Media coverage of Stereotypical Feminine Issues and Electoral Consequences: A Comparative Analysis of Male and Female legislators in Newspapers

This paper examines the electoral consequences of media coverage of legislators concerning stereotypical feminine issues such as environment, social welfare, education, or minority protection. A wide range of empirical evidence drawn from multiple world regions demonstrates that being associated with feminine policies, issues, and positions has negative career consequences for politicians (e.g., Bailer et al., 2022; Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson, 2009; Kroeber and Hüffelmann, 2021; Shim, 2021b). Building on this, the paper investigates the role of the media as an additional potential venue that can cause career disadvantages to politicians associated with femininity. Based on two underexplored cases in the gender politics scholarship—South Korea and Taiwan—the paper first tests whether and to what extent the media coverage connecting legislators to feminine policy issues affects their re-election chances. For this goal, the paper first examines 25,000 hand-coded newspaper articles published between 2004 and 2016 that depict all elected legislators in both countries. Then, ordinal regression analysis is applied to investigate the effect of media coverage on re-election by examining the degree of progress an incumbent legislator made at the next election. The results demonstrate that, in general, the media’s portrayal of a legislator in connection to feminine policy issues hurt the legislator’s re-election chances. However, for party list elected legislators, the negative effect was substantially moderate compared to district elected ones. By focusing on feminine policy issues, the paper demonstrates an essential conditionality behind the media’s electoral impact—that more media coverage is not necessarily electorally advantageous for legislators—and calls for a more policy-specific approach to be taken in future research. Besides, the fact that the electoral tier mediates the media effect demonstrates the importance of bringing political institutions into the political communication field.