“Be Professional, Private and Pleasant”: The Conscious and Unconscious Gendering of Campaign Messages in Canadian and Australian Local Elections

This dissertation examines Australian and Canadian local campaigns to investigate the extent to which gender and gendered stereotypes consciously affect candidates’ campaign messaging. The data for this study was gathered via in-depth interviews with 92 candidates who contested elections at the state/provincial level between 2010 and 2013. The data collected during the interviews included information on how candidates presented themselves in terms of their appearance, qualifications, character traits and family life; the issues that they highlighted in their local campaigns; the voters they targeted and strategies to connect with them; and information about their opponent relationships such as whether they formed civility pacts, employed negative attack messaging and how they responded if they were negatively campaigned against. The main conclusion is that gender affects political campaigns. Women’s campaign messaging looks different from men’s campaign messaging in several ways. For example, women are less likely to share personal information about themselves and their families and less likely to target an opponent with negative attack messages despite being more likely to be the target of such attacks. Among the most competitive women candidates, the differences found between their campaigns, and men’s campaigns, regardless of competitiveness, started to diminish. In terms of understanding why campaigns are gendered, there was minimal evidence detected that candidates consciously adjusted their messaging in response to what they perceived to be either voter-held or self-held beliefs about gendered stereotypes. Thus, gendered campaign messaging is the result of unconscious gender role stereotypes. By and large, women candidates did not cue gender in their local campaigns by highlighting women’s issues in their messaging, or by appealing to voters to support a woman candidate.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Political Science

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Arts

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Croskill, Julie Lynn

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• O'Neill, Brenda
• Franceschet, Susan

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Young, Lisa
• Lucas, Jack
• Janovicek, Nancy
• Raney, Tracey

• Campaign communication
• Australian elections
• Canadian elections
• Gender and political campaigns
• Elections

Statement dc:rights

• University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/38494

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ucalgary.scholaris.ca:1880/112900