Abstract
AbstractResearch on political style suggests that where women make arguments that are more emotional, empathetic and positive, men use language that is more analytical, aggressive and complex. However, existing work does not consider how gendered patterns of style vary over time. Focusing on the UK, we argue that pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years. To test this argument, we describe novel quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data. Analysing UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019, we show that the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication. Our findings imply that prominent gender-based stereotypes of politicians' behaviour are significantly worse descriptors of empirical reality now than they were in the past.
Highlights
Have incentives for politicians to conform to gender stereotypes diminished over time? In addition to the fact that female and male politicians speak about systematically different sets of political issues (Bäck and Debus 2019; Catalano 2009), another dimension on which gendered differences are said to arise is argumentation style
If politicians internalise these expectations before entering politics, or if voters punish them for contravening gender stereotypes (Bauer 2015a; Boussalis et al 2021; Cassese and Holman 2018), legislators are likely to engage in gender-role-consistent behaviour, and we should expect systematic differences in the political styles that female and male politicians adopt
We argue that recent changes in the roles played by women in both politics and the broader public are likely to have weakened traditional gender stereotypes in the UK, and we expect a decline in the degree to which MPs, and especially women, will adopt styles that are congruent with the stereotypes described earlier
Summary
Have incentives for politicians to conform to gender stereotypes diminished over time? In addition to the fact that female and male politicians speak about systematically different sets of political issues (Bäck and Debus 2019; Catalano 2009), another dimension on which gendered differences are said to arise is argumentation style. If politicians internalise these expectations before entering politics, or if voters punish them for contravening gender stereotypes (Bauer 2015a; Boussalis et al 2021; Cassese and Holman 2018), legislators are likely to engage in gender-role-consistent behaviour, and we should expect systematic differences in the political styles that female and male politicians adopt Empirical evidence supports this view: compared to their male colleagues, female politicians’ speeches are more emotional (Dietrich, Hayes and O’Brien 2019), less complex and jargonistic (Coates 2015), less repetitive (Childs 2004), and less aggressive (Kathlene 1994), and they use different types of evidence to support their arguments (Hargrave and Langengen 2020). We show that the evolving variation in style use has primarily resulted from women’s decreasing use of communal styles and increasing use of agentic styles over time
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