ÄR KÖNSSTEREOTYPISK KOMMUNIKATION I DEN SVENSKA RIKSDAGEN EN GREJ? En kvalitativ analys av svenska utrikesdebatter utifrån ett genusperspektiv

Abstract

Executive summary A big part of political communication is strategically planned to influence our knowledge, opinions, and assumptions about reality. Political communication is by science often proven to be built on gender stereotypical expectations, which means that male and female politicians largely use different ways to communicate. Because of these stereotypical expectations female and male politicians can be evaluated differently for the same behavior. This may negatively affect female politicians in particular, because the stereotypically expected behavior of a woman does not correlate with the stereotypical expectations of a leader. Because of this, female politicians may be valued not by their ability to be a good politician, but by their capacity to behave and act according to gender stereotypical expectations. The purpose of this study was to map out communicative similarities and differences between Swedish female and male politicians when talking about the war in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine was chosen as a subject because all the politicians have a similar stance in the matter and can therefore be expected to communicate with a similar narrative. This gave us the opportunity to compare the politicians and their communication more fairly according to gender stereotypes. The theories used for the study were social role theory and gender congruity role, and as an analytical tool we took inspiration from gender communicative accountability structure. The data was collected from two parliamentary debates which took place on June 10, 2022, and on February 15, 2023. Sixteen politicians from different political parties were in this study analyzed, eight were men and eight were women. To analyze which traits the different politicians used, a model was developed from an already existing model originally created by Gredbelsky-Lichtman & Bdolach. The analytical model contains 17 masculine traits and 16 feminine traits, categorized into stereotypically female and male traits, and according to verbal and non-verbal communication. The results showed both differences and similarities between female and male politicians and how they communicate. Both women and men politicians used traits that matched traits of the opposite gender which indicates that the Swedish politicians do not only use traits that are stereotypical for their sex. They often used a combination of traits from both sides while talking in the parliament. Some traits were only used by men and some traits were only used by women, but in these cases, we only saw a few examples which suggests that the differences depend on personal traits rather than gender