Authors : Vaishali R. Venkat and S. Arulchelvan
Abstract: This study expands our understanding of factors affecting women’s involvement in gendered politics to examine the extent and determinants of Gender-Issue Affinity (GIA) amongst women. The conceptual framework extends Dolan study on gender affinity effect which found evidence for the claim that women tend to vote for female candidates. Similarly, this study suggests that women tend to develop affinity towards gender-related issues. This study constructs a GIA scale to measure the levels of commitment to gender-related issues. It models GIA as dependent variable and explores the effects of selected drivers of gender-affinity media 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 in Chennai, India. The results suggest that media importance and political news interests contribute significantly to GIA, even when controlled for demographic and socio-economic factors.
Vaishali R. Venkat and S. Arulchelvan, 2018. How Gendered Media Politics Matter? The Role of Media in Supporting Gender-Issue Affinity. Asian Journal of Information Technology, 17: 84-91.