Lee Shaker

Gender Inequality in Deliberative Participation

Can men and women have equal levels of voice and authority in deliberation or does deliberation exacerbate gender inequality? Does increasing womens descriptive representation in deliberation increase their voice and authority? We answer these questions and move beyond the debate by hypothesizing that the groups gender composition interacts with its decision rule to exacerbate or erase the inequalities. We test this hypothesis and various alternatives, using experimental data with many groups and links between individuals’ attitudes and speech. We find a substantial gender gap in voice and authority, but as hypothesized, it disappears under unanimous rule and few women, or under majority rule and many women. Deliberative design can avoid inequality by fitting institutional procedure to the social context of the situation.

Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement

Using data from the 2008 and 2009 Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the United States Census Bureau, this article assesses the year-over-year change in the civic engagement of citizens in Americas largest metropolitan areas. Of special interest are Denver and Seattle, where the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed during the intervening year. The data from the CPS indicate that civic engagement in Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009—a decline that is not consistently replicated over the same time period in other major American cities that did not lose a newspaper. The analysis suggests that this decline may plausibly be attributed to the newspaper closures in Seattle and Denver. This short-term negative effect is concerning, and whether it lasts warrants future attention.

Community Newspapers Play Significant Role in Election

This article compares coverage of the 2007 Philadelphia mayoral campaign in the citys major daily and community newspapers. The findings show that community newspapers serve as a complement to the dailies but also prove to be sources of campaign information in their own right.

Local Political Information on the Web: The Case of the 2007 Philadelphia Mayoral Campaign

Scholars and pundits have widely discussed the decline of print journalism, but there has been very little empirical research focussed on examining online alternatives. This article utilizes a unique sample of online local political content related to the 2007 Philadelphia mayoral campaign to address this void. A content analysis of this data set has three objectives: to depict the range of sources of online local political information (LPI) available to Philadelphians; to compare the LPI provided by these various sources; and to determine the amount and provenance of the original LPI that is available on the web. New media sources of LPI may be far from maturity, but this article finds that they do exist and are a viable resource for citizens.