Violators, virtuous, or victims? How global newspapers represent the female member of parliament

ABSTRACT

Previous research finds mass media often frames female members of parliament (FMPs) as novelties, violators, or deviants intruding in a masculine domain. However, most of these studies have focused on a small number of primarily Western nations. Inspired by new research on the normalization of women in politics, intersectionality, and violence against women in politics, this study undertakes a broad examination of how global newspapers represent FMPs to the public. Taking an inductive approach and drawing on a collection of 772 articles drawn from 265 newspapers in 48 countries over thirty years (from 1985 to 2014), we assess how media framed the “female member of parliament” as being violators, virtuous, or victims and whether it made (in)visible their various intersectional identities. We found general support for the normalization thesis, but observed significant differences between Western and non-Western countries and between Asian and African media framing of FMPs as violators, virtuous, or victims.

KEYWORDS:

• Framing
• mass media
• parliament
• representation
• women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Most of the world’s national legislative bodies in Africa, Asia, and Europe are referred to as “parliaments” (especially in those countries with a parliamentary as opposed to presidential form of government) whereas in the Western Hemisphere (where presidential systems are more common) many national assemblies are referred to as a “Congress” or “National Assembly” such as in the US and much of Latin America, which are therefore under-represented in our study.

2. The first author developed the initial codebook. Then the second and third authors conducted pretests and various adjustments to refine the codebook during the trial rounds. Following Dan et al. (2013), to make coding simpler we applied dichotomous coding of items as either present or absent.

3. This multi-stage procedure was effective in enhancing inter-coder reliability because most initial coding discrepancies were mistakes where one coder missed an item present in an article while the other coder spotted it. In this study, authors were coding many items on many texts, hence we applied double coding followed by collective discussions to minimize the possibility of interpretive biases or errors.

4. The dataset titled “Global Newspaper Coverage of the ‘Female Member of Parliament’ (1985–2014)” is accessible at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JZXZ88.

5. For this and subsequent quotations we list the year of publication and article number in the dataset.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Devin K. Joshi

Devin K. Joshi is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. He graduated with a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Washington and a B.A. in history from Stanford University. Author of over thirty peer-reviewed journal articles, he conducts research on gender and youth politics, parliamentary representation, globalization, and human development. His recent articles appear in Politics & Gender, Women’s Studies International Forum, International Studies Quarterly, and World Development. Email: [email protected]

Meseret F. Hailu

Meseret F. Hailu is an Assistant Professor of Higher and Postsecondary Education at Arizona State University. The overarching theme of her research is the pursuit of gender equity in STEM education, and she focuses on the strategies, programs, and systems that help historically underrepresented students and faculty succeed in these fields. She previously held a postdoctoral research position at The Ohio State University and received her Ph.D. in Higher Education from the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver. Email: [email protected]

Lauren J. Reising

Lauren J. Reising received her B.A. in International Studies from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Since 2017, Lauren has been based in Kampala, Uganda working at SHONA Group, a business accelerator supporting the growth of impact-driven East African startups. Prior to her work at SHONA, she coordinated several women’s health projects in Kabale, Uganda in partnership with the Global Livingston Institute. E-mail: [email protected]