Ennser-Jedenastik Laurenz
University of Vienna, Austria.
J Eur Soc Policy. 2017 Jul;27(3):215-228. doi: 10.1177/0958928716685687. Epub 2017 Feb 1.
Social policy matters have long been considered women's issues. Extant research has documented a strong link between gender and the policies of the welfare state in the legislative, executive and electoral arenas. Yet what determines the strength of this association has largely been left unexplored. Drawing on tokenism theory, this article proposes gender diversity at the group level as a key explanatory factor. It hypothesizes that the gender gap in social policy diminishes as the female representation in a political party increases. To test this argument, it examines almost 8000 press releases issued by over 600 politicians during four election campaigns in Austria between 2002 and 2013. The analysis demonstrates that women talk more about social policy issues during election campaigns than men, but that this emphasis gap disappears for parties with a more equal gender balance. These results have important implications for our understanding of the politics of gender and social policy.
社会政策问题长期以来一直被视为女性问题。现有研究记录了在立法、行政和选举领域中性别与福利国家政策之间的紧密联系。然而，这种关联强度的决定因素在很大程度上仍未得到探讨。本文借鉴象征主义理论，提出群体层面的性别多样性是一个关键解释因素。它假设随着政党中女性代表比例的增加，社会政策中的性别差距会缩小。为了验证这一论点，本文研究了2002年至2013年奥地利四次选举活动期间600多名政治家发布的近8000篇新闻稿。分析表明，女性在选举活动中比男性更多地谈论社会政策问题，但对于性别平衡更平等的政党来说，这种重点差距会消失。这些结果对我们理解性别政治和社会政策具有重要意义。
