Représentations sociales de la femme politique idéale et de l’homme politique idéal : étude d’un gender gap à la française

Abstract

Emmanuel Macron victory in the 2017 French presidential election opened a period of political restructuring across the entire political spectrum. In this nebulous context, this research aims to determine how citizens represent the ideal male and female politician. After a qualitative exploration phase, participants were asked to respond to a questionnaire based on the aforementioned study. The identification of organizing principles of social representations allowed us to observe differences among participants: the ideal male politician is perceived as agentic and the ideal female politician as communal, revealing socially ingrained sexism. Finally, it seems that to be ideal, the female politician must be superior to the male politician on many points.