Seminar: Not in the Picture: Visual Descriptive Representation and Gender Gaps in Parties’ Visual Communication - Malo Jan, Noémie Piolat, Luis Sattelmayer (Sciences Po)
14:00-15:00 (GMT) Wednesday, January 28.
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14:00-15:00 (GMT) Wednesday, February 25.
Abstract: Political communication has increasingly shifted toward visual and social media platforms, transforming not only how parties engage with voters but also what they present to them. In this context, political representation unfolds not only through institutions but also through images. This paper introduces the concept of visual descriptive representation, the extent to which social groups, here women, are visibly represented in party-controlled visual communication. Using an original dataset comprising all images ever posted by 360 political parties on Instagram across 38 countries from account creation to the end of 2023 (600,000 images), we employ computer vision techniques to detect gender in party visuals and compare women’s visual presence with their institutional representation in parliament. The results reveal a consistent gender visual gap: women are systematically underrepresented in party imagery, even in parties with women leadership or strong women’s parliamentary presence. However, parties also strategically under- or overrepresent women visually relative to their institutional representation, depending on party ideology and electoral dynamics. Gender underrepresentation thus persists not only in access to power but also in the symbolic visibility of politics.
About the speakers: Malo Jan is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po Paris. His primary research interests lie in political parties and climate politics and his dissertation examines political polarization around climate change in Western Europe. More broadly, he has a strong interest in studying party competition by operationalizing political concepts in textual and visual data using computational methods. Malo's work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Party Politics, and Global Environmental Politics.
Luis Sattelmayer is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po Paris. His dissertation examines the decline of mainstream center-left and center-right parties in Western Europe, focusing on how their communication and positioning on immigration and vis-à-vis the far right have shaped their electoral decline. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review and Party Politics. Luis uses computational methods to develop novel measures of political concepts in textual and visual data from parties, politicians, and media."