Do parties aim to represent womens' interests or do they instrumentalize them to push for other policy goals, communicating them as objects without individual agency? While we know that parties appeal to women and their interests in political communication, we know less about how women and their interests are framed and utilized. Specifically, whether women are presented as subjects or instrumentalized as mere objects to argue for different political objectives from womens' interests.
We argue that parties strategically instrumentalize women and their interests in their communication to justify different policy goals, in addition to potentially genuine advocacy for women's interests. For example, parties may use the protection of women as a justification for their opposition to immigration. We expect this strategic instrumentalization to be more common for more conservative parties and on the individual level for older and men politicians.
Applying a comparative study of parliamentary speeches spanning four countries (Germany, Great Britain, Czech Republic and Sweden). We use a combination of several natural language processing tasks. We facilitate Part-of-speech tagging to extracte the grammatical position of entities in political communication. This position allows to make inferences about the objectification and subjectification of named entity. sentiment analysis helps to understand the context in which entities of interest are appearing. These items allow us to make assumptions how politicians interact gender and issues in their communication.
We find that women are more often objectified in comparison to men, especially women in specific roles (e.g., young women and mothers). These effects are mainly driven by men politicians from conservative parties. These results suggest that women tend to receive less agency in political discourse, which can impact their participation and mobilization patterns.
Our research contributes to larger discussions political behavior of individual politicians, especially in their language usage while shedding more light on agency of women in political discourse. Additionally, a new methodological approach is provided that can be applied to facilitate the examination of agency among other marginalized groups in society.
