Exploring Contemporary News Media Coverage of Female Political Candidates : Issue Coverage Across Electoral Contests

Previous research indicates that women candidates may more easily gain elected office by aligning themselves with issues that the public associates favorably with women, such as health care, education, and children's and women's rights. But this strategy may be more or less successful depending upon the type and level of office women seek. The public's gendered attitudes are therefore a double-edge sword; where there is gender-office congruence, it appears that women may benefit from stereotyping at the ballot box. In addition to long-standing concerns about how the media portray female candidates, therefore, media coverage may amplify either the challenges or the opportunities for female candidates depending upon the policy issues they emphasize and the congruence of those issues with the particular institutional office sought. In this paper, we draw from our larger research project that has constructed a current and comprehensive dataset on local news coverage of gubernatorial and senatorial electoral contests from the 2004, 2006, and 2008 election cycles, and test a number of hypotheses related to gender-office congruence on specific features of news coverage, especially the policy issue focus of the coverage. Based on the findings generated from 15 races, we find that the office sought matters for the degree and type of issue coverage women candidates receive. But we also find that the broad category of “women's issues” must be refined in order to capture the full effects of gender on campaign communications and news coverage