Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates how the mainstream media reflects the elite-level representation of women’s issues during Abe's second premiership. Based on quantitative text analysis, the press coverage of the political elites who played a critical part in the agenda-setting of women’s issues is examined.

Paper long abstract:

The paper investigates how the mainstream media reflects the elite-level representation of women’s issues in Japan. The second premiership of Abe was marked by a surge of initiatives aimed at advancing women’s interests, including the government-led Womenomics. These initiatives notwithstanding, Japan’s progress towards gender equality has remained rather limited. Seeking to shed light on this (seemingly contradictory) phenomenon, this paper investigates the role of the media and to what extent it succeeded in translating the elite-level initiatives into public debate. In an attempt to analyse the media’s ability to translate the parliamentary agenda into public discourse, the paper draws on gender and media studies and examines the press coverage of the actors who played a critical part in the elite-level agenda-setting related to women’s issues. Specifically, quantitative text analysis and regression methods are applied to an original dataset comprising 12,143 newspaper excerpts related to 48 legislators with a proven record of women’s issues promotion. The results show that women’s issues only took up a small portion of the published articles related to the 48 selected critical actors. Moreover, the amount of media spotlight given to these actors on women’s issues was not related to the amount of their actual legislative efforts. In Japan, the factors determining the media coverage of women’s issues were newspapers’ ideological orientation, legislators’ gender, and the size of a party a legislator is affiliated with. The findings in this paper suggest that, in addition to existing socio-political explanations highlighted in previous research, unimpressive progress with gender equality in Japan could also be attributed to the media’s lack of attention to and scrutiny of elite-level initiatives in the legislative branch.