Political Leaders’ Nonverbal Gendered Communicative Structure During Crisis

During crisis there is an intense interest in political leaders’ nonverbal communicative structures during televised appearances. Nonverbal communicative structure (NCS) plays a central role in perceptions of politicians’ leadership, charisma, confidence, and trust. Political leaders’ NCS is essential in affective communication, influence, and persuasion, especially during times of crisis and challenging periods of stress, fear, and uncertainty. Political leaders NCS during crisis exposes the leaders to sensitive public eyes that express contemporary essential processes in political communication, which are the trends toward personalization and emotionalism. Grounded in the role-congruity theory, this study analyzes political leaders’ NCS and develops novel theoretical and analytical frameworks of gendered NCS, which delineate the unique NCS of male versus female political leaders during crisis. We analyzed 20 televised appearances by 10 heads of state (five males and five females) from democratic Western countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis of political leaders’ NCS was a multi-tiered system for observed nonverbal communication classification, which coded gestures, postures, facial expressions, vocalic characteristics, and performance. The findings revealed that gender had a significant effect on political leaders’ NCS. Male leaders presented masculine NCS of competition, warning, threatening and scaring behavior, broad proxemics, tension leakage, and illustrative gestures. By contrast, female leaders presented an alternative novel feminine NCS for leadership, which expresses cooperative, emotional communication, empathy, optimism, eye contact, and flexible expressions. These finding are new and important because it was previously assumed that the key to political success for female leaders was the performance of masculine NCS. Our innovative conclusions are that contemporary female leaders do not adopt the masculine NCS of leadership; instead, they present a new leadership style based on feminine NCS. This novel feminine NCS for leadership provides an alternative to masculine-dominated political NCS. The conclusions advance the role-congruity theory and the social construction theory of gender and develop theoretical and analytical frameworks that explain the central effect of gender on contemporary political leaders’ NCS. Furthermore, this study presents advanced distinctive profiles for male versus female leaders’ NCS of emotions, cognition, and behavior during crisis. Finally, the conclusions from this study could have meaningful practical implications for effective communication of political leaders. Political leaders may adopt the proposed theoretical and analytical framework to develop and improve their communication skills, persuasion effects, social influence, public support, and cooperation into political success.