和党派关系）之间比较这些文本的内容。然后，该项目将这些发现用于调查实验，以评估不同内容对选民的影响。到目前为止，这个项目将是第一个利用这种方法确定立法机构男女成员之间不同的交流模式并评估这些差异对选民的影响的奖学金。这项贡献以及今后采用类似方法的研究将使我们能够更好地了解妇女代表的特点，并有助于更广泛地了解政治信息的内容和影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Despite gains made over the past three decades, women remain the most underrepresented group in Congress relative to the general population. The purpose of this project is to better understand how women in Congress represent women generally. To this end, the project examines the relative influence of partisanship and gender on the content of congressional communications about women's issues and voters' responses to those messages. To accomplish this task, the project analyzes the content of more than 40,000 congressional newsletters about women's issues and uses the findings to generate a survey experiment to test how men and women in the electorate interpret messages about women's issues differently based on the gender of the messenger. This project contributes to an important, ongoing debate about representation --do women substantively represent women, are all members purely partisan, or is it something in between? And, how are voter opinions about women's issues affected by the gender of the person who presents them? This research will push forward our understanding of the character of women's representation in Congress, and will broaden the knowledge held by both voters and members of Congress concerning the quality of descriptive and substantive representation of women on women's issues.The purpose of this project is to evaluate the relative influence of partisanship and gender on the content of congressional communications about women's issues and voters' responses to those messages. To accomplish this task, the project uses structural topic modelling to identify how gender and partisanship influence communication about women's issues in congressional newsletters. It utilizes these findings in a survey experiment that randomizes the gender of the representative delivering the content to test how men and women in the electorate interpret messages about women's issues differently based on the gender of the messenger. This project presents several distinct contributions to the field of American politics generally, and scholarship on representation and political communication in particular. Methodologically, it utilizes an innovative methodological tool --structural topic modelling--to analyze a large corpus. It compares the content of these texts between categories available in the metadata, including gender and partisanship. The project then employs these findings in a survey experiment to assess the effect of the differing content on the electorate. This project will be the first scholarship, as of this date, to use this method to identify distinct patterns of communication between male and female members of legislatures and to assess the impact of these differences on the electorate. This contribution, and future research that utilizes a similar methodological approach, will allow us to better understand the character of women's representation and will facilitate a broader understanding of the content and impact of political messages generally.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.