When a man debates a woman: Trump vs. Clinton in the first mixed gender presidential debates

ABSTRACT

Televised political debates have attracted intensive research interest. Here we examined the effect of mixed-gender televised political debates on the candidates’ multimodal gender communicative accountability structure. The 2016 election campaign in the United States introduced for the first time a new factor into the presidential political contest: gender. This study is grounded in a theoretical and analytical framework that maps gender accountability structures of verbal/nonverbal communication patterns. We analyzed the televised debates during the 2016 US presidential campaign with the candidates: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The findings indicated that during mixed-gender debates, contenders present conduct that correspond to their gender communicative structures, primarily nonverbal patterns. Trump mainly expressed masculine-communicative patterns, while Clinton displayed mostly feminine-communicative patterns. The theoretical and analytical framework highlights the effect of gender on political communication. The novel perspective delineates and explains the implications of multimodal gender communicative accountability structure of contenders in mixed-gender political debates.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• political communication
• televised political debates
• verbal communication
• nonverbal communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tsfira Grebelsky-Lichtman

Tsfira Grebelsky-Lichtman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in the Department of Education at The Ono Academic College. She received her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Grebelsky-Lichtman’s current research interests includes gender and multimodal political communication, both verbal and nonverbal.

Roy Katz

Roy Katz is an experienced journalist, lecturer, manager in media outlets and an award-winning interviewer. He is a B.A student in the Department of Education at The Ono Academic College, and currently serves as the VP Content and New Media at Radio Tel Aviv, lectures on digital media and serves as the chair of the DIGIT conference for digital media at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.