Family matters? Exploring media coverage of presidential candidates’ families by gender and race

ABSTRACT

Researchers have only recently begun to explore the role of parenthood and family in politics. While some scholars focus on the political attitudes of parents, others examine the advantages and disadvantages of politicians’ parental status on candidate viability. Building on the concept of politicized motherhood, we argue that focusing on candidates’ parental status alone provides an incomplete picture of the full range and symbolic functioning of family in political discourse. We coin the theory, politicized family, which includes narratives of candidates’ spouses, parents, grandparents, and children, and argue it provides a more useful frame for understanding these processes. We also move the literature forward by assessing how media coverage of families of presidential hopefuls varies along gendered and racialized lines. Using 2,458 articles and opinion pieces from the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, we conduct a content analysis of candidate coverage from the 2004 and 2008 Democratic presidential primaries to explore how national print media portrays the family narratives of presidential candidates. Our results uncover both gendered and racialized family discourses embedded in media representations of presidential hopefuls. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of such portrayals for establishing candidates’ relatability and electoral viability.

KEYWORDS:

• Family
• women and gender
• motherhood
• stereotypes
• campaigns
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although previous work has examined the intersection of race and gender in political campaigns in detail (Gershon 2013; Carew 2016; Major and Coleman 2008; Walsh 2009; Ward 2016) we focus specifically on family narratives because it is through the discourse of family that gender and racial stereotypes are often articulated and become salient (Collins 1998, 2012). See Table A2 for results from supplementary analysis of coverage related to themes of masculinity and femininity by race and gender. See Table A4 for proportions of family coverage for each candidate separately.

2 We also included variations on candidate names to include middle initials or maiden names, e.g. Joseph R. Biden or Hillary Rodham Clinton.

3 In 2004, every candidate but Carol Moseley-Braun announces in December 2002 or January 2003. Carol Moseley-Braun announces in February of 2003. In 2008, John Edwards announced his candidacy on December 28, 2006 and Barack Obama on February 10, 2007.

4 Grandparenthood mentions were combined with the parenthood measure as there were too few observations to examine separately.

5 See Table A2 in Appendix.