Gender, race, and the politics of crime rhetoric

Since the mid-1970s, the United States has taken a punitive policy turn and incarcerated more of its citizens than any other industrialized democracy. To explain the rise of the carceral state, extant research has focused mainly on the crime rhetoric of a few conservative national white male leaders. Yet, we do not know much about the political rhetoric adopted by women and racial/ethnic minorities. Do women and racial/ethnic minority leaders talk about crime in distinct ways? Are women and racial/ethnic minority more or less likely to adopt tough-on-crime rhetoric or non-punitive rhetoric than men and whites? This dissertation aims to answer these questions.

I argue that women and racial/ethnic minorities focus on different crime issues and talk about crime and criminal justice policies in different ways, because of their distinct life experience, the linked fates among people of color, and their different understanding of the issue of crime. Women and racial/ethnic minorities also face different electoral challenges which can shape their crime rhetoric. Using an automated quantitative method to analyze a large collection of law-and-order ads, I find that female candidates are more likely to discuss crimes that affect women disproportionately – such as sexual assault, sexual harassment, and domestic violence – than their male counterparts. There was also a marked difference in their vocabularies used to discuss criminal justice issues. Using a survey experiment, I find that adopting tough-on-crime rhetoric does not disproportionately affect the rating of female candidates, but using rehabilitation rhetoric will. I also find that only male candidates’ tough-on-crime rhetoric has a framing effect on the public. Finally, a content analysis of law-and-order ads for congressional elections finds evidence for descriptive representation of Latinx candidates as they are more likely to discuss illegal immigration and less likely to support decriminalization of illegal immigrants than whites. But I do not find that African American candidates attach more attention to the topic of incarceration/sentencing than whites. They are also just like their white peers regarding the use of war-on-drugs rhetoric.