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Gender and Candidate Communication: VideoStyle, WebStyle, and NewsStyle. By Dianne G. Bystrom, Mary Christine Banwart, Lynda Lee Kaid, and Terry A. Robertson. New York: Routledge, 2004; pp 240. $85.00 cloth; $23.95 paper.
Women are underrepresented when it comes to U.S. political offices. Cultural stereotypes, media framing, and public perceptions are among the factors female candidates must confront when running for public office. And confront they do. According to Gender and Candidate Communication, those women who sought U.S. Senate and gubernatorial offices between 1990 and 2002 presented themselves to the public in strategic ways through their political advertising and campaign websites that influenced news coverage of the campaign. While descriptive in nature, Gender and Candidate Communication brings together an impressive data set consisting of over 1,300 political spots, 48 websites, and 1,800 newspaper articles. The authors rely on content analysis as their primary method of inquiry as well as experimental, survey, and case-study approaches. This book is an important read for practitioners as well as political scientists, media scholars, and especially those who study women's political campaign communication.
The authors' theoretical constructs of VideoStyle, WebStyle, and NewsStyle provide the organization of the book's major sections. VideoStyle considers the verbal, nonverbal, and production techniques of television campaign advertising. Originally based on the work of Goffman and advanced by Kaid and Davidson, Bystrom supplemented VideoStyle with CampbelPs view of feminine style to assess more effectively the role of gender in television campaign advertising. Banwart adapted the constructs of feminine style and VideoStyle to candidate websites, particularly considering their interactive possibilities, to establish WebStyle. NewsStyle encompasses media coverage of political candidates and considers research on sex stereotypes, particularly that conducted by Kahn. Media coverage research advanced by Robertson, Banwart, and Bystrom developed the construct of NewsStyle.
The section on VideoStyle proceeds through four chapters. The first reports on the...