Women with thick skins: The experiences of portuguese political candidates with online violence

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Bárbara
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/29491
• topic: Gender; Política -- Politics; Media sociais -- Social media; Violência -- Violence; Portuguese politics; Género; Política portuguesa

Violence against women in politics is responsible for restricting female political participation and reinforcing traditional gender norms. Despite its impact, violence against women in politics remains a phenomenon dismissed by society, constituting an obstacle to gender equality (Krook, 2020). This dissertation seeks to explore, in the Portuguese context, the manifestations of the phenomenon of online violence against women in politics and its impact on female politicians. A mixed methods approach was applied. First, a discourse analysis of comments on Twitter directed at political candidates was carried out during the electoral campaign period of the 2022 Legislative Elections. Based on the number of followers and the engagement rate on Twitter, nine candidates were selected. After extracting the tweets published by the candidates during the campaign period, 2365 comments to those tweets were extracted and analysed. Posteriorly, these results were triangulated with a thematic analysis of interviews with deputies Isabel Moreira and Joana Mortágua. The analysis shows how women in Portuguese politics experience forms of psychological, semiotic and sexual violence. It was confirmed that politicians with greater visibility and from leftist parties experience greater online violence and that women deputies, when facing violence, are forced to change their behaviours on social networks in order to guarantee their well-being.