Gender and politics scholars have demonstrated that the women's movement plays a pivotal role in the adoption of gender quotas and in improving women's political representation (Bauer and Britton 2006; Dahlerup 2006; Krook 2009). They typically argue that domestic political transformations and international pressure help to mobilize the women's movement and demands for more women in elected offices (Huang, this volume; Krook, O'Brian, and Swip 2010). The South Korean case affirms these studies, as women's organizations often take advantage of the local political transformations to push for the gender quota adoption. However, we contend that without political parties' full commitment to implementing gender quotas and supplementing quotas with non-quota measures, efforts that prioritize the descriptive representation of women and formal quota legislation have brought only limited effects on enhancing women's political representation.

What determines which political actors dominate a country’s news? Understanding the forces that shape political actors’ news coverage matters, because these actors can influence which problems and alternatives receive a nation’s public and policy attention. Across free-press nations, the degree of media attention actors receive is rarely proportional to their degree of participation in the policymaking process. Yet, the nature of this “mis”-representation varies by country. We argue that journalistic operating procedures – namely, journalists’ incentive-driven relationships with government officials – help explain cross-national variance in actors’ media representation relative to policymaking participation. We examine two free-press countries with dramatically different journalistic procedures: United States and Korea. For each, we compare actors’ policymaking participation to news coverage (using all 2008New York TimesandHankyoreh Dailyfront-page stories). Although exhibiting greater general discrepancy between actors’ policymaking and media representation, diverse actors are over-represented in United States news; in Korea, governmental actors are dominant.

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