Abstract
AbstractDo the media cover men and women politicians and candidates differently? This article performs a systematic analysis of 90 studies covering over 25,000 politicians in over 750,000 media stories, and presents the accumulated knowledge in a comprehensive theoretical framework. The paper shows that there is a gender bias in the amount of coverage of politicians in proportional electoral systems, where women politicians lag behind men in media attention, but that, surprisingly, this gender bias is absent in majoritarian electoral systems. In addition, we systematically review gender differences in the content of media reports on political candidates, such as differences in attention to private life and family, viability and horse-race coverage, issue coverage, and gender stereotypes. Overall, women politicians receive more attention to their appearance and personal life, more negative viability coverage, and, to some extent, stereotypical issue and trait coverage. We conclude by pointing out promising avenues for future research.
Highlights
The paper shows that there is a gender bias in the amount of coverage of politicians in proportional electoral systems, where women politicians lag behind men in media attention, but that, surprisingly, this gender bias is absent in majoritarian electoral systems
Stereotype incongruence could lead the media to amplify non-stereotypical behavior, such as attack behavior by women, and lead to more interpretative coverage. This gendered mediation has been examined in too few studies to summarize in the table, and all are by Gidengil and Everitt, on the coverage of leader debates in Canada. They show that women politicians are described in more aggressive terms and with an overemphasis on combative behavior (Gidengil & Everitt, 1999, 2003a, 2003b), and that women politicians receive less descriptive and more mediated coverage
Are journalists biased against female politicians? We systematically analyzed 90 studies covering over 4,000 women politicians and over 750,000 coded media stories to answer this question
Summary
Are women politicians disadvantaged in their media coverage?1 The seminal work of Kahn (Kahn & Goldenberg, 1991; Kahn, 1994) resulted in the emergence of a subfield directed at gender differences in the media coverage of politicians.. Are women politicians disadvantaged in their media coverage?1 The seminal work of Kahn (Kahn & Goldenberg, 1991; Kahn, 1994) resulted in the emergence of a subfield directed at gender differences in the media coverage of politicians.2 Research in this field focusses on the question of whether women politicians receive different media coverage than their male colleagues, both in terms of the quantity (are women politicians less visible in news coverage?) and the quality (are women politicians covered differently than men politicians in news coverage?) of the coverage. We provide a systematic overview of research on gender differences in the coverage
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