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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton November 14, 2020

The world’s first mainly female cabinet: “The council of female ministers” in the Spanish cabinet (2018) on Twitter

  • Asunción Bernárdez-Rodal , Maria Luz Congosto and Nuria López-Priego
From the journal Communications

Abstract

1 June 2018 marked a historic moment in Spanish politics, when the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE) announced a cabinet with the largest proportion of female ministers in the world. This announcement received extensive coverage in the traditional media. The objective of this research was to measure whether the news had an equivalent impact on Twitter users. To this end, we analyzed the reaction to the appointments based on the popularity of the hashtags #GobiernoSanchez (“Sanchez Government”), #GobiernoFeminista (“Feminist Government”) and #ConsejoMinistras (“Council of Female Ministers”). The most significant findings are that women had even less visibility than they were given in traditional media because of what is not retweeted does not exist, and that the extreme polarization of political life and the media in the public sphere appears to extend to the digital environment of Twitter.


Article Note

This article forms part of the Convocatoria de Excelencia R&D Projects. Reference: FEM2017-83302-C3-3-P. Title: Cultural produsage on social networks: Industry, popular consumption and audiovisual literacy of Spanish youth with a gender perspective (2018–2022) and Digital gap between university teachers and students: Cultural production and consumption via social networks by youths in Spain (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter). Ref. Pr41/17-20959 (Santander-Complutense) Universidad Complutense de Madrid.


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Published Online: 2020-11-14
Published in Print: 2020-11-18

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