Media Effects and Gender-Based Violence in Politics

In this paper, we focus on media coverage a violent exchange between a politician and a member of the public, as an example of gender-based violence in politics, or GBV-P. We pose two sets of research questions. First, how does learning about GBV-P affect how someone views themselves as a political actor? Does exposure to media content that documents this violence suppress people’s nascent political ambition, internal efficacy, and political interest? If consuming news media about GBV-P leads some, especially women, to (further) disengage from politics, they may not only be less likely to consider running for office, but also less likely to make representational requests from their representatives, and less willing to participate in democratic processes more generally. This, in turn, may have negative downstream consequences for the health and vibrancy of both representative and deliberative democracy. Second, how does witnessing GBV-P affect how people evaluate the objects of that violence? Is reading news about a violent attack against a politician associated with more negative evaluations of that politicians’ character and competence, especially if the victim is a woman? If news reports about GBV-P negatively affect voter perceptions of those representatives, it suggests that GBV-P creates additional perceptual barriers for women representatives beyond the already steep costs associated with it. We answer these questions using an original survey experiment of Canadian adults, where participants were randomly assigned to read a news story based on a report of the real-world attack of a federal politician in Canada. One experimental group read a news story where the politician who was attacked was a woman; the other read the same story, but the politician under attack was a man. We compare these conditions to explore whether 1) seeing someone who shares one’s gender identity being attacked affects how participants view themselves, including their interest in a political career, and 2) if being the victim of psychological violence penalizes women in politics disproportionately. This paper is part of a larger project. In the larger project, we focus on three identities (gender, race, and parental status) and three types of coverage (sexualizing, work-life balance, and violence) to ask: how does gendered and racialized coverage influence political attitudes, behaviour, and evaluations across voters, candidates, and party officials? While the prevalence of gendered coverage is well documented worldwide, ours is amongst the first to comprehensively explore its consequences on voters, candidates, and political parties.