Women's Place is in the Statehouse: The Politics of Presence in Discourse before and after Dobbs

This project investigates how gender shapes political discourse around abortion in US state legislatures. With the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision, regulation of abortion was formally delegated to US states. Abortion was a hotly debated topic in statehouses in the years leading up to Dobbs, with some states regulating it so stringently that abortion was effectively unavailable even before Dobbs (Luthra 2019). We build on a foundational question in gender and politics: how does the presence of women change political discourse? There is a complex relationship between gender, religion, and attitudes on abortion (Cassese & Holman 2017, Holman et al. 2020), as well as the discussion on descriptive representation of gender, testing whether women represent women’s issues differently than men do (Mansbridge 1999, Rosenthal 1995). By analyzing debates in the years before and after Dobbs in states with differing political climates, we will investigate what relationship, if any, exists between the discourse on abortion and numbers of women participating in debate. Do women legislators frame abortion differently than men? Do they use distinct emotional tones or rhetorical strategies, and how does party affiliation moderate these effects? Beginning with two states — Democratic Illinois and Republican Nebraska -- we use text-as-data methods to analyze legislative transcripts alongside speaker demographics, contributing a new dataset on state-level legislative speech.