When a man debates a woman: Trump vs. Clinton in the first mixed gender presidential debates

Televised political debates have attracted intensive research interest. Here we examined the effect of mixed-gender televised political debates on the candidates’ multimodal gender communicative accountability structure. The 2016 election campaign in the United States introduced for the first time a new factor into the presidential political contest: gender. This study is grounded in a theoretical and analytical framework that maps gender accountability structures of verbal/nonverbal communication patterns. We analyzed the televised debates during the 2016 US presidential campaign with the candidates: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The findings indicated that during mixed-gender debates, contenders present conduct that correspond to their gender communicative structures, primarily nonverbal patterns. Trump mainly expressed masculine-communicative patterns, while Clinton displayed mostly feminine-communicative patterns. The theoretical and analytical framework highlights the effect of gender on political communication. The novel perspective delineates and explains the implications of multimodal gender communicative accountability structure of contenders in mixed-gender political debates.     

Talk like a man,walk like a woman: an advanced political communication framework for female politicians

One of the most significant developments of the past decade in the political arena has been the integration of women into senior political positions. Previously, there was a common assumption that female politicians wishing to succeed had to adopt the male communication model, both verbally and non-verbally. This study aims to examine the communication patterns of women in the political sphere. Twenty-four speeches by 12 female politicians in senior political positions from five democratic Western countries were analysed. All speeches were delivered in the respective countries’ legislatures, between 2009 and 2012. This study presents a theoretical framework that maps gender accountability structures of verbal and non-verbal communication patterns. The findings delineate an advanced communication model that indicates that female politicians’ communication consists of a combination of feminine non-verbal communication patterns and masculine verbal communicative expressions. The study expands the theoretical and analytical research on female politicians and develops a gender-communication approach to political communication.     

The Role of Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior in Televised Political Debates

This paper presents a study of televised political debates based on an integrated model that simultaneously examines verbal and nonverbal communication and their interconnections. An integrative approach yields better explanatory power than a separate analysis of each of these modalities. This model was used to analyze televised debates from Israeli election campaigns and identify consistent discrepancy and nondiscrepancy patterns of behavior of winners and losers. The model also sheds light on gender differences and similarities in a novel perspective of discrepant and nondiscrepant communication styles. A set of propositions on the kinds of behaviors that might be beneficial or detrimental for contenders in a televised debate is provided.