Medien|Denken – Women’s Political Communication – Sharon Adetutu Omotoso

With continuing debates on media accountability especially in volatile countries, this study interrogates political corruption perception and how the media lookout for politicians’ loopholes to reinforce a widespread view that ‘no one goes into politics and comes out clean’. This essentialist about politicians, including women in politics makes the media popular and perhaps the attendant sensationalism aids media survival amidst stiff competitions. Within mediatization discourses, the political communication (also called ‘policom’) of women has also largely been subjected to the whims and caprices of the media (Omotoso & Akanni (2024). In the specific case of scandals, Cucchi et al (2021) affirm that when women adopt the stereotypical gender image of ‘submissiveness’ instead of the masculine ‘assertiveness’ in their policom, they increase their chances of being heavily penalized than men. This reveals how women’s shattering of the glass ceiling has placed them on a glass cliff where they had to answer to corruption allegations. Studies have established that women in leadership are perceived differently, accorded lesser honor, yet higher expectations than their male counterparts (Simms, 2008; Brenton, 2011), however, what has not been widely discussed in scholarship is how women leaders adopt, design and utilize political communication strategies. With case studies of corruption scandals among female politicians in Nigeria, I use a wide range of newspaper reports that offer robust analyses of how media mobs can or do foster feminized corruption-  a conceptual and theoretical interrogation of the scandalization of women in political offices and by extension, other leadership spaces (Omotoso & Faniyi, 2024); and to explain how women’s visibility in political spaces make visible their strategic political communication for stakeholder engagement, reputation management, and crisis control. This would then lead to a close reading of the political communication strategies or tactics of the women selected for this study. The argument here is that political communication is one viable tool in the prevention and protection from political damage, sadly not many women politicians pay attention to a full cycle of election/appointment policom. Here, I deploy policom as a tool that captures the (un)spoken; and silences that accompany the noises of politicizing of the personal. Furthermore, I connect women’s political communication lacunae with the rising scourge of feminized corruption, consequently expanding research on mediatization with specific focus on how media shapes women’s political communication and determine their political futures.

References

Brenton, Scott. (2011). When the personal becomes political: Mitigating damage following scandals. Current Research in Social Psychology, 18(4), 1–13.

Cucchi, Silvia., Anna Rita Graziani, Margherita Guidetti and Nicoletta Cavazza. 2021. Men and Women Defending Themselves from Political Scandals: Gender Stereotypes and Proneness to Forgive Scandalous Politicians. International Review of Social Psychology, 34(1): 18, 1–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.463

Omotoso Sharon Adetutu & Akanni Bolaji Olaronke (2024). Tokenism and Women’s Political Communication in the Pursuit of Gender Egalitarianism in Nigeria, Communication, Culture and Critique, 17(2)., 127–136. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcae018