Political battlefield: aggressive metaphors, gender, and power in news coverage of Canadian party leadership contests

ABSTRACT

Our study analyzed aggressive figures of speech used by the Globe and Mail to describe the personas, performances, and prospects of women and men leadership candidates for the (Progressive) Conservative Party of Canada in 1976, 1993, and 2004. We codified four distinct forms of power communicated by the aggressive metaphors—power over, power to, power with, and power as—to investigate what these battleground metaphors communicate about gender and political power. Our content analysis and discourse analysis of the phrases applied to each of the candidates revealed gendered assumptions about political leadership. All three women candidates in our study—Flora MacDonald (1976), Kim Campbell (1993), and Belinda Stronach (2004)—were discussed as formidable foes, capable of using considerable force in their efforts to win. Indeed, Campbell became Canada’s first and only woman prime minister. Yet, much of the aggressive mediation confirms the gendered mediation thesis that aggressive metaphors exclude women and reconstitute politics as masculine. Many of the combative phrases cast doubt on a woman candidate’s ability to successfully compete on the political battlefield.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendered mediation
• newspapers
• Canada
• power
• party leaders
• aggressive metaphors

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Siobhan Byrne, the conference participants at the Canadian Political Science Association Conference in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada in 2013, the conference participants at the Gender in Focus Conference in Braga, Portugal in 2014, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and critical assessments that greatly improved the analysis, writing, and arguments.

Notes

1. An intercoder reliability test on 10 percent of cases in the dataset achieved an acceptable standard of agreement on all variables, thus the Cohen’s kappa on the nominal variables ranged from 0.705 to 1.000. Assignment of metaphors to the groups was found to be reliable.

2. There were additional contenders in the 1976 race, including Jack Horner, who left on the second ballot and placed fourth overall, and Brian Mulroney, who placed second on the first ballot but was eliminated after placing a distant third on the third ballot. We chose to collect data for the top two finishers (Clark and Wagner) based on their final results. We also coded Hellyer, rather than Horner, as Hellyer placed closer to MacDonald on the first ballot.

3. Belinda Stronach was literally labelled a blonde bombshell in a column by Margaret Wente (2004, A17).