The present study explores gendered representations in Belgian electoral news coverage. Compared to other Western countries, Belgium has consistently reported a small share of female politicians in the news, offering limited insights into the ways they are portrayed. Starting from the observation that the (mainly Anglo-Saxon) body of work on women politicians’ representation has reported mixed findings, the study intends to provide a more comprehensive analysis by taking political and contextual factors into account. By means of a quantitative content analysis, we monitored news content prior to the 2019 Belgian elections, resulting in a sample of 981 television, newspaper, radio and web-based news items. The findings confirm the persistence of gendered patterns in Belgian news content, regardless of a candidate’s political characteristics. Women were less often represented and their gender, appearance and family life were more often highlighted. Whereas a candidate’s political power provided additional insights into gendering, some differences in coverage between candidates could not be explained by either sex or political characteristics. Lastly, differences between media were limited, though web-based news was more negative in tone.
Mother of three children, or first and foremost politician? A quantitative content analysis of the representation of female political candidates in the Flemish press
This study compares the presence and portrayal of female and male political candidates in news articles that report on newly announced candidatures during times of election. We used a quantitative content analysis to study 390 news articles about two federal (2007, 2014) and two local elections (2012, 2018) in Belgium. The articles were collected from four Flemish newspapers: De Morgen, Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Nieuwsblad and De Standaard. The findings show that male and female politicians are unequally represented. Numerically, male politicians are represented almost twice as often as woman politicians and articles about female politicians are shorter in length. For female politicians the age, marital status, and parenthood are more often mentioned, highlighting their roles in the private sphere. Notably, the coverage of local elections shows a more biased representation than the coverage of federal elections does. As such, this study underlines the importance of comparing different electoral contexts.
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