Intersectional Stereotyping in Media Coverage: The Case of Stacey Abrams Versus Stacey Evans in Georgia

ABSTRACT

Research on race and gender in the media finds that stereotypes often influence the type of coverage that women and minority candidates receive during campaigns. However, much less is known about the specific stereotypes that women candidates of color face in the media. To understand the challenges and opportunities that women candidates of color encounter, political scientists must take a closer look at the way they are portrayed in the news. As a first step, I conduct a content analysis of Georgia’s 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary, comparing the stereotypes used in campaign coverage of the two candidates – Stacey Abrams and Stacey Evans. I find that newspaper coverage of Stacey Abrams contained many more references to agentic stereotypes, like assertiveness, than coverage of Stacey Evans. Moreover, I find that agentic traits are more likely to be negative when applied to Stacey Abrams than to Stacey Evans.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• race
• gender
• media
• stereotypes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Sedef Berk, Kaitlynn Husovsky, Eliana Pritchett, and Megan Valliere for their excellent work coding the newspaper articles analyzed here. I am also grateful to Antoine Banks, Erin Cassese, Philip Chen, and Jennifer Merolla for their helpful comments on previous drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2022.2005388.

Notes

1. The Online Appendix provides additional information about the source newspaper.

2. The codebook is available in the Online Appendix.

3. Interrater agreement was calculated for each of the coded categories. Percent agreement across the four coders raged from 67% for the more subjective categories, such as tone, to 98% for more objective categories, such as whether the article mentioned the candidate’s race. The average percent agreement across all of the categories in the analysis below was 85%.

4. Because women may be penalized for agentic behaviors (Eagly and Karau 2002; Rudman and Glick 2008), negative descriptions of agentic behavior are important to include in this analysis. In addition, research suggests that correspondence bias, or making assumptions about a person’s disposition or personality based on situational behavior, is an important aspect of stereotyping (Barrett and Bliss-Moreau 2009; Gilbert and Malone 1995; Nier et al. 2012).

5. Exit Polls. CNN Politics. Race by Gender. https://www.cnn.com/election/2018/exit-polls/Georgia (accessed May 5, 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather M. Hicks

Heather M. Hicks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Colorado State University. She received her Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland. Her research broadly focuses on race and gender in American politics and the psychological mechanisms that underlie public opinion and political behavior. Her research has been published in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science and Political Psychology.