Gendered News Coverage at the Apex of Political Leadership: Validating and Applying a Visual Character Frame Instrument to the Campaigns of Merkel, Clinton, and Their Male Opponents
2025-12-01
This cross-national, two-study project examines leadership at the intersection of gender, politics, and visual framing. In Study 1, an online experiment, we used AI-generated images of synthetic women and men candidates ( N = 996) to validate an existing visual character frame instrument and examine if voters associate gender with these frames. We found strong consistency between German and US voters in attributing gender-variant leadership qualities to synthetic politicians. Study 2 applied the validated instrument in a comparative content analysis of TV election stories ( N = 318) about Angela Merkel (2017) and Hillary Clinton (2016) and their male opponents. Both women received more masculine framing than men, either signaling strategic success in side-stepping femininity or journalists were over-compensating for decades of gender role stereotyping. Merkel’s visual masculinity was part of a winning campaign while Clinton’s was associated with a loss, underscoring the complexities of visual masculinity for women in politics.