Gender Power And Political Speech PDF Download

Gender inequalities in contemporary U.S. politics are increasingly structured by dynamics of partisanship. Gender polarization - or the binary representation of state citizens in a two-party system that associates Republicans with masculinity and Democrats with femininity - is a characteristic of modern American politics that leads to material inequalities in the democratic process. In this dissertation, I examine when, where, and how gender polarization developed in U.S. politics between 1975 and 2020. I advance a multi-level explanation for this contemporary phenomenon. First, gender polarization is produced at the structural level as competing state parties fight for legislative power in a context of shifting political opportunity structures. Second, gender and partisanship are co-constructed discursively by state party leaders' in the practice of governance. I consider the consequences of gender polarization on political representation by focusing on contested state-level governance of the 2020 pandemic as an exemplary case. Chapter 2 uses state-level data to examine when gender polarization emerged, how its emergence varied among individual states, and how conditions of state partisanship are associated differently with Republican and Democratic women legislators' representation in three time periods. In a marked reversal from the 1970s and 90s, Republican Party control of state assemblies is negatively associated with Republican women's representation in the 2010s. State Democratic Party control, which in the 1970s predicted fewer women of that party, became positively associated with Democratic women's representation in the 2010s. The degree of party competition predicts higher rates of representation for Democratic women since party control regimes began to change in the 1990s. Overall, dynamics of state partisanship became a strong predictor of women's presence in politics when parties changed their strategies of recruitment and retention to manage reversals in party fortunes, giving a gendered meaning to partisan representation in this now polarized political context. The outcome of this process is a "partisan ceiling" on women's U.S. political representation. Chapter 3 asks how partisanship and gender are co-constructed through routine legislative speeches and how party leaders' performances of gendered partisanship have changed. Drawing on 82 floor speeches by party leaders in the Colorado and Wyoming House of Representatives between 1991 and 2019, I analyze how gender gives meaning to partisan political discourse using a combination of topic modelling and qualitative textual analysis. I find that gender ideology and gendered metaphors inform legislators' notions of state identity, their understandings of political leadership, and parties' issue priorities for the upcoming session. The salience of gender in political speech is contested and is shaped by state party regimes and critical events in states' political histories. As party leaders vie for power in a polarized climate of many state assemblies, we should expect to see gender become increasingly woven into partisan discourses on both sides. Chapter 4 interrogates the contemporary effects of gender polarization in state politics by examining gender contests in governance of the COVID-19 pandemic. I ask how partisan political actors deploy gendered ideas to argue for and against emergency state public health orders in states where executive authority was challenged by the legislature. Based on a discourse analysis of five legal cases, I find divergent gendered arguments used by conservatives, who cast women leaders as antidemocratic, and by progressives, who defend their authority using masculinized, objective arguments. Conservative and progressive discursive approaches simultaneously paint governing as masculine and in so doing exclude women from images of democratic authority. Taken together, these empirical studies advance scholarship on party polarization, political representation, and gender, and call for further research on the impact of intersectional diversity on representational outcomes. First, this dissertation provides a sociological lens on research about party polarization that has largely been gender-neutral and attitude-based. Party polarization is comprised of social relationships that produce and reproduce systems of gender inequality. Second, these studies reveal the institutional barriers to numerical representation of women in the polarized US party system, as well as the relationship between numerical and discursive representation. Women in political leadership face discursive resistance that is amplified by the current state of gender polarization in US parties. Third, these chapters capture remarkable change in gender power over the past forty years, even in the face of new forms of resistance to gender inclusion in politics. As political representatives become more diverse in terms of gender, race, and class, future research should attend to how the party system works to reorganize power and how intersectionally diverse representation matters for democratic outcomes in contexts of divisive partisanship.