Stereotypes in Politician’s Images? How Male and Female Politicians are Evaluated in Dutch Newspapers, 2006-2012.

Despite the large amount of research into the topic of gender differences in politics, the current literature remains inconclusive regarding how male and female politicians are portrayed differently in the media. This paper studies whether and how male and female politicians are differently evaluated on their leadership characteristics in 14 Dutch newspapers from 2006 to 2012. We study these differences based on computer-aided content analysis of positive and negative evaluations in over 400.000 articles in Dutch newspapers on six aspects of political leadership: political craftsmanship, vigorousness, integrity, responsiveness, consistency and communicative performances. The paper compares differences in media framing for males and females as political leaders, members of cabinet and members of parliament, thereby providing understanding of gender differences in media framing for multiple levels of media visibility. Based on gender stereotypes, we expect male politicians to be more often evaluated on task- and power-related leadership characteristics, such as political craftsmanship and vigorousness, while female politicians are expected to be more often evaluated on interpersonal leadership characteristics, such as responsiveness and communicative performances.