Female Candidacy and Patterns in Local Campaign News Coverage

We utilize an original on local news coverage statewide electoral contests from three election cycles, and test hypotheses related to news coverage of female political candidates, especially regarding the policy focus of the coverage. 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. While there is much research suggesting that female candidates can benefit by campaigning on policy issues and duties associated with gender stereotypes, particularly when those policy issues are also associated with particular offices, some current research on women in political office suggests "the boundaries of the set of issues that is traditionally defined as women's issues may be changing over time" (Barnello and Bratton 2007, p. 449), especially as the number of women in political office increases. Accordingly, we utilize what is called a Latent Class Analysis (LCA), to identify patterns of campaign news issue coverage and to examine whether and how said patterns are related to female political candidacy. We find that issues in the news cluster in ways consistent with literature on "female issues" and that female candidacy is positively related to the coverage of female issues and negatively related to other groups of issues such as those related to the economy