Media Discrimination and Gender Differences in Political Ambition in a Laboratory Experiment

Abstract

Very little research has considered how media discrimination could impact men and women’s political ambition. Yet, media discrimination could impact both beliefs about gender roles and political competence, and beliefs about voter bias, both of which could decrease women’s political ambition and increase men’s. Alternatively, media discrimination could lead women to react against discrimination and be motivated politically. This study tests how political ambition of men and women is impacted by media discrimination in a campaign and election lab experiment. Media discrimination in this experiment under-reports on women and uses traditional, stereotypical depictions of men and women. The results suggest that in certain conditions, media discrimination in political news may lead to a reactance or positive challenge effect for women, increasing their political ambition. Men, instead, may feel an aversion to entering politics, lowering their political ambition.

Women’s Good Political Representation

“…The most popular approach to symbolic representation examines how women politicians are subject to gendered media copy with studies of women Prime Ministers and Presidents, Cabinet Members, and MPs. These are both qualitative and quantitative, and the experimental method has more recently been adopted (Haraldsson 2021;Rohrbach et al 2023). The links with descriptive representation are often implicit in symbolic representation studies -women politicians and/or images or stereotypes about women are the object of the study.…”