The Discursive Construction of Women Politicians in the European Press

Abstract

The appointment of the first majority female government in Spain generated a significant amount of coverage in newspapers across Europe, synthesising the multi-faceted debate about the relationship between gender and political leadership. Through the combination of qualitative thematic and quantitative content analysis, this article examines the construction of women politicians across different European nations. By analysing the coverage of the issue in the main newspapers of four European countries (France, Italy, Spain and the UK) in the two weeks after the new Spanish cabinet was appointed, this article explores the values and ideal roles the media assign to female politicians. The article is based on the premise that mediated representations of female politicians can tell us important things about the relations between gender, power and politics. Such representations embody a set of assumptions about how successful women should look, behave and speak, and thus implicitly express judgments on models of femininity. Ultimately, such representations construct heroines and villains that inform our conceptions of women's political participation, thereby encouraging some forms of gendered political discourse and discouraging others. Our research found that while certain discourses celebrate women ministers for their (symbolic) emancipatory value, others judge them by their physical appearance or their performance as wives, mothers, and mothers-to-be.

Keywords:

• Women politicians
• democracy
• European press
• representation
• cross-national comparative research

Notes

1. The data about women's presence in the different governments and parliaments correspond to the first quarter of 2010 and has been retrieved from the European database “Gender Balance in Decision-Making”, available from http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId = 762&langId = en (April 2010).

2. The coding was carried out by the first author. An intercoder reliability test was carried out with a second coder proficient in all the languages represented in the sample, who coded 10 percent of the sample, averaging a 91 percent amongst all categories in the coding frame.

3. A search in Nexis ( < wom! OR government OR cabinet OR minister! AND Finland>, and its relevant linguistic adaptations) during the ten days after the Finnish government was appointed in the same newspapers analysed in this article did not yield a single relevant story. The same search for Norway, Sweden, and Belgium—which constitute, together with Finland and Spain, the “small group of [European] countries with at least 40% women amongst cabinet ministers” (European Commission 2009, p. 44)—in the twelve analysed newspapers generated two (2) news stories that commented, very briefly, on the considerable presence of women in the newly appointed cabinets: one about the Swedish government in Le Monde (Olivier Truc 2006), and a short story (119 words) on the Norwegian cabinet in Le Figaro (2005).

4. All translations are by the authors.