Women municipal politicians in election news

This study uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine Alberta newspaper coverage of the Wildrose Party’s 2009 leadership contest. We compared the overall visibility of the two candidates, Danielle Smith and Mark Dyrholm, and contrasted news framing of their public and private personas and assessments of their ideological positions and leadership skills. Smith was more visible than her male opponent, reflecting her front-runner status during the leadership race. Somewhat surprisingly, Smith was not framed as a woman candidate, nor were evaluations of her performance marked by sexism or gender stereotypes. We argue that these findings are atypical and other women leadership contenders are not likely to receive the glowingly positive assessments Smith enjoyed. Smith’s conservative ideological position, and the possibility that she had the skills and public appeal necessary to topple the longstanding governing party, prompted the remarkably adulatory coverage accorded her candidacy by the Alberta press corps.

Political Research Quarterly, 2008

Some research on gender bias in news coverage of political campaigns indicates that the media portray male and female candidates differently. Research to date, however, has focused only on elections to national or statewide offices, where confounding variables such as party, incumbency, and competitiveness are present. The authors resolve this problem by focusing their analysis of media campaign coverage on nonpartisan, open-seat, and competitive mayoral races. The authors' content analysis of press coverage in six mayoral elections suggests that press coverage is not biased in favor of male candidates. The authors, however, find that the presence of a woman on the ballot expands the range of issue coverage in local campaigns in ways favorable to perceived strengths of female candidates.

International Journal of Communication, 2016

We investigate gendered and racial mediation in news coverage in the 2014 Toronto Mayoral Election. Drawing on a content analysis of a large sample of election stories in two major daily newspapers, we find significant differences across candidates in the prominence of coverage received and in the media’s attention to candidates’ racial and ethnic characteristics and immigrant status. In particular, we find that a non-White woman candidate (Olivia Chow) was significantly less prominent in media coverage and significantly more likely to be racialized than other candidates, despite being a well-established politician and the frontrunner in polling for a sizeable portion of the election period. These findings highlight, among other things, the significance of the intersection of race and gender in the study of electoral politics and political communication.

Political Research Quarterly, 2013

As female candidates may face greater challenges in establishing their "qualifications" for office, coverage of their personal traits may be pernicious, because it tends to de-emphasize substantive qualifications. This study focuses on relative amounts of trait and issue coverage of contests with and without women candidates. We find that races with female candidates yield more coverage of traits than male versus male contests and races with female candidates are less likely to generate issue coverage than trait coverage. Candidate gender and office interact; female gubernatorial candidates are most likely to garner trait coverage and least likely to engender issue coverage.

Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 2000

This article uses televised news reports of the 1993 Canadian leaders' debates to examine gendered mediation in the coverage of women politicians. By assessing the preponderance of interpretive versus descriptive coverage for the male and female debate participants we show that coverage of female political leaders is more filtered than men's. A comparison of actual debate behavior and sound bite coverage also reveals that political coverage tends to marginalize women when they fail to conform to traditional masculine norms of political behavior but will overemphasize the behavior counter to traditional feminine stereotypes when they do behave combatively. As a result, the women's soundbites focused disproportionately on aggressive verbal behavior and gestures.

The International Journal of Press/Politics

Gender bias in the media coverage of political elections has long been theorized as a major obstacle to women’s success in elections and their institutional representation. However, this view of persistent media bias against women politicians is increasingly subject to pressure by inconsistent evidence of size and patterns of gender bias. This paper argues that some of these inconsistencies derive from a lack of attention to contextual influences of electoral coverage. This study analyzes gender bias in the amount and content of media coverage in the run-up to Swiss federal elections in 2015 by means of a quantitative content analysis. Drawing on an extensive sample of print, online and audiovisual election coverage from the most important tabloid and broadsheet media of three different language regions, the results reveal mixed evidence of gender bias: On the one hand, women candidates remain underrepresented in Swiss media. On the other hand, however, once they are covered by the ...

2022

This study is an exploration of the trend in media coverage of female candidates in the Nigerian 2019 general elections. It examined the extent to which two print media, The Punch and Daily Trust newspapers, reported and featured electoral campaigns and related activities of the female candidates in the 2019 general elections. This study set out to examine the editorial content in terms of the coverage of male and female candidates by The Punch and Daily Trust Newspaper and to ascertain the prominence given by the two newspapers in reporting the political activities of female candidates ahead of the 2019 General elections. The study was anchored on two theoretical frameworks of Media Framing theory and the Feminist theory. Content analysis was used to assess editorial content of the two newspapers in terms of news, editorial, features, interviews, news photography and opinionated stories. The study also examined the prominence given by The Punch and Daily Trust newspapers to the female candidates’ stories. The findings of the study showed that the level of prominence given to female politicians in the run-up to the 2019 general elections by the two newspapers was extremely low compared to the prominence given to male politicians. This outcome is a clear indication that there is much that needs to be done in bridging the gaps in gender reporting, not only in the coverage of men and women politicians but across the general scope and context of gender reporting dynamics. From the outcome of this study, it is obvious that there is need for more in-depth research that is beyond conducting an exploratory study on the trend in coverage of men and women as political candidates, but on examining and proffering solutions to mitigate the low reportage of women politicians. Keywords: Media Coverage, Female, Candidates, 2019 General Elections, The Punch Newspaper Daily Trust Newspaper

An important feature of women's underrepresentation in politics is the fact that the media tend to portray female politicians differently from male politicians. This paper studies how political campaigns may affect such bias, leveraging the 2019 Swiss federal elections, which were shaped by two nation-wide, cross-party campaigns advocating for women's rights. The empirical analysis compares the 2015 and 2019 election campaigns, relying on an original dataset of the mentions that all candidates (over 3,700 in 2015, and over 4,600 in 2019) received in a corpus of over 2.2 million news articles. The analysis produces three main results. First, although in both elections male candidates received more media attention than female candidates did, the gender gap was significantly smaller in 2019 than in 2015. Second, in both 2015 and 2019, male and female candidates tended to be mentioned in conjunction with gender-stereotypical topics. Third, the gender gap in media attention befor...

2016

This paper explores ways that Canadian municipal governments can increase the number of women who run for Mayor and City Councilor positions. I first provide an overview of barriers for women's political representation in Canada and an analysis of the current gender gap at the municipal level. I then outline my research, which consists of interviews both with women elected as Mayors and City Councilors in Canada as well as with subject matter experts. Based on these interviews the major barrier identified for women is a negative political environment, namely through gendered comments and assumptions. My research leads to five policy options which are analyzed using standardized criteria and measures. I conclude that gender-equity mandates for municipal boards and advisory committees is the best option for increasing the number of women who run for municipal office; this would happen via skill-building and making the political culture more welcoming to women.

In the months leading up to the 2010 British General Election, pundits were claiming that women would be specifically targeted by all political parties. However, this focus never materialized and it was just more business as usual but with the added novelty of televised leaders’ debates, which meant that coverage was more male ordered than ever.The study on which this article is based monitored articles published in the four weeks leading up to election day across twelve newspapers, comprising a mix of dailies and weekend editions, broadsheets and midmarket, and tabloid titles.The study concentrated on articles that had the election as the main story and which mentioned or sourced one or more candidates, both MPs seeking reelection, and Parliamentary Candidates.We were interested in exploring (any) differences in the news coverage of women and men candidates, looking at both frequency and content. Our findings suggest that women were much less likely to feature in news stories than men, even when controlling for Party Leader coverage.Women were much more likely to be mentioned or quoted in feature articles focused explicitly on gender issues, made interesting because of their sex and couture rather than their political abilities and experience.