Linking Gender, Language, and Partisanship: Developing a Database of Masculine and Feminine Words

• Author: Stephen M. Utych,Damon C. Roberts
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912919874883
• Date: 01 March 2020
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919874883

Political Research Quarterly

2020, Vol. 73(1) 40 –50

© 2019 University of Utah

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1065912919874883

journals.sagepub.com/home/prq

Article

Donald Trump’s presidency, and his rhetorical style, has

led to increased attention toward gender, language, and

the intersection between the two concepts in the political

world. Some see Trump as a hyper-masculine politician,

referred to by Jill Filipovic (2017)1 as a “throwback to the

day when authority and power were exclusively white

and male by definition,” but one that also exhibits more

modern displays of masculinity as Filipovic refers to

Trump as “the kind of overgrown adolescent you expect

to find on internet forums dedicated to video games or

anti-feminism.” Trump has also been referred to by the

media as being a prime example of fragile masculinity,2

suggesting he may go out of his way to portray masculin-

ity in his public statements. Perhaps, Trump is using this

gendered language as a dog whistle to communicate with

and garner support from his base. Of course, it is difficult

to understand this without knowing which words are gen-

dered. We seek to establish and validate a dictionary of

words, rated on their masculinity and femininity, and use

that dictionary to determine the extent to which

Republican and Democratic politicians are using gen-

dered language in public proclamations.

Scholars have long studied the role of gender in poli-

tics. In this study, we aim to further understand more and

more that gender and politics are inextricably linked.

Although scholars agree that this is true, the next step is

to propose new ways to study and to identify previously

unidentified manifestations of the intersection of gender

and politics. For those who are interested in political

communication, we are keenly interested in attempting to

understand how language and words, specifically, are

used by politicians to describe and frame political events

with a masculine and feminine connotation, especially in

an era where Democrats and Republicans focus on differ-

ent aspects of gender in politics (Rymph 2006).

Given their different bases of support, and the prefer-

ences of these bases for masculine and feminine lan-

guage, we expect that Republicans and Democrats differ

in how they use gendered language. Although it is well

understood that Democrats and Republicans view and use

gender differently, we wonder how language may be used

to emphasize these differences. More specifically, rather

than analyzing gender stereotypes and similar phenome-

non that have been well studied, we aim to show the sub-

tle influence that individual words may have on candidate

support. To do this, we present a dictionary of gendered

words. We concede that this dictionary is not exhaustive

874883PRQXXX10.1177/1065912919874883Political Research QuarterlyRoberts and Utych

research-article2019

1University of Colorado Boulder, USA

2Boise State University, ID, USA

Corresponding Author:

Stephen M. Utych, Boise State University, 1910 University Drive,

Boise, ID 83725, USA.

Email: stephenutych@boisestate.edu

Linking Gender, Language, and

Partisanship: Developing a Database

of Masculine and Feminine Words

Damon C. Roberts1 and Stephen M. Utych2

Abstract

Seemingly, gender, language, and partisanship are intertwined concepts. We believe that the use of gendered language

in political settings may be used strategically by political elites. The purpose of this paper is to craft a tool for scholars

to test the interconnection between politics, gender, and language—what we refer to as being the gendered language

and partisanship nexus. We test our prediction using original word rating data. From our test, we find significant

variation across seven hundred words in ratings as masculine and feminine and discover that words rated as masculine

are more likely to be rated as dominant and negatively valenced. We additionally find that Republican men are most

likely to rate words as more masculine. Using this dictionary, we find that Republican presidents are more likely to use

masculine language than Democratic presidents in their State of the Union addresses and that the Republican Party

uses more masculine language than the Democratic Party in their official party platform.

Keywords

gender, language, politics, Republicans, Democrats