Gender Asymmetries in Accountability and Citizen Knowledge

• In Event: Legislator Messaging and Communications

Abstract

Legislator’s identities have largely been overlooked in analyses of whether citizens engage in accountability. An implicit assumption in much of this literature is that all legislators enter into the representational relationship equivalently regardless of their personal identities. Yet, a large literature on gender stereotypes on competence and trust demonstrates this assumption is unlikely to hold and women legislators will be monitored more closely than men. In this project, we propose an alternative explanation to gender stereotypes that can account for why women legislators are held more accountable for their policy positions than men. We argue that legislator gender does not have an independent influence on constituent monitoring of legislators. Rather, Democratic women legislators are clearer in the communication of their positions. Consequently, constituents have more accurate perceptions of issue congruence and are better able to evaluate Democratic women legislators based on actual issue congruence. The existing literature is entirely observational data so communication and party are highly correlated with gender, producing spurious correlations. In a survey experiment, we will demonstrate that legislator gender has no effect on citizens’ knowledge of legislators' positions or engagement in accountability while holding communication clarity constant. Additionally, we code legislators’ press releases and twitter data for clarity of policy positions from 111th-115th Congresses. This allows us to measure the variable confounding observational data and reanalyze CCES data to examine how legislator gender and communication clarity independently affect citizen knowledge and accountability. By integrating accountability and communication studies, we can consider accountability as an outcome of a larger communication loop between the politician and the represented. Our results will have important implications for electoral accountability by challenging existing explanations for the mechanism behind gender moderating accountability engagement in observational work.

Authors

• Nicole Huffman, Stony Brook University

• Ryan J. Vander Wielen, Stony Brook University