Paper presented in London

Thursday, 1st of July, Drs. Valeriu Frunzaru and Nicoleta Corbu presented a paper on gender differences in the Romanian election for the European Parliament at the international conference Beyond Citizenship: Feminism and the transformation of Belonging, held in London, UK at Birkbeck, University of London.

The paper, “Women Politicians in the 2009 Romanian Elections for the European Union Parliament”, presented the results of a content analysis of 26 electoral debates broadcasted by Romanian public television channels (TVR1 and TVR3), in order to investigate the differences between men and women in political debates, in terms of visibility, political affiliation, topics covered, time allocated, and number of interventions.

The research is part of a research grant called The Media Construction of Europeanization as Public Problem in The Context of European Integration of Romanian Society. The general purposes of the grant are: Identifying Romanians’ requests regarding europeanization and the channels to transmit and acknowledge these requests; 2. Establishing the extent to which mass media, especially television reflects the projects, governmental or other social actors’ projects regarding the Romanian society’s europeanization; 3. The study of television as an agent of europeanization in the process of transition from the “tendential modernization” of Romanian society to structural modernization of the European community. 4. Gender representation in Romanian and European Politics. The paper focused on the last objective.

The research showed that women candidates cover only about 20% of the time of all interventions, but relatively similar topics. However, some topics (such as economics and structural funds) are less debated by women, if compared to men. Even though 12 of 33 Romanians members of the EU Parliament are women (they were elected on electoral lists, sometimes ranking better on these lists than men candidates), women candidates are even less represented in TV electoral debates.

Here you can find a copy of the presentation.