The Gendered Mediation of Political Leadership: A Contextual Approach

Although political leadership remains understood mostly in stereotypically masculine terms, its definition is now more inclusive of traits traditionally associated with femininity. As the literature on the gendered mediation of political leadership has shown, these leadership demands are reflected by the media discourse, which has increasingly valued some stereotypically “feminine” approaches to power, alongside the continued promotion of traditionally “masculine” leadership skills. In some cases, the gendered coverage of political leadership includes a harsher evaluation of women politicians or candidates to leadership roles (Wagner, Trimble & Sampert 2019), although they are increasingly perceived as possessing the agentic skills traditionally ascribed to men (van der Pas, Aaldering and Bos 2023). Several contributions have started to investigate how contextual factors, such as the characteristics of the political system or the nature of the period under scrutiny – electoral or routine times –, shape gendered discourses on political leadership in the media (Trimble 2017; Aaldering & Van der Pas 2020). This paper intends to contribute to this contextual approach by assuming that during electoral campaigns, the gendered construction of political leadership in media discourse is shaped by campaign events. Indeed, the media do not just mention political candidates and leaders, but they tell a story of these personalities taking actions, reacting to or participating in political events. This research argues that these campaign events can be understood in gendered terms and that this could potentially impact the evaluation of candidates in mediatic discourse, with women’s communication skills at risk of being evaluated harsher in the coverage of stereotypically male events such as political rallies. This paper analyzes the gendered construction of political leadership in the press coverage of the 2022 French presidential elections campaign. Using discourse analysis assisted by a text analysis software, we examine which traits or skills are used to depict candidates in the context of several campaign events and how they are evaluated in mediatic discourse in order to uncover gendered understandings of the qualities associated with political leadership.