Replication Data for: The Gender Gap in Elite-Voter Responsiveness Online
A number of important studies have documented gender gaps in the effectiveness or performance of individual representatives. Yet, whether these differences are observable when it comes to responsiveness to public opinion is unclear. In this article, I examine the degree to which representatives use social media to dynamically respond to shifts in issue salience among the electorate. After combining nearly 400 bi-weekly repeated public opinion surveys from YouGov asking voters about their issue priorities, I trained a large language model to classify the universe of elected US and UK representatives' social media messages on Twitter to the same issues. Findings reveal that women representatives demonstrate greater responsiveness than their male counterparts to shifts in issue salience according to both women and men constituents. Despite an overall bias toward male constituents, women representatives play a crucial role in narrowing the gender gap by consistently aligning their attention with the issues prioritized by women constituents. These findings not only contribute to our understanding of elite-voter responsiveness but also underscore the substantive benefits that women representatives provide for all constituents.
| Item Type | Dataset |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Harvard Dataverse |
| DOI | 10.7910/dvn/fknrik |
| Date made available | 20 October 2024 |
| Keywords | social sciences |
| Resource language | Other |
| Departments | LSE |
Explore Further
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Dickson, Z.
(2024). The gender gap in elite-voter responsiveness online. Perspectives on Politics, 23(2), 477 - 493. https://doi.org/10.1017/S153759272400104X (Repository Output)