In his initial work, Jürgen Habermas (1962) showed how the very emergence of the notion of public sphere in xviii th century Europe was linked to a space restricted to bourgeois salons where literary discussions gradually moved towards political debates involving criticism of those in power. Thus, if we follow the ideas of many authors who have contributed to forging a deliberative theory of democracy (Girard, Le Goff, 2010), we could assume the following adage to be correct for the purposes of this introduction – individual or collective opinions are formed through discussion.Ģ These discussions are not abstract exchanges which take place in a fanciful “world of ideas” they are concrete social activities which take place in material spaces. This debating process is seen as necessary for citizens to be able to make choices upon which public policies can be developed which will influence collective destinies. The next stage is a process in which contradictory arguments are debated, thus confronting individuals or a group with diverging opinions to either modify or conversely support their initial positions. Forming individual or collective opinions requires access to information which is both independent of private interests and respectful of the diversity of points of view. For a people to govern itself either directly or via its representatives, it must be able to forge enlightened opinions on the questions and problems which concern them. Our findings have important implications for how political communication styles might improve public engagement with politicians, offer a different focus to the discussion, and improve democratic legitimacy.1 Public debate is at the very heart of how democracy functions. We find compelling evidence for differences in communication style: women evidence arguments with personal experience, discuss policies in a concrete way, and are less adversarial than men. Communication style is examined through a content analysis of almost 200 speeches in three parliamentary sessions of the British House of Commons. Second, we advance existing measurement approaches by testing for multiple dimensions of communication style, providing a more systematic approach to studying gendered speech behavior. We contribute to this literature in two ways: First, we empirically examine speeches by Members of Parliament to establish whether gendered differences are observable in parliamentary debates. The evidence for this claim has come mostly from interviews with legislators as the key informants on gendered differences. It has long been claimed in the gender and politics literature that male and female legislators have different communication styles.
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