Parliamentary Speeches and Social Media Discourses Across Party Systems

Abstract

This panel examines how political masculinities are framed in parliamentary speeches, social media narratives, and political leadership. While gender balance patterns are more or less evident in politics, narrative repertoires of power, dominance and authority continue to structure political discourse and communication. Τhis panel asks whether there is there a gender gap in the use of these frames and toxic styles. Are female politicians less inclined to use them or do they adopt similar repertoires under certain conditions? Do such narratives align with specific ideology and party family orientation (e.g. far/extreme right), or do they spread across party systems through political/electoral competition, crises and critical political junctures? Employing computational approaches, the panel analyzes large corpora of parliamentary speeches and social media content across multiple cases. We theorize “political masculinity” as a set of performative scripts including strength, control, protection, humiliation, affective polarization, etc., that can be mobilized by various actors for different objectives. Papers will compare the narrative of parties and leaders and situate communication within socio-political contexts and/or trigger events to identify convergences and divergences across gender, ideology, political orientation and status (government/opposition, etc.), and to determine the circumstances (e.g. during crises or polarized political campaigns) in which “toxic masculinity” narratives spike. Maintaining a critical and intersectional perspective, the panel contributes to a synthesis of political communication, party politics, and gender research, while offering conceptual and methodological tools for mapping the status, significance, and dynamics of political masculinities in contemporary democracies.

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