In their ambitious and timely book, Dianne Bystrom and her colleagues seek to answer the following question: Why are women still so underrepresented among political officials? The authors design an impressive study to examine whether gender differences in campaigning style influence voters' reactions to candidates.

This study is guided by the theory of videostyle, introduced by Lynda L. Kaid and Dorothy K. Davidson in New Perspectives on Political Advertising (1986), as well as the theory of “feminine” style introduced by K. K. Campbell in Man Cannot Speak for Her (1989). “Videostyle,” as explained by Bystrom and her colleagues, examines the verbal content, nonverbal content, and video production techniques of televised political advertising. To understand the videostyle adopted by male and female candidates, it is important to examine the “feminine” and “masculine” styles of presentation. The feminine style of presentation relies more on personal experiences, inviting audience participation, addressing the audience as peers, and identifying with the audience's experiences. The masculine style of presentation, in contrast, includes affirmations of one's own expertise, use of expert authority, and use of impersonal or incomplete examples.

In this book, Bystrom and colleagues seek to examine if male and female candidates differ in their style of presentation in their political advertisements, in how they develop their websites, and in how the news media represent their candidacies. The authors also examine whether male and female voters differ in their reactions to these styles of presentation.

The authors use content analysis to examine political advertisements, websites, and newspaper stories. They use experimental designs to test citizens' reactions to political ads, websites, and news stories. They use survey research to examine differences in how male and female citizens use the media. Finally, they use case studies to examine a small number of Senate and gubernatorial campaigns in greater detail.

The strongest aspects of the book are the content analyses of political advertisements and websites. The weakest aspects are the experimental and survey studies examining voters' reactions to men's and women's messages. I begin with the examination of political advertising. The authors look at mixed-gendered races for U.S. Senate and governor between 1990 and 2002, examining almost 1,400 advertisements. In their analysis of the advertisements, they look at a variety of dimensions, including the tone of the advertisement, the types of issues emphasized, the discussion of character traits, the visuals, the facial expressions of the candidates, the dominant dress of the candidates, and the appearance of families in the advertisements. Overall, the authors find some differences between the videostyle of male and female candidates (e.g., women use more negative ads, women are more likely to attack their opponent's personal character, women are more likely to emphasize education, men are more likely to emphasize taxes), as well as some similarities (e.g., men and women use similar image traits in their ads, the production content of men's and women's ads are similar). When the authors look at the interaction of gender and status (e.g., incumbent, challenger, and candidate in open race) and party, they find a conditional effect where the gender, status of the candidate, and the candidates' party influence the candidates' choice of videostyle.

Bystrom and colleagues examine voters' reactions to videostyles by looking at how subjects viewed candidate advertising in the 1996 and 2000 presidential campaigns. The subjects, students from several different universities, watched a set of advertisements (three negative spots and one positive spot for each candidate). These experiments seemed disconnected from the previous analysis of videostyle in Senate and gubernatorial races. The authors do review a few experimental studies examining subjects' reactions to advertisements in a small number of statewide races. Unfortunately, these studies also rely heavily on student samples, and the results may have been influenced by the dynamics of the small number of races (about nine races across three election years) examined. I think the usefulness of the experimental studies would have been improved by manipulating aspects of the feminine and masculine style of presentation found in the content analysis in a series of advertisements. For example, subjects could have viewed a male candidate relying on a feminine style of presentation in one condition, where other subjects could have viewed a female candidate, using the same advertisement (e.g., the same feminine style of presentation) in another condition. With such an experiment, alternating the style of presentation with the gender of the candidate, the authors could more authoritatively examine the impact of videostyle on citizens.

After examining the candidates' use of political advertisements, the authors examined the candidates' use of websites in the 2000 and 2002 campaigns. More specifically, they examined 48 websites from mixed-gender gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races. Overall, they report similar content on the websites of male and female candidates. To examine the impact of webstyle on voters, the authors conducted an experiment where subjects were exposed to the websites of the presidential candidates. As before, a more sophisticated experiment manipulating the webstyles of male and female candidates for Senate and governor would have been more interesting.

The last section of the book is devoted to gender differences in newsstyle. This time, the authors look at the newspaper coverage of the mixed-gender U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races contested in 1998, 2000, and 2002. These results suggest that some of the gender differences in news coverage found in earlier analyses of male and female candidates have disappeared (e.g., female candidates do not receive less coverage than do men). However, other differences persist. For example, certain issues are more likely to be linked with male candidates (e.g., taxes), and other issues are more likely to be linked with female candidates (e.g., education). Marital and family status receive more attention for female candidates. In their analysis of news coverage, I would have liked the authors to control for the status of the candidate as well as the type of office (e.g., senator vs. governor), given that we know that coverage patterns differ by status and race type. The authors conclude their examination of news coverage by looking at whether male and female respondents differ in their use of news in presidential and statewide races. This analysis, as they note, relies on small samples and simple measurement techniques, and they find that men and women sometimes use the media differently in presidential campaigns, but find fewer differences in statewide races.

Overall, this book represents an important contribution to the study of women in politics. I am particularly impressed with the authors' extensive content analysis of political advertisements and campaign websites. The examination of the impact of videostyle and webstyle on male and female candidates was more preliminary, but this avenue of research is important and should be pursued in the future. Finally, I think their decision to focus on mixed-gender races may limit the generalizability of their findings since male candidates may campaign differently when running against a woman. However, this is an impressive book with a great deal of valuable and timely information about how men and women use the media in their campaigns for office.