Baris Kesgin, associate professor of political science and public policy, and Katherine Graham McCormick ‘24 published in article that develops an average quantitative profile of American women political leaders’ beliefs about politics.
Baris Kesgin, associate professor of political science and public policy, and Elon alum Katherine Graham McCormick ‘24 published an article in “PS: Political Science & Politics“, one of the publications of the American Political Science Association.
This work is an important contribution to the at-a-distance study of political leaders and gender studies, and in fact illustrates a rare connection between the two. The authors present systematically developed profiles of multiple contemporary American women political leaders and an average profile (in contrast to the many existing ones that are predominantly male). Kesgin and McCormick project that the dataset will be used, invite conversations and receive critique, be updated by others, and this manuscript will inspire other similar undertakings.
According to the authors, although women leaders assume prominent national offices in the United States (and the world), one of the well-established specializations in political science and psychology (i.e., leadership studies) is inundated with male-centric benchmarks. Their article suggests a remedy and introduces a women leaders comparison group for operational code analysis, which is a quantitative approach measuring leaders’ beliefs about politics. The manuscript and its associated dataset give scholars in the field a more appropriate quantitative benchmark for effectively comparing specific female leaders to a larger female norming group.
Kesgin and McCormick gathered American women leaders’ speeches from the Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication. Using an automated content analysis, they developed a comparison group exclusively for American female politicians in national politics. The authors’ findings indicate noticeable differences and suggest similarities with the existing male-dominant comparison groups; notwithstanding, they note that they aspire to initiate a conversation and hope that more data will follow and shed more light on women leaders. Kesgin and McCormick hope that their manuscript and the dataset will provide an illustrative example to bridge leadership and gender studies in advancing the study of women leaders in the United States and beyond.
Kesgin published multiple manuscripts on political leaders of India, Israel, Turkey, and small Pacific Island states. McCormick graduated from Elon University with a degree in political science and public policy, with minors in peace and conflict studies and public health. Currently, she is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.