LAUSR

A growing body of research examines the role of information processing on decision-making in a variety of organizational settings such as authoritarian and democratic governments, subnational organizations, and market systems. Although an increasing number of scholars point to the importance of cognitive capacities of individuals in explaining macro-phenomena, scant attention has been devoted to how individual human beings process incoming information. Utilizing original datasets of parliamentary speeches and the biographies of 1,100 members of parliament (MPs) who served in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey between 2002 and 2011, I explore female–male differences in MPs’ issue attention in the parliament. Drawing together the literatures on political agenda setting, gender studies, and cognitive psychology, I argue that women’s higher potential for empathic response to societal issues (i.e., lower cognitive threshold of urgency for social problems) leads them to speak about a wider range of issues facing society and find strong support for this hypothesis. The conclusion considers potential implications of these findings.