SV Machiavelli

Sign up now for our second pub lecture of the year at Café Plan West on the 25th of November, with the topic of Online Gendered Harassment! This year, the pub lecture will be given by Dr. Norah Schulten, your very own First Year Coordinator. Pub lectures are lectures given in a casual environment by experts in the field while students can have some drinks and snacks. Feel free to have a chat (and a beer!) with your fellow students or Dr. Norah Schulten after the event to discuss this interesting topic. We look forward to having you there!

Norah Schulten has assessed how gendered harassments against Dutch European Parliament (EP) candidates during the 2024 elections on social media could negatively contribute to political campaigning, open debate and equal representation. The following three research questions structure her work:

First, how do harassments of personal characteristics activate gender prejudices of men and women politicians, which make their gender appear unsuitable for politics? 

Second, how do gendered harassments activate gender prejudices that make politicians’ broad range of political ideas appear unsuitable? 

Third, how do online gendered harassments and resulting coping strategies of EP candidates negatively foster a lack of open debate on social media during a democratic campaign?

To answer these questions, she manually monitored gendered backlash in online campaigns of six men and six women Dutch prominent European Parliament (EP) 2024 candidates on X, Instagram and TikTok for three months. In interviews following the European elections, six of these candidates reflected on their own gendered harassments and on their coping strategies.

To learn about this aspect of Comparative Politics, come join us on the 25th of November at Café Plan West