“Media’s war on women in politics?” : A quantitative content analysis of Swedish print media’s portrayal of Anna Kinberg Batra and Ulf Kristersson

Abstract: The aim of this thesis is to achieve a deeper understanding of how media portrays politicians and examine whether media is gender-biased. This is done by carrying out a case study within the Swedish context, which compares print media’s portrayal of the Moderate party’s former leader Anna Kinberg Batra with their current leader Ulf Kristersson. A quantitative content analysis is applied on 330 articles from four Swedish newspapers. By examining previous literature, a theoretical framework is constructed using theories on framing, the gender system as well as media’s treatment of female and male politicians which is later operationalized. In brief, the results of the study show there are differences in certain parts of media’s portrayal of Kinberg Batra and Kristersson, however they were not always as substantial and obvious as previous literature had indicated.