Women politicians in Austria: Still not breaking the media ceiling

1 Introduction

The media play a crucial role in voters’ perceptions of politicians (Lühiste and Banducci, 2016) by providing them with essential information on their range of political choices. A lack of media attention is a potential barrier for politicians when running for office, because citizens will less likely vote for politicians with whom they are less familiar (Kahn, 1994). Hence, the underrepresentation of women politicians in the news further increases the gender bias (e. g., Baitinger, 2015; Dolan and Lynch, 2014). Gender equality in campaign coverage is a matter of fairness (Atkeson and Krebs, 2008) and “fundamental for democracy” (MSI-MED, 2017, p. 5). To this day, with only 25 % of all national parliamentarians in the world being women, the political arena remains one of the most men-dominated spheres in society (Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2020).

In Austria, the number of women members of parliament (Nationalrat) has steadily increased over the past years: from 27.32 % in 2008, to 33.33 % in 2013, to 34.43 % in 2017, and to 39.34 % in 2019 (Parlamentsdirektion, 2020). Austria is a representative democracy. The political system is that of a multi-party structure, the electoral system is based on the principle of proportional representation, and the political culture can still be described as consensus-based, although during the study period, conflict levels increased (Müller, 2006; Helms et al., 2021). The national parliament (Nationalrat) has 183 members, who are directly elected by universal suffrage for a five-year term of office unless snap elections are called, as was the case in 2008, 2017, and 2019. The increasing number of women politicians is to some extent owed to the adoption of gender quotas by Austrian political parties. Gender quotas directly influence the gender composition within political parties which facilitates women’s representation in parliament (Caul, 1999, 2001). For instance, the current party statute of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) mandates no less than 40 % of women and no less than 40 % of men when electing officials and compiling lists of candidates (SPÖ, 2018). The Greens – The Green Alternative has a self-imposed quota of 50 % women for all top positions of the party (Die Grünen, 2017) and for the 2017 national election, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) introduced the 50/50 principle of alternation, the so-called Reißverschlussprinzip (‘Zipper Principle’) (Die neue Volkspartei, 2017).

A previous study on women politicians’ representation in campaign coverage on Austrian national elections between 2008 and 2017 documented that women politicians are less likely than men politicians to appear in the news (Hayek and Russmann, 2022): only 4.8 % of the newspaper coverage featured a woman politician as the main actor of a news article, compared to 29.5 % men politicians. Moreover, the relative media representation of women politicians decreases over time, while men as their counterparts gain media visibility. Men politicians benefit from the increasing personalization of political media coverage (McAllister, 2007). Women politicians in Austria can only break the media ceiling when running as a top candidate^[1] or when holding a ministerial office. However, the number of women politicians in top positions varies considerably over the years; before the 2008 election, there were eight men and six women government ministers, before 2013, seven men and six women were in government, while before 2017, only three women governed together with 11 men.

The 2019 snap election was notably different from the three previous elections. First, it followed a seven-month interim expert government with six men ministers and five women ministers led by the first Austrian woman chancellor. Second and for the first time, a woman top candidate led one of the two major parties in Austria, the Social Democrats. In previous campaigns, women top candidates threw their hats into the electoral ring for minor parties only. We argue that while campaign coverage was still dominated by men, the 2019 Austrian national election brought great changes to women politicians’ appearance in campaign coverage. Hence, this paper examines the extent to which women politicians’ underrepresentation in campaign coverage has changed since the latest Austrian national election in 2019 by focusing on central aspects of research on gender bias in the media (Atkeson and Krebs, 2008; Kahn, 1994): the amount of media coverage featuring women politicians and the issues with which the mass media features them (see next section).

The paper begins with a discussion of women politicians’ underrepresentation in campaign coverage, from which we draw our hypotheses. To analyze potential changes in gender bias in media representations of politicians, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of the six most important newspapers in Austria during the last four weeks of the 2008, 2013, 2017, and 2019 Austrian national elections. A key benefit of this study is that it focuses on four national elections over a period of eleven years. We focus on newspaper coverage in our analysis, because Austria’s democratic corporatist media system (Hallin and Mancini, 2004) is characterized by wide newspaper circulation and an early emergence of mass-circulation press. The final section includes a discussion of the changes over time and their implications for political parties and the media with regards to the roles of women politicians.

2 Existing findings on women politicians in campaign coverage

Our study focuses on two of the four main aspects of research on gender bias in the media (Atkeson and Krebs, 2008; Kahn, 1994): the visibility of women politicians in campaign coverage (i. e., the volume of media coverage featuring women politicians) and the issues with which the mass media features them. These two aspects can be evaluated throughout all campaign coverage that features politicians, while politicians’ traits and politicians’ viability in the media are not featured in every news item (Atkeson and Krebs, 2008; Kahn, 1994).

3 Materials and methods

4 Results

The results presented in Table 2 show that, in almost 35 % of the newspaper articles across the four election campaigns, a politician was coded as the main actor. However, 28.7 % of the articles featured a man politician, and only 6 % featured a woman politician. This confirms hypothesis 1 that the share of newspaper coverage of women politicians is considerably lower than that of their men colleagues (χ² = 413.1, p~0.000).

The share of women politicians in the news reached a low in 2017, when only 2.7 % of newspaper articles featured a woman politician. In 2017, there was only one woman minister running for re-election, and only the Green party contested the election with a woman top candidate. In Hayek and Russmann (2022), we show that women in top positions are far more likely to be covered. Between 2017 and 2019, the share of women politicians in campaign coverage increased from 2.7 % to 8.7 %. The particular circumstances of the 2019 election campaign seem to be a key aspect of this positive development for women politicians. However, the percentage of women politicians in the media is only slightly higher in 2019 than in 2013.

At the same time, the share of men politicians in the news dropped to the level of 2008. This is in part connected with a rise in coverage of “non-political individuals” – one of these was Heinz-Christian Strache, the former vice-chancellor and central figure of the Ibiza-gate scandal, who had left politics, but remained a newsworthy actor, particularly in connection with the alleged misuse of party funds (e. g., Hager et al., 2019). Nevertheless, every fourth article still focused on a man politician, while not even every tenth article on a woman politician.

Power positions are indeed crucial for women politicians’ media coverage and significantly increase their presence in the news (χ² = 892.23, p~0,000), as shown in Table 3. In 2019, the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the liberal NEOS contested the election with a woman as front-runner. Pamela Rendi-Wagner (SPÖ) was the main actor in 159 articles (39 %) and therefore the most prominent woman in media coverage. Beate Meinl-Reisinger (NEOS) was the main actor in 60 articles, a share of 14.7 % of the coverage featuring women politicians in 2019. In 2008, Beate Meinl-Reisinger’s party – then known as the Liberal Forum (LIF) – was also led by a woman, Heide Schmidt, and accounted for a similar share of 14 % of that year’s coverage on women politicians. In 2013 and 2017, the Greens were the only party with a woman front-runner, Eva Glawischnig (31.7 %) and Ulrike Lunacek (78.8 %) respectively. Besides the women cabinet members in 2013, they dominated the coverage on women politicians in both years. With a man as top candidate in 2019, the Green Party did not manage to draw attention to their women candidates further back on their electoral list. Women candidates of the conservative ÖVP are still hardly visible; however, they reach a far higher coverage than in previous years. The so-called “zipper principle” seems to have paid off.

The government occupied a particular role in the 2019 election campaign, as it was composed only of non-partisan members. These non-partisan cabinet members are unusually absent in the election coverage: In the intensive phase of election campaigns, the main news formats focus on politics, not policies and so the non-partisan cabinet members did not play an active part during the campaign. Again, women ministers appeared less often (37 articles; 42 %) than their men cabinet colleagues (52 articles; 58 %), but the gender bias is smaller than among cabinet members in previous elections.

Surprisingly, in 2019, 65 articles cover a woman politician of the populist right-wing FPÖ as main actor. Here, two politicians attracted media attention: Ursula Stenzel, an FPÖ candidate in Vienna, took part in a demonstration with the extreme-right Identitarian Movement. Philippa Strache, wife of the former vice-chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache and now a candidate for parliament herself, was accused of misuse of party funds together with her husband. We can therefore confirm hypothesis 2 and add to our previous results that women politicians gain news coverage if they are cabinet members, top candidates – or if they are engaged in scandals.

To illustrate the division between hard and soft issues between genders, we examined the coverage on policy issues by gender of the main actor, as shown in Table 4. Across the four national election campaigns analyzed, women politicians only dominated the campaign coverage of one issue, namely culture. About 54 % of the articles on culture, a soft issue, feature a woman as main actor. Women politicians have dominated this issue in each election. Three more issues with which women politicians were featured most often can be considered as soft issues: the environment, kindergarten and schools as well as society.

Among hard issues, crime prevention is the only issue that features women and men equally often. This is due to the fact that in 2008 and 2013, a woman occupied the post of minister of the interior. On the other hand, four of the five issues with which men politicians were featured most often were hard issues. In our previous study (Hayek and Russmann, 2022) covering campaigns up to the year 2017, women were never associated with these issues, apart from pensions (soft issue). Including the 2019 campaign coverage, the data reveal that at least once or twice, woman main actors were featured with these issues.

Figure 1:

Proportion of hard issues per party and election year.

Finally, we are interested whether a top candidate’s gender matters concerning the issues their party is covered with. For that purpose, we compare the three parties that to this date have had men and women front-runners: SPÖ, NEOS, and the Green Party. Figure 1 shows the proportion of hard issues the three parties were featured with in the four elections. No clear pattern appears: For the NEOS and the SPÖ, the election campaigns headed by women led to the lowest proportion of hard issues; news coverage on the Green Party, on the other hand, showed the highest levels of hard issues when a woman was the top candidate. The front-runner’s gender does not seem to play a role for a journalist’s selection of issue type. In fact, the association of hard and soft issues with a party depends more on the party’s general ideological profile, and the salience of issues in the campaign year.

5 Discussion and conclusions

A key benefit of this study is that it focuses on four national elections over a period of eleven years. With the introduction of mandatory quotas by almost all parties during that time as well as a first woman chancellor, politics in Austria has developed into a more supportive environment for women politicians. However, in sum, throughout the last decade, women politicians in Austria have struggled with the media ceiling and changes have been minimal. A real gender bias still exists in Austrian campaign coverage: Women are considerably less visible in media coverage (H1 supported), they have fewer opportunities to impact the political agenda than their men counterparts (H2 supported), and they are assigned more often to speak about soft issues (H3 supported). The gender of a party’s top candidate, however, does not seem to play a significant role in the journalistic selection of their issue portfolio (H4 supported).

The virtual absence of women from the media means they will have fewer opportunities to influence the political agenda and may be at a disadvantage relative to their men counterparts when it comes to voter recognition and support (Kahn, 1994). Given that 8.7 % of newspaper articles featured a woman politician in the 2019 election, the share of women was the highest over the past decade, but this is due to a woman being top candidate of one of the two major parties. Although the interim government in power during the 2019 campaign was the first Austrian government composed of 50 % men and women, the public servants who occupied the ministries did not gain substantive media coverage.

Furthermore, our results show that women politicians are still primarily associated with soft issues. However, when it comes to top candidates, we find that the differences in the issue portfolios of campaigns headed by men or women disappear. Again, this finding supports the claim that only if women are in more powerful political positions, does the media treat them the same as their men colleagues. Maybe there should be a quota on top candidate positions as well: Gender quotas find support in our analysis of four election campaigns in eleven years. Only if more women occupy top positions in parties and election campaigns, they will be able to overcome the media bias.

In addition to women in power positions, we find that also women politicians involved in political scandals make the news. While it is not new that scandals fuel political coverage (Baumgartner and Bonafont, 2015; Puglisi and Snyder, 2011), the gender dimension of political scandal in the news has rarely been explored. Courtemanche and Green (2020) show that voters are moreforgiving towards women than men when it comes to political scandal – further research could explore the role of newspapers and journalists in gendering scandal.

Our study has limitations. First, it would be interesting to contrast the results with the parties’ own communication in their press releases, social media presences and the like. For instance, a study by one of the authors (Russmann and Höller, 2012) shows for Austria that in the 2008 national election women politicians’ visibility in party press releases was slightly higher than in the media coverage. Further research should investigate to what extent media selection processes play a role for the gender bias in news coverage. Second, future studies should include other media outlets to grasp the full spectrum of the media landscape. Particularly of interest would be a focus on online news and social media, because a previous study by the authors (Hayek and Russmann, 2022) shows no differences in women politicians’ representation between newspapers and TV news. Third, the content analysis of newspaper articles tells us nothing about voters’ evaluations of women politicians in election situations. People rely on the media for information on politics and the media influences their voting behavior (Dolan and Lynch, 2014; Iyengar and Kinder, 1987). Fourth, this study only focuses on a single country. It would be insightful to compare the results for Austria with other countries and examine whether women politicians have gained more visibility over time in other countries.

This study of news coverage over the last four national election campaigns shows that women politicians in Austria are scratching the media ceiling, but are still not able to break it. Their struggle continues. Men still have a better chance of winning votes, because of women politicians’ greater absence from influential news coverage as well as stereotyped media portrayals. Equal participation of women and men politicians in the political arena is fundamental for democracy (MSI-MED, 2017). The responsibility for change, and hence, gender equality and inclusion, lies within both parties and the media. Parties need to promote women to higher positions. After all, women make up more than half of the Austrian population, but they are not even close to equal representation in politics. The media need to report in a way that reflects political and societal realities.