Female Presidents: Gender and Political Campaigns
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Female heads of state remain a rare phenomenon in the world; the Northeast Asian region has seen two female presidents – Park Geun-hye and Tsai Ing-wen. A study of these two presidents addresses questions about gender bias in political campaigns. While Tsai and Park differ in many aspects, my thesis will explore similarities in their campaigns. This thesis compares campaign materials from four presidential campaigns in 2007, 2011, 2012, and 2015. Both candidates ran an unsuccessful first campaign followed by a successful second campaign. This thesis contrasts the first campaigns with the second campaigns for each candidate then compares the changes made between the campaigns. Changes in campaign messaging are assumed to be intentional and are contextualized. For both candidates, their gender was an unavoidable consideration in their campaign strategy. Consistent with previous literature on gender-based campaign strategy, all four campaigns contained gender-abiding and gender-bending aspects. Outside of these strategies, this thesis focuses on genderless campaign strategies. Genderless strategies downplay a female candidate’s gender without adopting ‘male’ characteristics. It is important to note that both gender-abiding and gender-bending strategies emphasize a candidate’s gender while genderless strategies do not. This thesis analyzes cartoon caricatures and logos that independently represented the candidates. These representations were neither gender-abiding nor gender-bending; rather, they were an attempt to create genderless or androgynous versions of the candidates. They presented an easily identifiable but ungendered visual signature. Although there is no correlation between having a female head of state and improving women’s participation in politics, studying the political campaigns of these female politicians reveals articulated gender bias. How a candidate navigates gendered expectations shows as much about the candidate as it does about a country’s electorate. Electorates accustomed to high proportions of female politicians may be less likely to negatively judge genderless strategies. In turn, female leaders of those governments are able to campaign more frequently as genderless politicians rather than as female politicians.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2020 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Yang, Tiffany Ellen |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Pan, Jennifer |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Stanford Global Studies, Center for East Asian Studies |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford Global Studies |
|---|---|
| Subject | East Asian Studies |
| Subject | South Korea |
| Subject | Taiwan |
| Subject | Presidential Campaigns |
| Subject | Female Presidents |
| Subject | Park Geun-hye |
| Subject | Tsai Ing-wen |
| Subject | Genderless |
| Subject | Gender Bias |
| Subject | Gender-abiding |
| Subject | Gender-bending |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Yang, Tiffany Ellen. (2020). Female Presidents: Gender and Political Campaigns. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/tq883nz4233
Collection
Stanford Center for East Asian Studies Thesis Collection
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- Contact
- tiffanyellenyang@gmail.com
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