Patricia Strach

Gender, Context, and Television Advertising: A Comprehensive Analysis of 2000 and 2002 House Races:

Are men and women portrayed differently in campaigns? Much scholarship and commentary expects that this is so, yet previous studies provide ambiguous evidence on the extent of gender difference.The authors provide a comprehensive analysis of gender differences in television advertisements in congressional races in 2000 and 2002 with data that allow them to take into account the frequency of airings, the sponsorship of the advertisements, partisanship, and competitiveness of the race. Although some gender differences emerge, the analysis reveals undeniable similarity in the presentation of male and female candidates in television advertisements.

The Politics of Family

Political science has been relatively silent about family, associating it with social welfare policy, gender, or the private sphere. However, family is also an important part of day-to-day politics, and legislators use family to accomplish a wide range of policy goals. This paper provides a theoretical framework for thinking about family as a part of the policy process that justifies policy positions, administers goods and services, and determines eligibility. I test the theoretical framework by evaluating where and how family is used in the policy process with a quantitative analysis of congressional speeches, the U.S. code, and federal regulations. Finally, a brief look at tax policy in the 1990s shows how family can be incorporated into political research. Ultimately, political actors use concepts of family across a broad spectrum of policy areas, including those not traditionally thought of as “family oriented,” suggesting a number of important implications and research questions for further study.

In a Different Voice? Explaining the Use of Men and Women as Voice-Over Announcers in Political Advertising

We draw on a comprehensive database of American political advertising and television audience profile data to investigate the ways in which gender influences choices about the use of voice-overs in political advertising. Our findings suggest that although men voice the vast majority of political ads, campaigns do strategically choose the sex of the voice-over announcer and that it systematically varies with candidate characteristics, ad tone, and, to a lesser extent, issues. Moreover, using survey data, we show that the choice of voice-over influences the perceived credibility of the ad.

Making Higher Education Affordable: Policy Design in Postwar America

During the 1996 presidential campaign, incumbent Bill Clinton proposed a new form of aid lodged in the nation’s tax code to make higher education more aff ordable. Even though Clinton’s Hope Scholarship and Lifetime Learning Credits targeted middle-class families who felt the squeeze of rising college tuition, some Democrats and education advocates criticized them as an ineffi cient way of achieving generally laudable goals. Essentially, the credits would not help those who needed assistance most or those whose decision about whether to attend college hinged on fi nancial aid. 1 Why would Clinton choose an ineffi cient tool, like tax expenditures, to achieve generally agreedupon policy goals? Th e question points to a weakness in the literature on policy tools. Although we know a great deal about the variety of tools and their relative effi ciency, we have a much harder time explaining how and why particular instruments are chosen. Conventional wisdom and policy insiders tell us that Clinton’s decision was “political”: in an election year, the president proposed to give the country both a tax cut and a social program all in one. Scholarly research on tax expenditures likewise points to their attractive features: they can be tucked into omnibus revenue bills, do not require additional bureaucracies, may be framed as tax relief or social welfare, and have hidden costs. 2 Although these accounts at fi rst blush are persuasive, they do not provide scholars with a way of analyzing why a particular tool is chosen at a given time or over other

Campaigning for Congress in the “9/11” Era: Considerations of Gender and Party in Response to an Exogenous Shock

This article takes advantage of a naturally occurring experiment to examine how congressional campaign advertising responds to dramatic events. Integrating the literatures on issue ownership and gender stereotypes, we ask how campaign rhetoric and substance changed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, paying particular attention to how those responses were mediated by party and gender expectations. Using data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project (WiscAds) of all ad-airings (not merely ads created) in the top 75 to 100 media markets in 2000 and 2002, we find that campaigns stepped up issues relevant to 9/11 consistent with party- and gender-based issue ownership. Republican men gave more attention to the military than any other group and more attention to foreign affairs than Democratic men or women. However, most noteworthy was the dramatic increase in the symbolic use of the flag for all candidates.

Gender practice as political practice: cancer, culture, and identity

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The Effects of Men’s and Women’s Voices in Political Advertising

Campaigns disproportionately choose men to voice their political ads, but it is not clear that men’s voices are more credible or better able to persuade an audience. We employ experimental data and novel survey data to test theoretical expectations about the circumstances under which men’s and women’s voices might be more or less effective, specifically looking at how gender association of the ad issues and gender of the message recipient shape the effectiveness of the ad. We find that men’s voices are not universally more effective than women’s voices and under some circumstances may even be less effective.

The State’s Relations: What the Institution of Family Tells Us about Governance

The authors examine family as an institution of governance in American welfare provision in nineteenth-century poor laws and the twenty-first-century earned income tax credit. Their study demonstrates family’s important role achieving public policy aims, illustrates the extent to which governments have relied on nongovernmental actors, describes the tools they use, and shows how citizens’ relationship to the state is translated back through nongovernmental institutions. Called upon in the task of governing, family—the hallmark of the private sphere—illustrates the mechanisms that governments use and the extent of governing authority necessary to get actors to comply with policy aims.