Newspaper Coverage of Female Candidates during Election Campaigns: Evidence from a Structural Topic Model

This Paper studies how female candidates are covered by newspapers during election campaigns. Previous studies have generally found that the media portray men and women quite similarly, but they have tended to use relatively selective sources and to focus on the amount of coverage and its tone, but not on on its content. We aim to gain a more nuanced understanding of this phenomenon by focusing on the Swiss national elections 2015, relying on an almost comprehensive sample of news items covering most of the duration of the campaign. Our dataset includes about 275,000 documents from 91 sources, covering over 3,000 male and female candidates. We analyze these texts using structural topic models, a natural language processing technique that allows us to identify inductively the themes (topics) of newspaper coverage and, importantly, how the candidates' gender is linked to both the topics and the language used to discuss them. The results will show, with a considerable degree of detail, how newspapers covered male and female candidates during an important national election campaign.