Do Perceptions of Political Leadership in the UK Vary According to Leaders’ Gender?

There is a certain amount of consensus across British literature that U.K. politics has become increasingly personalized. Arguably, this means leaders’ personal characteristics become directly correlated with their political competence. Yet, current gender and political leadership literature, the majority of which is U.S. based, suggests this personalization can be detrimental for women in politics. Often the ‘typical’ woman presented in the media does not fit with those characteristics required of the ‘good’ political leader. Despite this, gender has been largely overlooked in British leadership and personalization literature and this international work only sporadically applied. This research aims to study gender’s role in political leadership in the U.K. context, providing a current snapshot of the relationship between media, voter and leader from a gendered perspective. This paper applies current international gender and political leadership literature to the U.K. context by investigating how women are discussed in the U.K. media in comparison to men, and the possibility of examining the voter’s leadership perception via experimental methods. The ultimate research question is: “Do perceptions of political leadership in the U.K. vary according to leaders’ gender?” Empirically this is tested by content analysis comparing the representation of female and male candidates in both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media during the British Labour Party’s 2015 leadership election. Arguably, changes in Labour’s voting system and lower barriers to membership meant the contest played out almost like a presidential primary, with the candidates, half of whom were women, highly scrutinized by the media. This presents an unusual opportunity in British politics to study women’s treatment as candidates for high political office. The case is then made for voter experiments in the U.K. building on previous work in organisational studies and political psychology. An initial experimental design to test voter’s gender-stereotyping of political leaders is presented.