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Hearts or Minds?: Leader Evaluations by Men and Women in the General Election

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Political Communications

Abstract

This chapter assesses gender differences in leader evaluations in the 2005 British General Election. The research presented here is part of a larger project that considers issues, leaders and the motivators of voting behaviour more generally (Campbell and Winters, 2006). There is a received wisdom amongst the media and political campaigners that women’s assessments of political leaders are more driven by emotion and personality than men’s are. Here we describe the attempts parties made to target men and women’s votes, how this campaigning was reported in the media and whether in fact there was any difference in the way men and women evaluated party leaders.

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© 2007 Kristi Winters and Rosie Campbell

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Winters, K., Campbell, R. (2007). Hearts or Minds?: Leader Evaluations by Men and Women in the General Election. In: Wring, D., Green, J., Mortimore, R., Atkinson, S. (eds) Political Communications. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286306_17

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