Do the media cover men and women politicians and candidates differently? This article performs a systematic analysis of 90 studies covering over 25,000 politicians in over 750,000 media stories, and presents the accumulated knowledge in a comprehensive theoretical framework. The paper shows that there is a gender bias in the amount of coverage of politicians in proportional electoral systems, where women politicians lag behind men in media attention, but that, surprisingly, this gender bias is absent in majoritarian electoral systems. In addition, we systematically review gender differences in the content of media reports on political candidates, such as differences in attention to private life and family, viability and horse-race coverage, issue coverage, and gender stereotypes. Overall, women politicians receive more attention to their appearance and personal life, more negative viability coverage, and, to some extent, stereotypical issue and trait coverage. We conclude by pointing out promising avenues for future research.

This article studies gender differences in media portrayals of political leadership, starting with the expectation that male politicians are evaluated more often on traits belonging to the male leader stereotype, and that female politicians have no such advantage. These gender differences are expected to be especially pronounced during non-campaign periods. To test these expectations, a large-scale automated content analysis of all Dutch national newspapers from September 2006 to September 2012 was conducted. The results show that male politicians received more media coverage on leadership traits in general, although the male and female leader stereotypes explain most of the variation in gender bias between leadership traits. These gender effects are found during seldom-studied routine periods but not during campaigns. As leadership trait coverage has electoral consequences, this gender-differentiated coverage likely contributes to the under-representation of women in politics.

Ethnic minority women tend to be better represented in parliaments than ethnic minority men. What does this mean for their substantive representation? This article makes use of intersectional analysis to study how the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation differs within and between gender and ethnic groups. Drawing on written parliamentary questions and the committee memberships of MPs in seven parliamentary sessions (1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012) in the Netherlands, a strong link is found between descriptive and substantive representation. Female ethnic minority MPs more often sit on committees and table questions that address ethnic minority women's interests than male ethnic minority and female ethnic majority MPs. The link, however, is fragile as it is based on a small number of active MPs. This demonstrates the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding how representation works in increasingly diverse parliaments, which cannot be captured by focusing on gender or ethnicity alone.The under-representation of women and ethnic minorities in elected office is an almost universal phenomenon. But perhaps counter-intuitively, the combination of these seemingly marginal political identities can become an advantage for ethnic minority women. In the United States, more female than male elected officials have Latino and African-American backgrounds (Hardy-Fanta 2013;Orey and Brown 2014;Smooth 2006). Similarly, women in New Zealand are better represented among ethnic minority MPs, particularly M aori, than among ethnic CONTACT Liza M. M€ ugge

Education plays an important role in the political, social and economic divisions that have recently characterised Western Europe. Despite the many analyses of education and its political consequences, however, previous research has not investigated whether government policy caters more to the preferences of the higher educated than to the preferences of the lower educated. We address this question using an original dataset of public opinion and government policy in the Netherlands. This data reveals that policy representation is starkly unequal. The association between support for policy change and actual change is much stronger for highly educated citizens than for low and middle educated citizens, and only the highly educated appear to have any independent influence on policy. This inequality extends to the economic and cultural dimensions of political competition. Our findings have major implications for the educational divide in Western Europe, as they reflect both a consequence and cause of this divide.

How do policy issues reach the political agenda? This question has received ample scholarly attention over the last decades, yet only recently have researchers explicitly examined the ways in which the agendas of political parties and media interact. This study builds on this ongoing work to examine how the conflict among parties in terms of the policy stances they propose (positional conflict) and the frames they attach to policy issues (discursive conflict) affect media attention. By focusing on party debates on European integration in British, Dutch and German election campaigns between 1987 and 2006 and employing a pooled time-series analysis, the study shows that both positional and discursive conflict among parties boost media reporting on issues. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the dynamics of media attention in relation to particular policy issues, as well as the way in which parties and media interact within election campaigns.