Gender and Media: A Nationally-Representative Six-Country Survey Experiment

• In Event: Insights from Original Survey Research in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

How does gender affect public perceptions of the legitimacy of the media in the Middle East and North Africa? Although media legitimacy is an increasingly pressing issue around the world—with the rise of social media, the circulation of fake news, and the proliferation of increasingly polarized media outlets—relatively little is known about the factors influencing the public’s perceptions of media legitimacy across social and political contexts. In the case of gender, theories of patriarchy and power relations, gender role congruity, and in-group loyalty make differing predictions about how people will assess the quality and credibility of media. Yet only rarely have hypotheses about gender and media legitimacy been tested, particularly in the context of the Arab world. To help address this gap—and further explore how the relationship between gender and media legitimacy may vary in differing social and political contexts—we use a survey experiment across six Arab countries.

We test for direct and indirect (or interaction) gender effects in perceptions of media legitimacy, building on recent work examining gender and perceptions of candidate legitimacy (e.g., Barnes and Beaulieu 2014; Benstead, Jamal, and Lust 2015) and testing the extent to which differing theories apply to these populations. For example, are both men and women more likely to trust male reporters, as theories of patriarchy and power relations would predict? Or is this only the case for female respondents, the lower-status group socialized to view men as the key holders of authority in society? Alternatively, do women tend to trust female reporters more than male reporters, consistent with theories of in-group loyalty and gender solidarity? Do these effects vary based on the gendered nature of the issue, as gender role congruity theory would suggest, with male reporters trusted more on stereotypical-male issues and female reporters trusted more on stereotypical-female issues? What are the larger implications for public perceptions of media legitimacy in the Middle East—and authoritarian contexts more broadly?

Our survey experiment exploring these questions is being conducted simultaneously in six different nationally-representative country surveys in the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates; n=6000 total respondents) in early spring 2017. Subjects are read a scenario in which a male (or female) reporter is reporting on a stereotypical-male issue (security threat) or a stereotypical-female issue (corruption). We then collect scale rankings of a list of statements pertaining to the passion, truthfulness, and knowledgeableness of the reporter in question. We expect our findings to contribute to the current debate on media legitimacy, as well as, more broadly, the intersection of gender and communication, in the Middle East and beyond.


References

Benstead, Lindsay J., Jamal, Amaney A., and Ellen Lust. 2015. “Is It Gender, Religiosity or Both? A Role Congruity Theory of Candidate Electability in Transitional Tunisia.” Perspectives on Politics 13(1): 74–94.

Barnes, Tiffany B. and Emily Beaulieu. 2014. “Gender Stereotypes and Corruption: How Candidates Affect Perceptions of Election Fraud.” Politics & Gender 10: 365-391.

Authors

• Calvert W. Jones, University of Maryland, College Park

• Jocelyn Sage Mitchell, Northwestern University in Qatar

• Justin D. Martin, Northwestern University in Qatar