How Gendered Media Politics Matter? The Role of Media in Supporting Gender-Issue Affinity

摘要

This study expands our understanding of factors affecting women?s involvement in gendered politicsto examine the extent and determinants of Gender-Issue Affinity (GIA) amongst women. The conceptualframework extends Dolan study on gender affinity effect which found evidence for the claim that women tendto vote for female candidates. Similarly, this study suggests that women tend to develop affinity towardsgender-related issues. This study constructs a GIA scale to measure the levels of commitment to gender-relatedissues. It models GIA as dependent variable and explores the effects of selected drivers of gender-affinitymedia importance, news media use political news interests, voting behaviour, political party affiliation,non-conventional political activity and demographics. For this, a survey of 1,108 women was conducted inChennai, India. The results suggest that media importance and political news interests contribute significantlyto GIA, even when controlled for demographic and socio-economic factors.