Mediating Political Leadership in the UK: A Historical Analysis

The research draws upon data from both historical (1918-2015) and contemporary (1992-2015) media content analyses of British General Election campaigns. The data evaluates key issues and personalities in order to track changes and continuities in representations of leadership over time, with an additional focus on the (under) reporting and trivialisation of women politicians and leaders. Most recently this has involved an extensive analysis of the last campaign which took place in May 2015. The authors aim to provide a comparative analysis focusing on change over time within the same, rather than between two contemporary systems. The research is concerned with a range of questions: how leaders are represented by the media, particularly by the notoriously combative partisan press in Britain, whether the disclosure of leaders’ private lives has become increasingly critical to their profiles and to what extent overt evaluations of the leadership credentials of individual politicians have become increasingly prevalent. The research is particularly interested in whether or not the ways in which leadership is framed in the media poses gender-specific risks for women leaders, or for prominent women who might aspire to lead. As such, the authors aim to interrogate the extent to which the media frame effective political leadership as a set of traits or behaviours which privilege traditionally masculine characteristics and how this might have changed over time. The analysis also examines specific examples of women political actors to see how they fit into these wider discussions of effective leadership. Politicians such as Thatcher and Sturgeon are examined but potential others include past prospective Prime Ministers, such as Barbara Castle, Shirley Williams and Yvette Cooper, as well as potential future leaders Theresa May and Nicky Morgan.