Women in Politics and Media

Perspectives from Nations in Transition

Maria Raicheva-Stover, Elza Ibroscheva, Maria Raicheva-Stover, Elza Ibroscheva

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781501318986
• eBook ISBN: 9781628921076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Institutions & Public Administration
• Index: Social Sciences

Although women constitute half of the world's population, their participation in the political sphere remains problematic. While existing research on women politicians from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada sheds light on the challenges and opportunities they face, we still have a very limited understanding of women's political participation in emerging democracies. Women in Politics and Media: Perspectives From Nations in Transition is the first collection to de-Westernize the scholarship on women, politics and media by: 1) highlighting the latest research on countries and regions that have not been 'the usual suspects'; 2) featuring a diverse group of scholars, many of non-Western origin; 3) giving voice through personal interviews to politically active women, thus providing the reader with a rare insight into women's agency in the political structures of emerging democracies. Each chapter examines the complex women, politics and media dynamic in a particular nation-state, taking into consideration the specific political, historic and social context. With 23 case studies and interviews from Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Russia and the former Soviet republics, this volume will be of interest to students, media scholars and policy makers from developed and emerging democracies.

1

Introduction

As the world population grows closer and closer to complete parity between the sexes with the very real possibility of women outnumbering men, public discussions about the role of women in politics are no longer a thing of the past. On the contrary, women’s roles in local, national and international politics have become the staple of democratic discourses all over the world, with trends in both female representation and political empowerment often used as evidence that gender dynamics are undoubtedly shifting and that women are often the moving force behind this phenomenon. In this regard it is worth quoting the core vision of the Inter-Parliamentary Union Plan of Action adopted 20 years ago: “The concept of democracy will only assume true and dynamic significance when political policies and national legislation are decided upon jointly by men and women with equitable regard for the interests and aptitudes of both halves of the population” (Plan of Action n.d.).

Indeed, there have been some notable breakthroughs in female political participation that have caught the attention of media audiences, political commentators, and analysts the world over. It is perhaps safe to assume that no member of the international community who describes him/herself as politically involved will argue against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s status as a powerful political player, who has a serious bid for the U.S. presidency in 2016, or the centrality of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, ranked number five on Forbes’ 2013 Most Powerful People list, and described as “the backbone” of the EU (Forbes 2013). Yet, the media have been fixated on these powerful politicians not only because of their “gravitational pull”—a recent article in the New York Times Magazine described Clinton’s political relevance as “Planet Hillary”—but also because they are, after all, essentially women doing unwomanly things who often need to be reminded of their proper gender label as was the case of Germany’s Bild magazine, which dubbed the Chancellor’s role in leading the 2007 G8 Summit as “Miss World,” or the provocative Time magazine cover featuring a giant high heel accompanied by the title “Can anyone stop Hillary?” (Blake 2014; Chozick 2014; Lünenborg n.d.).

Outside of the Northern hemisphere, the recent presidential elections in Chile set a powerful precedent in having two female presidential candidates—Michelle Bachelet and Evelyn Matthei—compete for the highest post of the land, proving to be yet another indicator of the changing status of women in politics on a global scale. Interestingly, this example comes from a nation from the Global South, an area of the world that in many ways has recently demonstrated a much higher propensity to allow female players into the political arena. Another important milestone comes from Eastern Africa, where in 2008, thanks to a gender quota,1 Rwanda became the first country in the world to boast a majority-female parliament, with women holding 56 percent of the seats, including the speaker’s chair.

Indeed, things have changed in the past fifty years. Historically speaking, in 1960 Sri Lanka became the first country with an elected female head of government; in 1974 Isabel Perón of Argentina made history as the first woman president and in 1999 Sweden became the first country where female ministers outnumbered their male colleagues (Guide to Women Leaders n.d.). As of January 2014, there are nine female presidents and 15 female prime ministers worldwide (Guide to Women Leaders n.d.), though this number still represents a minority in the global leaders’ club, which remains a predominantly male preserve (Jalalzai 2013). The statistics on overall political participation are sobering as well. From 1995 to 2013, the percentage of women parliamentarians increased from 11.6 percent to 20.9 percent (UN Women n.d.). Currently, there are 37 states in which women account for less than 10 percent of parliamentarians in single or lower houses (UN Women n.d.).

These trends have been alarming to both advocates for women’s increasing political participation and academics alike. As Norris and Inglehart (2008), two scholars who have been mapping the trajectory of global gender equality for decades, noted, progress is taking place at a “glacial pace” so much so that “without intervention it would take more than a century and a half for women parliamentarians to achieve parity with men” (6). And despite global efforts to improve the political agency of women, including a pledge by the UN Beijing Platform for Action for a 50:50 parity between male and female politicians worldwide, there’s still “unfinished business,” to quote Hillary Clinton, (Walshe 2013). Clearly, the world of politics is far from achieving gender parity (Inglehart and Norris 2003; Jalalzai 2013; Norris and Inglehart 2008) and gender remains relevant when examining electoral politics in the twenty-first century (see Carroll and Fox 2006, for a detailed analysis of this point within the context of the United States; and Norris and Inglehart 2008, and Jalalzai 2013, for a global overview).

Naturally, the intersection of politics and gender has received a wide scholarly attention within the United States. Space limitations do not allow for a comprehensive overview of the rich literature on this topic, yet the latest research from the field of politics indicates that even if women, including incumbents, who run for office “do as well as men,” they have to nevertheless make significant investments in quality above and beyond that of men so that they would not be penalized electorally (Fulton 2012). As Fulton concluded, “relative to men, women have to work harder at developing greater political quality to be equally competitive” (310). Empirical research on how gender influences the decision to run for office in the United States also indicates that women are less likely to seek political office than their similarly situated male counterparts, thus influencing the “supply side” of the equation (Lawless and Fox 2010, 174–5). And even though overt bias against women politicians in the United States has been declared “largely a thing of the past” (CQ Researcher 2008, 269), the institutional and structural barriers to women’s advancement in positions of real political power across the globe remain largely intact and often calcified in social norms and cultural practices (Norris and Inglehart 2008).

The role of media

The question of whether media can be blamed, at least partially, for the low representation of women in politics has been debated for several decades among scholars and international organizations. As van Zoonen observes, discussions of gender and politics “have accompanied the emergence of female political leaders ever since the feminist movement of the 1900s, what distinguishes the current generation from their predecessors is their ascendance to power in profoundly mediated contexts” (van Zoonen 2006, 288). Undoubtedly, the rapidly evolving media landscape, characterized by new digital technologies, the tabloidization of news and introduction of a 24-hour news cycle, foregrounds the need to pay closer attention to the interaction between political players and media (Aalberg and Strömbäck 2011; Dahlgren and Alvares 2013; Lawrence and Rose 2010; Ross 2010b). Some scholars observe that politics has become “mediatized” (Strömbäck and Van Aelst 2013, 354) to the point where political actors need to take media logic2 into consideration regardless of whether they try to successfully promulgate their campaign messages to voters or counteract the effects of bad (or good) publicity. What needs to be acknowledged is that, as vital channels of information, “media are never mere neutral conduits: they have their own varying contingencies and logics, which serve to refract communication and cultural patterns in specific ways” (Dahlgren and Alvares 2013, 52). Framing theory has been frequently evoked by media and feminist scholars as a useful framework for explaining, interpreting, and analyzing the process through which news media construct and present political actors (see for example Bystrom, Robertson and Banwart 2001; Norris 1997; Ross 2010b; Tuchman 1979). The process is multifaceted and contextual. Norris (1997) reminds us that “frames are located within a particular culture and are the product of a complex interaction between sources, media and audiences” (7).

The close connection between news media and politics, therefore, raises questions about the nature and impact of media coverage on women politicians. Given the minority status of women politicians in the political field, it should be expected that their coverage would be mired by gender stereotypes. Seminal work on the effects of media coverage on women politicians was provided by Kim Fridkin Kahn (1991, 1992, 1994, 1996) who discovered through several systematic studies that, regardless of the status of the candidate (an incumbent, a challenger, or a candidate for an open seat), or the competitiveness of the race, women who were running for political office in the 1980s received less attention from the press than men. Moreover, the coverage showed preoccupation with the “horse race” frame, with greater attention to negative horse race information for women candidates that stressed their lack of viability or lack of campaign resources (Kahn and Goldenberg 1991, 109). Kahn’s conclusion was that unequal coverage has an effect on women’s electability because voters are less likely to consider candidates they are unfamiliar with or perceive as less viable (Kahn 1994, 172).

Another notable work has been the volume on Gender, Politics and Communication (2000) edited by Annabelle Sreberny and Liesbet van Zoonen, which, among other contributions, foregrounded distinctions between the public and private spheres. Extending the scope of examination from news media to popular culture, the volume underscored media’s role in framing politics and femininity as antithetical (13). In spite of what the editors perceive as fundamental fragmentations of the concepts of “publics” and “arenas,” the volume reaches the overarching conclusion that “the underlying frame of reference [for understanding the distinction between public and private] is that women belong to the family and domestic life and men to the social world of politics and work; that femininity is about care, nurturance, and compassion, and that masculinity is about efficiency, rationality, and individuality” (17).

Since the 1990s, feminist scholars responded resoundingly to Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross’s (1996) call to examine the “manner in which the mediated presentation of politics is gendered” (103). Scholarship of how media portray women politicians from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom has revealed that media coverage tends to be more negative than that of their male colleagues, focuses more on trivialization and personalization than on issues, and reinforces masculine and feminine stereotypes (Banwart 2010; Braden 1996; Byerly and Ross 2006; Gallagher 2001; Gidengil and Everitt 1999; Robinson and Saint-Jean 1991; Ross 2002; Ross and Sreberny 2000; Trimble, Wagner, Sampert, Raphael, and Gerrits 2013). More recently, Liesbet van Zoonen has been interrogating the link between gender, politics and popular culture, outlining the “perilous grounds female politicians tread when trying to comply with the requirements of celebrity politics, namely personalization and popularization” (van Zoonen 2006, 296).3

An overview of the most recent research on media coverage of women running for political office within the United States reveals that the gap in terms of volume of coverage might have closed yet women who sought higher, more executive office, are still receiving more gendered coverage than men (Meeks 2012). This observation is supported by empirical research “across eight newspapers, in differing regions of the United States, and over a ten-year time span,” suggesting that “media continue to cast women as novelties and norm breakers” (Meeks 2012, 187–8). The latest findings from the U.S. resonate with the results of a large scale, longitudinal study from Canada which found that, while personalized press coverage o...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part One: Framing the Message: Mediated Representations and Journalistic Practices
• 2 The Portrayal of Women Politicians in Israeli Popular Women’s Magazines Einat Lachover
• 3 Ambiga Sreenevasan and Malaysian Counter-Publics Mary Griffiths and Sara Chinnasamy
• 4 The Girls of Parliament: A Historical Analysis of the Press Coverage of Female Politicians in Bulgaria Elza Ibroscheva and Maria Raicheva-Stover
• 5 Zambian Women MPs: An Examination of Coverage by the Post and Zambia Daily Mail Twange Kasoma
• 6 Media Visibility of Tunisian Women Politicians in Traditional and New Media: Obstacles to Visibility and Media Coverage Strategies Maryam Ben Salem and Atidel Mejbri
• 7 Understanding the Gender Dynamics of Current Affairs Talk Shows in the Pakistani Television Industry Munira Cheema
• 8 Between Two Democratic Ideals: Gendering in the Russian Culture of Political Journalism Liudmila Voronova
• 9 Becoming Less Gendered: A Comparison of (Inter)National Press Coverage of First Female Government Heads Who Win Again at the Polls Tania Cantrell Rosas-Moreno and Ingrid Bachmann
• Part Two: Managing the Message: Self-representations
• 10 “Cameroon’s Female Obama”: Deconstructing the Kah Walla Phenomenon in the Context of the 2011 Presidential Elections in Cameroon Teke Ngomba
• 11 The Mother of Brazil: Gender Roles, Campaign Strategy, and the Election of Brazil’s First Female President Pedro G. dos Santos and Farida Jalalzai
• 12 The Visual Framing of Romanian Women Politicians in Personal Campaign Blogs during the 2012 Romanian Parliamentary Elections Camelia Cmeciu and Monica Pătruț
• 13 Gender, Politics, and the Albanian Media: A Women Parliamentarians’ Account Sonila Danaj and Jonila Godole
• Part Three: Navigating the Public Space: Class and Beauty
• 14 Michelle Bachelet, President of Chile: A Moving Portrait Claudia Bucciferro
• 15 Virgin Venuses: Beauty and Purity for “Public” Women in Venezuela Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols
• 16 Ultra-Feminine Women of Power: Beauty and the State in Argentina Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols
• 17 Yulia Tymoshenko’s Two Bodies Tatiana Zhurzhenko
• Concluding Remarks
• References
• Index
• Copyright