scholarly journals Gender Stereotyping of Political Candidates

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toril Aalberg ◽  
Anders Todal Jenssen

Abstract Electoral research has demonstrated how men and women sometimes have different political preferences. Men are typically thought to be more concerned about taxation, business policies, etc., while women care more about issues related to the welfare state. Thus, it seems obvious that stereotyping influences candidate evaluation with regard to issue competence. In this article, we investigate whether stereotyping also influences how the electorate views the communication skills of the candidates. We ask whether the gender of politicians affects the way citizens evaluate various aspects of the qualities of a political speech, and thus their support for political parties. The experiment used in this study is based on a pre- and post-stimuli questionnaire. Stimuli are videotapes of genuine political speeches (originally given by party leaders in October 2000) performed for the experiment by one female and one male actor. Our main finding is that the male “politician” was believed to be more knowledgeable, trustworthy and convincing than the female “politician” even though they presented the same speech verbatim. These differences in scores were the result of the male part of the audience consistently rating the female lower and the male higher than did the females in the audience. Among the female audience, the two politicians received almost identical scores on all traits. The candidate’s popularity and the popularity of the candidate’s party were also affected by the gender of the politician who performed the speech.

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malte Schott ◽  
Jule Wolf

Abstract. We examined the effect of presenting unknown policy statements on German parties’ election posters. Study 1 showed that participants inferred the quality of a presented policy from knowledge about the respective political party. Study 2 showed that participants’ own political preferences influenced valence estimates: policy statements presented on campaign posters of liked political parties were rated significantly more positive than those presented on posters of disliked political parties. Study 3 replicated the findings of Study 2 with an additional measure of participants’ need for cognition. Need for cognition scores were unrelated to the valence transfer from political parties to policy evaluation. Study 4 replicated the findings of Studies 2 and 3 with an additional measure of participants’ voting intentions. Voting intentions were a significant predictor for valence transfer. Participants credited both their individually liked and disliked political parties for supporting the two unknown policies. However, the credit attributed to the liked party was significantly higher than to the disliked one. Study 5 replicated the findings of Studies 2, 3, and 4. Additionally, participants evaluated political clubs that were associated with the same policies previously presented on election posters. Here, a second-degree transfer emerged: from party valence to policy evaluation and from policy evaluation to club evaluation. Implications of the presented studies for policy communications and election campaigning are discussed.


Author(s):  
Dawn Langan Teele

In the 1880s, women were barred from voting in all national-level elections, but by 1920 they were going to the polls in nearly thirty countries. What caused this massive change? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it was not because of progressive ideas about women or suffragists' pluck. In most countries, elected politicians fiercely resisted enfranchising women, preferring to extend such rights only when it seemed electorally prudent and necessary to do so. This book demonstrates that the formation of a broad movement across social divides, and strategic alliances with political parties in competitive electoral conditions, provided the leverage that ultimately transformed women into voters. As the book shows, in competitive environments, politicians had incentives to seek out new sources of electoral influence. A broad-based suffrage movement could reinforce those incentives by providing information about women's preferences, and an infrastructure with which to mobilize future female voters. At the same time that politicians wanted to enfranchise women who were likely to support their party, suffragists also wanted to enfranchise women whose political preferences were similar to theirs. In contexts where political rifts were too deep, suffragists who were in favor of the vote in principle mobilized against their own political emancipation. Exploring tensions between elected leaders and suffragists and the uncertainty surrounding women as an electoral group, the book sheds new light on the strategic reasons behind women's enfranchisement.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danica Kulibert ◽  
Aaron J Moss ◽  
Jacob Appleby ◽  
Laurie O'Brien

People who deviate from group norms pose problems for their ingroup, but not all forms are deviance are equivalent. Four experiments (N=1,063) investigated whether people hold a lay understanding of these subjective group dynamics by assessing people’s beliefs about how others would perceive two types of deviants within U.S. political parties—political moderates and extremes. Participants thought both Democrats (Experiment 1) and Republicans (Experiment 2) would view moderate political candidates more negatively (e.g., less loyal, less principled, less typical, and more likely to defect) than extreme candidates. Moreover, these relatively negative evaluations of moderates extended to rank and file members of the Democratic (Experiment 3) and Republican (Experiment 4) Parties. These findings suggest that people intuitively understand subjective group dynamics and, when applied to politics, this understanding may have important consequences for how people with moderate and extreme beliefs engage in political discourse.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 252-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Harris

Explanations for the expansion of the welfare state have frequently centered on the importance of left-wing political parties and labor unions. Scholars have even pointed to the rare but growing significance of social democracy in the industrializing world. Yet, in the field of healthcare, labor unions frequently oppose sweeping universalistic reforms that threaten to erode members’ existing benefits, and those most in need of healthcare in rural areas and the informal sector are often the least organized politically. In the absence of mass demands, who then is responsible for universal healthcare programs in the industrializing world, and by what means do they successfully advocate for far-reaching reforms? This article explores the role that “professional movements” played in expanding access to healthcare in an industrializing nation that was engaged in processes of democratization. Mass movements are typically composed of lay people; by contrast, professional movements are made up of elites from esteemed professions who command knowledge, networks, and access to state resources that set them apart from ordinary citizens. The account illustrates how and why professional movements are able to play such a powerful role in health policymaking in the industrializing world, points to the need for more research on professional movements in other cases and policy domains, and discusses their relevance to social change in the industrializing world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Vural Karagul

The purpose of this study is to examine if Turkish people prefer their leaders with spiritual leadership characteristics. The findings reveal that Turkish people prefer their leaders with spiritual values and characteristics.  In addition, Turkish people in both the East and West part of Turkey, after spiritual leadership values and characteristics, want to see their leaders with religious values. However, the magnitude of preferences of religious values in the East part of Turkey is higher than in the West part of Turkey.These results can be implemented training the high ranked government officials such as bureaucrats and district governors to empower them with spiritual leadership values and characteristics; therefore, they could provide better services for the benefits of people. Also, political parties can bring spiritual leadership values to their agenda. They can emphasize on these values in their party programs and to raise awareness among the party leaders and members to inspire and sustain people. 


2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raivo Palmaru

Abstract Although numerous studies over the past 20 years have revealed a clear connection between content analysis statistics and the results of public opinion surveys, the media’s “minimal effects” hypothesis still remains the overwhelmingly prevailing view. Among other things, it is not clear which of the two influences the other: Do people’s political preferences influence the media or do the media influence people’s preferences? In order to test this, the results of the 1999 and 2003 general elections and the 2002 local elections in Estonia, as well as the results of current public opinion surveys, were compared to the coverage given to the campaigning parties in the largest Estonian newspapers. The analysis showed that the coverage of political parties in the print media, as determined by the frequency of valuative notations, described the election results to a great extent. It is noteworthy that a change in media content was followed by a change in public opinion. At the same time, an accumulation effect became obvious: The voters’ preferences for political parties accumulated diachronically during the course of several weeks based on the information that was available to them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
Cristina Ares ◽  
Antón Losada

The transformation of the Welfare State is not a standardized response to globalization or a by-product of European Union policies, but rather ‘what parties make of it’ (Burgoon, 2006). Different welfare regimes and welfare cultures contribute to the maintenance of diverse national responses to global and regional integration in terms of their public welfare systems, but there are also meso-level variables, such as parties´ ideologies, that may have an impact on the volume and distribution of welfare expenditure. This article presents a new scheme and procedure to code party manifesto statements in favor of social spending and retrenchment; it applies them in Britain, France and Spain in order to show the possibilities of the new data. The preliminary results indicate that ideologies are linked to parties´ preferences regarding the distribution of social spending between programs, the emphasis on different age groups as beneficiaries of welfare expenditure, and the rationale for social cuts.  


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulla Moberg ◽  
Göran Eriksson

This study focuses on Swedish political press conferences and explores the discursive efforts of politicians to express unity despite diverging ideological views. It concerns the use of the first person pronoun ‘we’ (Swedish. we) and is influenced by both dialogue theory and linguistic theories, which highlight the meaning of pronouns in context. The data consist of transcribed web broadcasts of press conferences with the leaders of the four political parties that form the Swedish Government since 2006. Our analysis reveals that a clear-cut use of the personal pronoun ‘we’ can serve the same political purposes as a more ambiguous use, i.e. to show unity while there are differences. The four party leaders are involved in a communicative project of ‘doing unity’ to demonstrate that they are a very capable government.


1975 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Finn Fuglestad

The institutional framework imposed upon Niger in 1946, tended to function according to traditional political concepts, norms, notions and values. Hence the distinction established in this paper between ‘traditionalist’ (UNIS/BNA) and ‘modern’ political parties, refers to the degree of reliance upon this traditional culture and also to the degree to which party-leaders were able to manipulate the norms, notions, etc., of the traditional political systems, in order to gain influence within the new institutional framework. The French Administration, functioning largely as an indigenous chieftaincy, was to a certain extent forced to interfere in politics, since an electoral victory for a ‘modern’ political party (i.e. the évolués) would have to be interpreted—according to the logic of traditional political theory—as a loss of the ‘force’, ‘power’ or ‘luck’, without which the French could no longer be regarded as the legitimate rulers of Niger.If the French finally decided to collaborate with the évolués (and in the process disentangled themselves from the ‘chieftaincy-model’), it was because the évolués constituted the only group capable of grasping the intricate problems of economic development and of running a modern state.


Asian Survey ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (5) ◽  
pp. 969-990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Kushner

How do political parties in developing countries, without access to accurate polling data, understand their voters? I examine the role that various sources of information play in political party platforms, and how the method of data collection affects parties’ policy and political efforts, primarily by using interview data from 2012 and 2013 with workers from four leading parties in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. I theorize the role of party workers as a key conduit for information between party leaders and the voters they represent.


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